The quality of the Maigret novels begins with one of the simplest but most telling test of any writer, the ability to convey basic physical reality: heat, cold, hunger, satiety, light and dark. This is a huge strength of Simenon's. He is always precise and evocative about weather and seasons.
--John Lancaster, Maigret's Room, London Review of Books, 4 June 2020
He glanced outside. The bottom halves of the windows in the Café Francais were frosted. Above the frosted section, all you could see were the bare trees on the square and the rain, the never-ending rain..
-- Georges Simenon, The Judge's House, (La Maison du juge, 1942), translated by Howard Curtis, 2015..
Maigret has fallen into disgrace and transferred to Lucon, a remote coastal town where the main occupation is farming mussels. A judge is seen trying to get rid of a body and no one, not even the judge, knows who the dead man is. Maigret slowly begins to question everyone in the town and secrets, from mental illness to illegitimate births, begin to emerge about the judge and his family. The judge admits a previous murder, the investigation of which takes Mairgret briefly back to Paris and then to Versailles, but it turns out to have nothing to do with what happened in Lucon. Simenon describes Maigret's investigation in detail, as he gradually learns that everyone is lying about something and every lie is a piece of the puzzle that Maigret works diligently to solve.
No comments:
Post a Comment