Adam Colclough lives and works in the West Midlands, he writes regularly for a number of websites, one day he will get round to writing a book for someone else to review.
The dismembered body of a man is pulled from Paris’s Canal Saint-Martin one newspaper wrapped piece at a time. A gruesome, but seemingly routine, case for Inspector Maigret, at least on the surface anyway.
Surfaces can be deceptive though, not least because beneath them might lie disturbing secrets. Like the link between this case and Madame Calas, the owner of a shabby bistro whose husband has recently left town.
What seemed to be a simple case turns out to be something much darker, as old secrets point the way to present day crimes.
Georges Simeon was prolific and then some, publishing more than 400 novels and collections of short stories. Unsurprisingly the quantity of his work tends to overshadow its quality.
This 1955 outing for Maigret is a case in point, what presents at first glance as a pulp novel has far more going on. Simenon is as interested in the brutal dynamics of a doomed marriage and the life experience of someone who lives at one remove from the world, as he is in the business of detection. Whilst at the same time delivering a taught police procedural that more than stands the test of time.
He also writes about the seedier side of the French capital in a way that makes it come across as having streets every bit as mean as those of Chandler’s LA running along both sides of the Seine. He might dress differently and no longer smoke a pipe, but it isn’t too hard to imagine Maigret walking those same streets today, poking about in the shadows for truths that someone wants to stay hidden.
