The Police Procedural: Michael Connelly and Georges Simenon

By law they should have had a search warrant but both detectives knew they could cite exigent circumstances if a problem developed later.
--Michael Connelly, The Late Show (Little, Brown and Company 2017)

Were the goings-on in an upstairs bedroom in a private house in Rue Chaptal of any interest to the papers, the public, or even juries made up chiefly of small shopkeepers and bank clerks?
----Georges Simenon, Maigret's First Case (Penguin, 1949, translated by Ros Schwartz)

Connelly's novel takes place in the present-day while Simenon's takes place in 1913, when Jules Maigret was just starting his career as a policeman and detective.  Though Connelly's detective Renee Ballard has the use of computers, data bases and all the modern methods of crime solving that Maigret does not have, still, the two detectives both rely primarily on stake-outs and ratiocination.

The Late Show is Connelly's first book about Detective Renee Ballard and she faces some of the same problems of class and bureaucracy that Detective Harry Bosch has faced in the two dozen books Connelly has written with Bosch as the lead character.  Both Connelly and Simenon have a considerable grasp of the exhausting details of police work, a detective being part psychologist as well as scholar, researcher, and scientist.  Connelly and Simenon also excel in their use of specific locations and their denizens, Ballard in Los Angeles and Maigret in Paris.  Whether for private detectives or police personnel I prefer the liveliness of specific and precise locations rather than the fictional city of, for example, Ed McBain's 87th Precinct series, as good as it is.

Detective Ballard has to deal with sexual harassment and condescension, while Maigret's biggest problem is one of class, i.e., his superiors are much less interested in solving a case if it involves people of wealth who may be their dining companions.  Maigret at least has an understanding wife to come home to, while Ballard is something of a loner, exiled to the night shift when her partner will not back up her complaint of harassment.  Maigret's First Case is actually the thirtieth of Simenon's extraordinary output of 75 Maigret novels (as well as many stand-alone novels).  It is not unusual, of course, for "first cases" to be published long after a detective's original appearance, e.g., Sherlock Holmes's first case, "The Adventure of the Gloria Scott," appeared several years after the first Holmes stories.

Both Maigret and Ballard are attacked and kidnapped and both manage to free themselves, though Ballard is able to retaliate against her kidnappers more effectively than Maigret, physical training for police having improved considerably in the last one hundred years, and both manage to solve their cases, even if justice is not as perfectly served as they might like.