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Rating: Rude, silent, sometimes indifferent, with his imposing bulk, his pipe, and his long coat: Commissioner Maigret, born from the imagination of Georges Simenon in 1930, has thus entered the collective imagination.
Portrayed in succession by phenomenal actors (Jean Gabin, Gino Cervi, Bruno Cremer) Maigret has very precise physical, behavioral, and psychological characteristics, like most heroes of this genre of novel (just think of Poirot, Montalbano, Ellery Queen, Holmes, and many others).
What to recommend for someone who wants to fall in love with this character? Answer: Maigret and the Reluctant Witnesses.
Set in a suggestive rainy winter season, in a mysterious old house outside Paris where murder has been committed, with very simple traits (an important characteristic of Simenon, which differentiates him, for example, from Christie, the perfect master of the "locked-room mystery" or in any case of the refined crime.) A murder "for Maigret," a family that has seen and heard everything but does not want to speak, even at the cost of their own lives.
It then falls to our commissioner to delve into the past of the individual family members, discover their secrets, their hidden desires, their feelings that are not easily recognizable to the naked eye.
But Maigret is a "policeman-psychologist", and the entire novel develops according to a frantic search for the psychology of the characters. With a few clues and the certainty of having fully understood the "human drama" in which the entire family is involved, it is only necessary to piece together the various bits of the puzzle for the picture to be complete.
A simple murder, an almost predictable solution but never trivial, a whirlwind of novelistic psychology and quite a bit of "skirmishing" as I call it, between our Maigret and the witnesses who do not want to talk, truly remarkable.
Simenon's writing is fluid, smooth and halfway through the novel, it almost feels like you can smell that house, hear Madame Maigret's voice, the falling Parisian rain, being accustomed to that environment, fully entering the story, becoming part of the drama.
This novel perfectly reveals Maigret's "non-method": the commissioner starts the investigation gropingly, doesn't know where to go, what to do, doesn't mull over the clues but stores them well in his mind, asks questions of all kinds. Maigret is tired (he's about to retire), overwhelmed by the new generation of examining magistrates who believe the action of the investigation belongs to them (the final interrogation will actually take place in the judge's office and not in Maigret's, as Simenon has accustomed us to).
If you like this novel, I recommend delving further into Simenon: I'm sure you'll find delightful surprises from this immortal writer.
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