I sort of side-stepped Patti Abbott's Maigret Day of a few weeks back, but now I'm catching up. I've been re-reading my small collection of Maigret books and for those very few that might have missed Maigret Day, here's my entry for today's Forgotten Book.
Oh, and don't forget to head on over to Patti's blog, Pattinase, to see what other Forgotten (or Overlooked) Books other bloggers are talking about today.
MAIGRET AND THE MADWOMAN (1970) by the super prolific and hyper-active Georges Simenon is not so much a 'who' but a why-and-what-for-done-it. It is a slowly developing tale of greed, stupidity and carelessness which begins when a gentle old woman requests Maigret's help - only he and he alone can solve her problem.
Unfortunately, the police have little time to deal with elderly Madame de Carame - she suspects that someone has been getting into her apartment and moving things around and that she's being followed.
Though Maigret thinks that there might possibly be something to the old woman's jitters, he puts off going to see the her as promised, finding other things of more importance to deal with.
But when the old woman is murdered, Maigret realizes he was wrong to wait.
Part of the essential mystery in this particular book is the old woman's personality which, in a sense, is what intrigues Maigret in the first place.
Simenon wrote the kind of books that immediately draw you in and by the time you've read just a few words, you're in Paris, deep into Maigret's world. As he lights his ever-present pipe and thinks his way through the mysterious intricacies of human behavior, we admire Maigret's doggedness in pursuit of the truth. The books are not intellectual masterpieces of crime, just well told stories written in a natural convincing way by a born story-teller.
Currently I'm re-reading MAIGRET AND THE WINE MERCHANT.
Please use this link to see a complete list of Georges Simenon's books. And here's a good link to anything and everything Simenon.
No artist attribution - the source.
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