murdered at Mass; Maigret seeks to under-
stand why.
Born in the Belgian city of Liège in 1903,
Simenon said he had a ‘middle-class soul’.
Maigret is a bourgeois adrift in a murky
underworld but, unlike his creator, he is duti-
fully uxorious. Madame Maigret pampers
him like the needy man he is. (‘Men, they’re
all the same!’) Alsatian-born, she serves him
cassoulet and is aware of his many dislikes
(whisky, champagne, calf’s liver, central heat-
ing). He is an only child. Madame Maigret
calls him ‘Monsieur Maigret’ when she wants
to tease; he can be extraordinarily overbear-
ing. (‘Now, please will you fill a pipe for me
and plump up my pillows?’)
His devotion to his wife is something
that his creator clearly envies. The Mai-
grets have a holiday home in the Loire; in
Paris they enjoy quiche suppers at an Alsa-
tian restaurant near their flat on Boulevard
Richard-Lenoir. (‘What’s the point of being
Alsatian if you don’t know how to make
quiches?’ Madame Maigret demands.)
Perhaps it is fortunate that they have no
children; Simenon’s much-loved daughter,
Marie-Jo, committed suicide in 1978.
No fewer than 10 Maigret novels were
published in 1931, with another seven the
following year. (The last, Maigret and Mon-
sieur Charles, appeared in 1972.) Pietr
the Latvian, the first in the cycle, translat-
ed by David Bellos, displays a faint anti-
Semitism in its portrayal of ‘garlic-eating’
Jews. As a cub reporter in early 1920s Bel-
gium, Simenon had written vitriolic anti-
Jewish articles for the Gazette de Liège. He
later repudiated them, but a taint of Jew-
baiting remains. (‘Jews usually have sensitive
feet,’ Maigret tells his wife in The Madman
of Bergerac. ‘And they’re thrifty.’) During
the German occupation Simenon lived in
seigneurial self-sufficiency in the French
countryside; after the war, fearing charges of
collaboration, he spent ten years in Ameri-
ca. At some level, Simenon was a morally
dubious man.
I
mpressively, the Maigret adventures show
little sign of haste or overstrain in the
writing. Simenon confessed that he typed
many of them while half drunk. (He was
intermittently alcoholic.) Unsurprisingly,
they are awash with quantities of Calva-
dos, Vouvray, Armagnac, Pouilly, caraway-
flavoured kummel, pastis and rosé. Mai-
gret is at times ‘glassy-eyed’ from too much
Vermouth or else wretchedly hung over. In
the early books he is a casually conceived
figure with a detachable shirt collar, trou-
ser braces and a dark ministerial suit. He
becomes the archetypal fictional detec-
tive of the 20th century and the template
for Inspector Morse, Kurt Wallander and
any number of sternly pensive sloggers on
the beat. The pipe is an essential prop. Mai-
gret plugs it with tobacco when he wants to
appear informal in the interview room. He
carries at least two pipes in his pockets at all
times. (Sometimes they overheat and sizzle.)
His height is given as ‘1 metre 80’ — almost
six foot. He is broad-shouldered, stubborn-
browed and faintly bovine in appearance.
We learn more about Inspector (later,
Commissaire) Maigret in Maigret’s Mem-
oirs, an almost Pirandellian exercise in role-reversal where the detective talks in the first
person about his creator’s perceived liter-
ary shortcomings. ‘Simenon likes to describe
me as being heavy and grouchy,’ we read
(in Howard Curtis’s translation), but the
heaviness is frankly ‘exaggerated’. Maybe
Simenon should re-write some of those
descriptions?
Published in 1951, Les mémoires de
Maigret is easily the funniest of the Mai-gret sagas. Scarcely a conventional detec-
tive, Maigret has no interest in Sherlock
Holmes-style scientific deduction and pre-
fers instead to operate by instinct. If pushed,
he will resort to violence. Often he enters
an abstracted, absent state or ‘trance’ while
investigating — a sign that a breakthrough
is imminent. In his fascinating biography
of Simenon, The Man Who Wasn’t Maigret,
Patrick Marnham relates that Maigret was
based on the author’s adored father Désiré
Simenon, an insurance salesman who died at
the age of 44.
Georges Simenon died, aged 86, in his
36-room château outside Lausanne, a mau-
soleum residence where Jules Maigret would
have felt ill at ease. Simenon is often and
rightly read as an author who offers no hope.
By the end of his life he had all the money
and women he wanted, yet he was encir-
cled by low spirits and the sadness of days
gone by. His château had become his tomb.
All that remained was Commissaire Maigret
and his pipe.The pipe is an essential prop. Maigret
plugs it with tobacco when he wants to
appear casual in the interview roomGeorges Simenon, photographed in the Navigli district of Milan in the 1950sGETTY IMAGES