The stories in this collection were written the year before Simenon invented his famous detective Jules Maigret, whose first appearance was in Pietr the Latvian (1931), and their relation to Maigret’s invention is not immediately apparent. The Investigating Magistrate Froget, already old in the stories, is a cerebral protagonist who deduces the guilt of the thirteen title characters almost solely from the answers each person gives to his questions, and he lays out at the end a few lines resembling a geometrical proof, demonstrating their guilt. He takes advantage of his considerable authority as a juge d’instruction, who can recommend prosecution, to rattle his subjects and get them to blurt out an inconvenient truth or desperately to offer a telling lie. Maigret, who is generally in his stories around the age of forty-five or so, is more likely to talk to his suspects like a fellow traveler and to try to get inside them, to inhabit their thinking. But in fact, Froget and Maigret both tap into the same store of experience and wide knowledge of criminal behavior.
More recognizably like the Maigret stories is the parade of colorful, largely low-life Parisian and provincial types, vain, arrogant, cunning, or just ground down by life. Simenon draws these in a very few strokes. The stories are short, averaging just over ten pages, and Détective magazine, where they first appeared, printed the last page or two containing the solution an issue or two later than the one with the main body of the story. The stories are somewhat like the inverted detective tales that R. Austin Freeman invented; the method was most notably used by the Columbo television series of the 1970s. We already know the culprit, and the question is how Froget will solve the mystery.
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