by Georges Simenon, David Bellos
Oh boy. This is the first of the 70+ Maigret novels that Georges Simenon published over the course of 40 years, beginning in 1931, and it's perhaps a sign of just how far crime writing has evolved since then that this book was published (in serialized form initially) "as is": I'm willing to wager t...
On a detective roll, going back and reading Inspector Maigret's first book. It takes place in Paris sometime in the late 1920's or early 1930's. Short, sparse plot, little character development, but, there is Maigret. I look forward to reading many of Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret books.
"Pietr the Latvian" introduces the world to Jules Maigret, Detective Chief Inspector of the Police Judiciaire in Paris for the very first time. The setting is a cool, rainy autumn afternoon in interwar Europe a little more than a decade after the end of the First World War. Simenon provides the read...
Penguin recently announced that it will issue new translations of all 75 of Georges Simenon's Maigret books, in original publication order. The project began at the end of 2013 in the UK, and the beginning of 2014 in the US. In addition to these new translations being published in paperbacks with at...
My first Maigret and the first Maigret.
It was interesting to see many of the existentialist themes with which Simenon grapples in his other work here in a procedural format. While the noir genre does deal with anxieties about identity and gender, in Simenon’s hands noir is a cultural critique of a...
Atmospheric, dark, stormtossed, and very French, Simenon manages to create a vivid hero in this first book of a SEVENTY-FIVE book series. I enjoyed this short and easy mystery, enough to probably pick up the second at some point. I might even finish all of them by the time I'm 75.