Pietr the Latvian (Inspector Maigret, 1), Georges Simenon. Penguin Books (ISBN: 9780141392738) 2025 (first published in 1930).

Summary: Maigret tracks an international criminal appearing in a number of guises, not always sure he is tracking the real Pietr.

Georges Simenon wrote 75 novels and 28 short stories featuring Inspector Jules Maigret. This is the very first of the novels and serves as a kind of introduction to Maigret and to Simenon as a mystery writer.

One thing we discover is Simenon is capable of an extremely twisty plot. He learns that an international crime ring leader, known as Pietr the Latvian, is arriving via train in Paris. He has a description and intends to follow him, hopefully to apprehend him in his nefarious dealings. The one problem is that the man he identifies as Pietr is simultaneously heading to his hotel and also very much dead in a train lavatory. The man at the hotel registers as Oswald Oppenheim and is there to meet an American businessman.

This is the first of several identities Maigret investigates, including a Norwegian sea captain and a drunken Russian living with a prostitute, Anna Gorskin. Who is the real Pitr and who are the doubles? Are any of them the dead man on the train?

Not only is the pursuit bewildering. It is also dangerous. A colleague of Maigret, working at the hotel is murdered. Then someone shoots Maigret in the street of a rough district. Although the wound entered his chest and exited his shoulder, Maigret somehow keeps going. We discover that Maigret is resolute as a junk yard dog.

What keeps Maigret going? It seems it is both the offense of the crime and the expectation that the best criminals sooner or later slip up. And Maigret’s plan is to be there when it happens.

To sum up, this initial number is a good example for the series. Short, fast-moving, twisty stories, running about 160 pages. An implacable Inspector. And interesting criminals. What’s not to like?

The Late Monsieur Gallet (Inspector Maigret, 3) Georges Simenon. Penguin Books (ISBN: 9780141393377) 2014 (first published in 1931).

Summary: Gallet’s death seems that of an uninteresting failure until Maigret discovers that nothing about him is as it seems.

A non-descript man checks into a hotel in Tracy-Sancerre. His usual room is unavailable, so he takes a back one, facing out on a courtyard, The next morn, he is found dead with a gunshot wound to the face and a stab wound to the heart.

Maigret is sent to investigate. He finds an ordinary man, Monsieur Gallet, with an old, shiny suit. The man’s widow, who lived in Saint Fargeau, thought he was in Rouen. She even had a postcard from there. Maigret learns he was a traveling salesman. The widow is rather vain, from a family that considered her husband a failure. Her only consolation is that the dead man had taken out a 300,000 franc life insurance policy. Her son seems aloof and ambitious, and not terribly broken up.

When Maigret contacts the man’s company, he finds they have not employed him for eighteen years. He’s not in Rouen. Nor is he working at the job everyone believed he was doing. His attacker or attackers first wounded him from outside his room, then killed him with a knife wound in his room. And how has he purchased a house, paid for a life insurance policy, and maintained their lifestyle when he has no job? Why was he in Tracy-Sancerre?

Suddenly, this non-descript, unattractive man becomes interesting to Maigret. The fascination in this story is how Maigret discovers the nature of the double life this man was living and how he died. Like others in the series, there are just enough twists, interesting characters and red herrings to make this interesting without dragging out the story. Simenon’s genius lies in telling a story with nothing extraneous and lots that is puzzling.

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.

The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien (Maigret Number 4), Georges Simenon, translated by Linda Coverdale. Penguin Books (ISBN: 9780141393452) 2014 (First published in 1931).

Summary: The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien, in which Maigret’s swap of a suitcase as he follows a suspicious character results in the man’s suicide.

Maigret is on business in Brussels when he notices a shabbily dressed man mailing a pile of bank notes in an envelope labeled “printed matter.” The man is carrying a cheap cardboard suitcase. He sees the address, a Paris address. His curiosity piqued, he follows the man. Then at a buffet, he manages to switch the suitcase for one filled with paper. Subsequently, he follows the man to a cheap hotel, getting a room next to him. When the man opens the suitcase, he cries in dismay. The next thing Maigret hears is a shot. The man has committed suicide and Maigret, unintentionally, is the cause.

But what was in the suitcase? When Maigret opens it, he finds an old suit, too large for the deceased, with dark stains on it, with a tailor’s label from Paris. Then Maigret goes to the morgue and a businessman, Van Damme shows up as well and offers to travel with Maigret. And he keeps showing up as Maigret explores the life of the deceased, Jean Lecocq d’Arneville. In Paris, when he meets several others connected to the deceased and each other and later in Liege, Van Damme is there. One of the others is a highly successful businessman, Belloir. Another, Janin is a sculptor. And a third, Jef Lombard, is a painter in whose studio are numerous paintings of hanging men.

There’s something they are keeping from Maigret. At times, it seems they are a step ahead, destroying records. At one point there is an attempt on Maigret’s life. And we wonder where the hanging man of Saint-Pholien in the title comes in and whether Lombard’s paintings have anything to do with that. Above all else, Maigret needs to find a satisfying explanation for why Jean Lecocq d’Arneville would kill himself over a suitcase of old clothes that weren’t even his.

This is a short novel that makes for a quick read. What I want to know if you’ve read this or when you do, is whether you liked the ending. I didn’t see it coming, but I liked it when it came.

The Yellow Dog (Inspector Maigret #6), Georges Simenon. New York: Penguin Books, 2014 (Originally published in 1931).

Summary: Maigret is called in when a distinguished wine merchant is shot, followed by a murder, a disappearance and another shooting in which a common element in several instances is a yellow dog.

A well-thought of wine merchant makes a late night of it at the Admiral Hotel in the seaside village of Concarneau. Making his way home, he stops to light a cigar, and is shot, though not fatally. A yellow dog shows up nosing around the wounded man. Maigret, setting up a mobile unit, is nearby and called in by the town mayor. He stays at the Hotel and meets an interesting cast of characters. Shortly after he arrives, the doctor, who never practiced but is involved with real estate, recognizes poison on a drink being served. The next day another associate, Jean Serviere vanishes, leaving behind a car with blood-stained seats. Then the doctor has a drink with the third in this circle, Pommeret, who goes home and drops dead of poison.

Hysteria in the town is rising. The dog has been seen several times around the time of the murders as well as a giant vagabond, who becomes the prime suspect in the eyes of most. He is sought–and captured only to break free and elude re-capture. The mayor wants Maigret to do something. Yet he seems curiously inactive, baffling his assistant, who he tells:

‘You’re lucky my friend! Especially in this case, in which my method has actually been not to have one … I’ll give you some good advice: if you’re interested in getting ahead, don’t take me for a model, or invent any theories from what you see me doing.’

Pressed by the mayor to arrest somebody, he arrests the doctor, who is terrified for his own life after what happens to his two associates. While waiting for events to develop that will reveal the murderer, Maigret observes Emma waitress at the Admiral and sometime mistress to the doctor. He senses she knows more than she tells.

When another assault on a customs official occurs, suspicion centers on the vagabond, who is re-captured. But because Maigret has been watching Emma, he knows better as he reveals in a final scene in the doctor’s prison cell.

I have to admit that I was as perplexed as the mayor and the assistant with Maigret, so this was not at all predictable to me, and made Maigret all the more fascinating, particularly for the generous act on his part at the end. Simenon does all this in a short work that can be read in an evening.