"Look! That's France you can see over there, twenty minutes away by boat, an I'm as lost as if I were in the heart of Africa or South America."- Inspector Maigret (My Friend Maigret, 1949).
Last
Tuesday, fellow mystery enthusiast and scholar Curt Evans, who's still tramping
past the musty covers and brittle pages of detective stories that were
abandoned a long time ago to accumulate dust particles, pulled out a novel that
not only looked pretty good for its age but also had managed to clung to the
public's collective memory. "The Passing Tramp" had hitched a ride with Georges Simenon to review Un Crime en Holland (Maigret in Holland, 1931),
which infused me with pure, undiluted nostalgia as I always associate Georges
Simenon with the late Appie Baantjer – whose politieromans ignited my
love for the detective story.
As might
be expected, from a chronophobiac on a nostalgia rush, I wanted to read one of
their novels next, but picking between both men and deciding on a specific
title proved to be more difficult than it should've been. I was initially
inclined to go with Appie Baantjer's De broeders van de zachte dood (The
Brothers of a Merciful Death, 1979), but decided to make an offensive
gesture at that mocking demon in the clock and went with Georges Simenon's Mon
ami Maigret (My Friend Maigret, 1949).
The
scenery of Mon ami Maigret moves from the rain swept streets of Paris to
the perfidious tranquility of a Mediterranean island, Porquerolles, where a
two-bit criminal was brutally murdered after he boasted in a crowded bar about
his friendship with a policeman named Maigret. He can even show a signed letter
as proof. Maigret is dispatched by train and ferry to delve into the matter,
but even though the island is as rich in suspicious character as in sunshine,
from a wealthy old English lady with her much younger French secretary to a
Painter from Holland with anarchistic tendencies and his Belgium mistress, nobody
of them seems to be equipped with a motive good enough to empty a gun on a
bragging crook.
But
Maigret also has another matter that plagues him like a Big Brother: The
presence of Mr. Pyke who follows him around like a discreet shadow. Mr. Pyke is
an inspector from Scotland Yard and was invited to study Maigret while he's
working on a case – and this worries the inspector to no end. Maigret is very
pre-occupied what a colleague from such a prestige's institute might think of
their simple methods, like roughing up a suspect to loosen up their tongues, difference
in cuisine, clothes (etc.) and the inevitable discovery that there's no order
or method to how handles a murder case.
At one
point in the story, the reader becomes privy of Maigret's thoughts and how he
would've preferred to roam the island and soak up the atmosphere as oppose to
interviewing people in order to keep up an appearance of professionalism to Mr.
Pyke. Unfortunately, the opportunity to pit Maigret's intuitive method against
the sound police work of a Scotland Yard tech was left unexploited.
 |
| Statue of Maigret in Delfzijl (Holland) |
All in
all, Mon ami Maigret was a nice, quiet read for the most part, but the
pace became so slow that I began to loose interest and the only encouragement for
going on was that I was only two chapters removed from the back cover. Don't
get me wrong, it's not a bad story but very little happens and that goes on for
far too long. And unlike the book Curt Evans reviewed, this was not a pure
detective story. The case got solved by a few very late discoveries, but then
again, I knew beforehand that Simenons was, for the most part anyway, not that
kind of writer, however, the solution and motive were interesting – especially the
motive, which was later reused and improved upon in one of Baantjer's best efforts at
penning a genuine whodunit.
So even
though this was not a thoroughly bad book, au contraire, I do think I
prefer Appie Baantjer over Georges Simenon any day.
After thought: the French cover gives off the impression that the book takes place on the dirty backstreets instead of a sun soaked island.
After thought: the French cover gives off the impression that the book takes place on the dirty backstreets instead of a sun soaked island.
