Maigret and the Wine Merchant (Inspector Maigret Number 71), Georges Simenon (Translated by Ros Scwartz). Penguin (ISBN: 9780241304280), 2020 (First published in 1970).

Summary: Maigret investigates the murder of a wealthy wine merchant, a womanizer and a ruthless employer.

Theo Stiernat is something of a pathetic young man. He bludgeoned his grandmother to death for a few francs. He “didn’t mean to do it” yet savagely beat her. While Maigret interrogates him Oscar Chabut, a wealthy wine merchant, also meets his death, gunned down in front of a high class brothel. Maigret knows the place, the Rue Fortuny and Madame Blanche, its proprietor.

He questions her and Chabut’s secretary, the latest of many lovers. Chabut was a notorious womanizer. Jeanne Chabut, his wife knows all about it. More than that, she furnishes Maigret with a list of all his known lovers. Many were married and it seems Chabut delighted in humiliating the husbands. No one is broken up over his death. But it is not clear who hated him enough to kill him.

All through the investigation, Maigret is down with the flu, frustrating his wife who cooks him magnificent meals, while trying to keep him in his bed.

Then the calls start coming. And the caller knows his whereabouts, but eludes attempts to capture him. Could this be the murderer? Maigret thinks so–in this case a troubled soul who wants to tell his story but has to be sure someone will listen without roughing him up. And so Maigret waits for the murderer to come to him.

There’s an interesting insight in this tightly written plot. The murderers are figures worth listening to and pitiable. But so are their victims, whether an old grandmother or a rich wine merchant. And it is this that drives Maigret, even when the victim is a wealthy man whose death no one mourned. He was a human being.