Georges Simenon

In his own words, Maigret reflects on his legacy--and storytelling itself--in this metatextual meditation on narrative, policing, and truth. Is the real Inspector Maigret the mentally agile, physically ponderous detective of Georges Simenon's famous novels? Or is this character a distorted facsimile of an actual person? In a startling turn of events, the original Jules Maigret of the Paris Police Judiciaire now takes the reins from Simenon and reveals, with self-effacing candor and some trepidation, where reality ends and skillful storytelling begins. As he well knows, his identity cannot be disentangled from his fictional alter ego's. Indeed, over the decades, the gap between "Maigret" and Maigret has only narrowed. Yet his urge to assert his individuality is, he hopes, understandable--because aren't we all discomfited when shown an image of ourselves that is almost, but not quite, true to life?

Maigret must wade through a media frenzy when news of a body found in a stove spreads across Paris. Who is the corpse, and how is the case connected to Madame Maigret? A gruesome mystery has the whole of Paris agog: who is "the corpse in the stove"? The stove's owner, a reclusive Belgian bookbinder detained in the Sant prison, isn't saying. His ambitious young lawyer, meanwhile, keeps giving combative press interviews, stoking public fascination to a fever pitch. As Maigret and his team triage a flood of tip-offs, the case throws up a series of unexpected connections--even, bizarrely, to Madame Maigret. Plotted with a watchmaker's intricacy, Madame Maigret's Friend is a hypnotic journey through a city where everyone's lives are enmeshed, whether they realize it or not.

A maid dies after sipping a poisoned drink on a country estate. Was the woman of the house the true target, as she claims, or will Maigret uncover another story? In the tranquil coastal village of tretat, a young maid has died after drinking an arsenic-laced sleeping draught. The murderer's real target, however, was the elderly widow Valentine Besson. Or so Valentine declares when she visits Maigret in Paris, humbly requesting that he take on the case. Swapping his official patch for the seaside, Maigret encounters mixed opinions on the Besson family, whose late patriarch was a face cream magnate. Is Valentine a sweet old lady or a cold-hearted phony? Is the mutual loathing with her beautiful, unhappy daughter a red herring or the key to the mystery? In these picture-postcard surroundings, Maigret must distinguish truth from window dressing--and quell his own rising distaste for grim reality--before tragedy strikes again.

In the sweltering Arizona desert, Maigret can't help but investigate the death of a teenage girl--even if it means questioning the stories of five men in uniform. Maigret is touring the United States, studying their methods, when he drops by a Tucson courtroom to watch a coroner's inquest. To his surprise, he is transfixed by the case. Seventeen-year-old Bessie Mitchell, out on a drunken night with five airmen, was run over by a train. None of the men's stories match--but who is lying, and why? As the judge questions the witnesses, Maigret longs to leap up and ask the right questions. The story of this girl's death, he realizes, precisely illuminates why American values seem so out of kilter. A tense courtroom whodunnit, Maigret at the Coroner's is also a merciless x-ray of the postwar United States, with all its submerged angst and hypocrisies.

A private confession leads an ordinary Dutchman to abandon his family for a life on the run in Georges Simenon's existentialist masterpiece. Kees Popinga has always played by society's rules. A dutiful husband and father, he owns a house in a nice neighborhood and holds down a responsible job in the shipping industry. Fantasies of escape, of rebellion, are kept carefully contained--until the night Kees's boss makes a private confession. Having recklessly bankrupted the firm, he plans to fake his own death. Kees is not only shocked; he's exhilarated. Abandoning his home and family, he is soon a violent fugitive, wanted by police in Amsterdam and Paris. Has he gone insane, or was his compliant former self a masquerade? Infused with Georges Simenon's gift for moral complexity, The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By is a haunting existentialist masterpiece.

Brooding and propulsive, Georges Simenon's indictment of American suburbia follows a Connecticut lawyer who, after years of jealousy and rage, finally tears down the facade of his perfect life. Donald Dodd has always envied Ray Sanders. A Madison Avenue adman with an actress wife and a gift for womanizing, Ray grabs anything he wants from life. Donald, his best friend from Yale, has chosen a safer, more circumspect path. Respected in his job as a small-town lawyer, he's faithfully married to the serene Isabel, a Mayflower descendant, while their two daughters attend a prestigious Connecticut boarding school. It's an irreproachable existence indeed. But everything changes one winter night at a party, when Donald catches Ray with the host's beautiful young wife. Suddenly, Donald's years of jealousy boil over into rage. But is he actually capable of murder? Under Georges Simenon's unsparing gaze, the psychological fault lines of 1960s American suburbia are exposed as never before.

A shattering study of restlessness and midlife crisis on the ocean, from an icon of bleak fiction. Fran ois Mah took his family on vacation to Porquerolles, a sun-drenched C te d'Azur island, only because a friend suggested it. His everyday life as a small-town doctor was sedate and predictable, but contented--until he experienced the strange, hostile energy of Porquerolles, with its intense heat and deafening thrum of cicadas. Now Fran ois is consumed with a terrible restlessness, a mutinous longing that settles on an impoverished young girl. He doesn't love her, he tells himself, or even desire her. Yet for what she represents--danger, newness, a renunciation of passivity--he may just set a match to everything. A pitiless meditation on the irreconcilable lures of belonging and freedom, The Mah Circle is Georges Simenon at the height of his disturbing powers.

On a tiny Mediterranean island, a rowdy fisherman is shot dead mere hours after mentioning "my friend Maigret." The suspects are few--and the famous inspector is trapped among them. On the tiny Mediterranean island of Porquerolles, the fisherman Marcel Pacaud has been shot dead. Hours earlier, he was overheard mentioning "my friend Maigret." The inspector once knew Pacaud, who has a long rap sheet for pimping and violence. But that was many years ago. If Maigret's name has inspired murder, he cannot fathom why. Stepping into Porquerolles's intoxicating atmosphere of tropical heat and perfumed air, he questions an eccentric clique of islanders. Rich or poor, young or old, French, Dutch, or British: they're all exiles from conventional society. Can Maigret solve the case before he succumbs to "porquerollitis" and joins them? In My Friend Maigret, Georges Simenon puts his mischievous twist on the closed circle mystery, crafting a mesmeric portrait of an idyll marred by evil.

The story of how it all began: an investigation into a dynastic family pulls a young Maigret away from his desk and into a web of fame, money, and corruption. At age twenty-six, Maigret is a secretary at the Saint-Georges district police station: a lowly, mostly deskbound job. Late one night, a young musician comes in. He was walking home, he says, when he saw a woman at the window of a mansion, shouting for help. Then a gunshot rang out. The mansion belongs to the Gendreau-Balthazar family, Maigret realizes, whose coffee brand is a household name. Such a high-profile case could be his big break--except this family has powerful friends, among them Maigret's boss. Can the ambitious young officer conduct an honest investigation? Or must he choose between his idealism and his hopes of promotion? A taut and unpredictable thriller, Maigret's First Case is also a finely shaded psychological portrait of the fledgling genius who will, one day, be France's most famous detective.

My dear Judge, I would like one man, just one, to understand me. And I really hope that man can be you. In a small town in western France, Dr Charles Alavoine seems to lead the perfect life: his own medical practice, two beautiful children, a new wife and a doting mother. Yet as each quiet day of bourgeois conformity passes, Alavoine begins to feel a sharp sense of futility and solitude. Then, one rainy day in December, he meets a mysterious young woman on a station platform. Fascinated by her innocence and the scars of her past, Alavoine’s passion soon gives way to obsession, as he is drawn deeper into a web of desire and deceit, ending in a terrible act that will forever change the course of his life. First published in 1947, Letter to My Judge is a masterful exploration of the darkest corners of the human soul, and a harrowing exorcism of Simenon’s phantoms.

A panicked man turns to Maigret for help--and dies before the detective can learn his identity. Who was he, and what led to his brutal murder? One morning, Maigret receives several phone calls from an increasingly panicked man. He's being followed, he says, and his pursuers want to kill him. Before Maigret can track down the caller, his lifeless body is thrown from a car. Yet his identity remains a mystery. Who was he, and what led to his brutal murder? As Maigret sorts through the bewildering evidence, he develops a surprising affinity for this anonymous victim, whose personality seems to resemble his own. His legendary intuition heightened, the inspector is poised to crack a case with, it turns out, far greater repercussions than one man's death. Fiendishly plotted and humming with psychological tension, Maigret's Dead Man is an unmissable installment in Georges Simenon's famous detective series.

Maigret finds himself at a seaside resort, but this is no vacation--something is afoot. "For pity's sake, ask to see the patient in room 15." Maigret and his wife are at a seaside resort, taking a rare vacation, when Madame Maigret is hospitalized with appendicitis. One afternoon after visiting her, Maigret finds an anonymous note in his pocket. But nineteen-year-old Lili, the patient in room 15, is in a coma and soon dies. Was Lili's road accident foul play? Could her eccentric brother-in-law, a distinguished neurologist, have a motive? As Maigret delves deeper, he realizes Lili wasn't alone in harboring sordid secrets--but that in this unfamiliar setting, he may be ill-equipped to avert further tragedy. A gripping tale of sexual obsession played out under the radiant August sun, Maigret's Holiday confirms, once again, Georges Simenon's unerring knowledge of the human heart.

"A writer who, more than any other crime novelist, combined a high literary reputation with popular appeal." --P. D. James Caught in a spiral of bitter seclusion and drinking since his wife abandoned him and their newborn child eighteen years ago, Hector Loursat, once a respected lawyer, now holes up, unwashed and drunk on Burgundy, in his once grand but increasingly decrepit mansion. He barely notices the goings-on under his roof or the strange, dangerous secret life his daughter and her friends are leading there. He is shaken from his complacency by a gunshot one night and walks into the scene of a murder. Overcoming the inertia of his long isolation and inexplicably drawn to his daughter's group of young friends, he finds new engagement with the world as he seeks to clear the name of the young man accused of the killing. Simenon, master chronicler of the dark side of the human heart, gives us a detective story that is also a tale of an improbable redemption.

"Dark, disturbing . . . Simenon discovered something fundamental about the soul." --The GuardianA string of murders has the small French town of La Rochelle in its grip. The victims, all elderly women, have been found strangled with cello string--in caf s, over card games, near the canal. As the winter rain gives cover to the killer stalking the streets with impunity, we watch as he deliberates over and justifies his heinous acts to himself, unaware that the quiet, unassuming tailor, Kachoudas, has discovered his secret. In this chilling game of cat and mouse we follow along in the steps of the killer, unsure if his crimes will be brought to light by the one man who knows his secret, or if Kachoudas will end up being the next of his victims in this masterful tale of murder and intrigue.

"I always have a Simenon close at hand. In my youth I adored his Maigret books; nowadays I prefer his 'hard novels, ' as he called them, in which his mastery of human psychology is laid plain." --Julian Barnes Georges Simenon's chilling portrayal of tragic love, persecution, and betrayal. One sensed in him neither flesh nor bone, nothing but soft, flaccid matter, so soft and so flaccid that his movements were hard to make out. Very red lips stood out from his orb-like face, as did the thin moustache that he curled with an iron but that looked as if it had been drawn on with India ink; on his cheekbones were the symmetrical pink dots of a doll's cheeks.People find Mr. Hire strange, disconcerting. The tenants he shares his building with try to avoid him. He is a Peeping Tom, a visitor of prostitutes, a dealer in unsavory literature. He is also the prime suspect for a brutal murder that he did not commit. Yet Mr. Hire's innocence will not stand in the way of those looking for a scapegoat as tragedy unfolds in this quietly devastating and deeply unnerving work from Georges Simenon.