In engaging with crime and thrillers, I have for the first time been meeting some classics of this world. Before this year, my run-ins had off the top of my head only been with Holmes and Bond. Dashing through some classics, with probable future engagements with the likes of Smiley, Marple and Morse, I've had my first encounter with Poirot and now Georges Simenon's Maigret, in Maigret and the Idle Burglar.
Maigret is actually not a character I'd heard of before, but as the star of 75 novels, clearly he's a staple of the genre. Maybe because he's French my ignorance of European writing is being exposed, which is quite a lot of ignorance when I add up all the things that I know little or nothing about despite spending half my life with my nose in a book – really there just are so many books and so little time.
Anyway, my first experience was largely a positive one. What I liked about it was actually that it didn't feel like a self-contained story, but part of a larger world. It was a very simple premise (man gets murdered), but it felt like more than just a whodunnit, as it explored aspects of people's characters, particularly Maigret's. This made it seem a bit more real, and the exploration of how things were investigated by the police was also interesting, with it not simply being a case of the hero going against the grain, or being, well, all heroic. He also felt refreshingly normal, rather than having six divorces, Asperger's syndrome and a crack habit, like some detectives seem to be portrayed as, lest they be deemed dull. Short and to the point, I can see how Simenon made a career out of it.
Book number: 71
Title: Maigret and the Idle Burglar
Authors: Georges Simenon
Category: Crime
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