Maigret the Man of Feeling

            It may be paradoxical to talk about Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret stories as uncommon mysteries. The first one I read, Maigret Loses His Temper, from 1963, is, after all, the sixty-second in the series about the Paris detective, eventually Chief Superintendent, who goes to work every day at the criminal investigation division, or Sûreté headquarters on the Quai des Orfevres, the wharfside street named after the goldsmiths who used to have their shops there. It’s common enough to find these Maigret mysteries on bookstore racks, after all. But there are some uncommon things about Maigret mysteries and about Maigret as a mystery detective.

            Fictional detectives usually go against the grain a bit, but Maigret is as about as bourgeois as the bourgeois Frenchman gets. Unlike most fictional detectives, he has a happy married life, although, or perhaps because, 

his wife tends to feed him too much rich food. Maigret has been advised by his friend Doctor Pardon to “watch his liver,” but he still allows himself an occasional apéritif—in addition to a glass of wine at mealtimes and a beer sometimes in the evening.  And he hardly ever loses his temper, as he does in this book.

            Maigret investigates the disappearance of a Montmartre night-club owner.  Maigret studies his family situation very carefully: he has a wife, a former nightclub performer, who seems perfectly content in her role as mother and not jealous of her younger sister who was the victim’s secretary.  People at the night club tell him that the night club owner repeatedly tried to telephone someone the night of his disappearance, finally got through, and then walked slowly up the Rue Pigalle. Maigret walks slowly up the Rue Pigalle, thinking.

            Eventually Maigret uncovers a scheme to defraud people suspected of crimes. A lawyer has come up with the brilliant plan of extorting money from these people by promising to pay off police and judges, but he only tries this on cases where he knows there is very little chance the police or prosecutor will pursue them. Maigret loses his temper because the lawyer has told his clients that Maigret is corrupt and takes bribes.

            The Maigret stories are not ordinary police procedurals, because the emphasis is not on the police work that is done, but rather on Maigret’s own thought processes.  We are let in on these in the early stages, and it is not so much the inferences he makes from the clues, but the way he identifies with the people in the investigation; for example, he tries to get inside the victim’s wife’s head to see how she reacts to his questions and whether she is jealous of her sister.  His cases absorb him completely, not intellectually the way Sherlock Holmes’s cases do, but emotionally.  His talent is a perfect compassion.  Although he despises the villain in this book, he nevertheless has managed to be him in the course of the investigation.

            I usually start with the first mystery of a series when I can, and eventually I did get around to reading the first Maigret, called Pietr the Latvian (1930).  Maigret is already forty-five in this first book. His methods, too, are already established, as he works from intuition, or “a vague feeling that didn’t even deserve to be called an intuition” (this translation is by David Bellos), but he also needs to see past the criminality to the humanity of his adversary, what he calls “the crack in the wall.”

            Maigret is a large, broad man who uses his bulk deliberately to intimidate people. Also tough, he takes a bullet to the chest in this story, bleeds sang-froid, and goes on with the case. He is tracking Pietr the Latvian, who commits a murder almost under his nose, leaving a body aboard a train Maigret is waiting for in the Gare du Nord. Pietr, as we discover well before the end of the book, is really a pair of twin brothers—a plot device that wouldn’t pass Golden Age mystery rules across the channel, but Simenon from the beginning wrote a different kind of whodunit. Another feature that seemed to me to date the book was the way Maigret gives the murderer a way out at the end, in a clichéd fashion. But these are minor matters compared with the complete portrait of his detective, who looks solid and imperturbable, but who solves crimes precisely because he feels.

A Painful Good Book

            William Stoner teaches for his whole career at a Midwestern college where he went to school and where he met his first love: English literature. He lives and dies there, and is forgotten. John Williams informs us of these facts at the beginning of the novel in a kind of dare. Why would we continue reading it?

            One answer is that Williams writes compelling prose that makes us continue. Critics describe it as “precise” and “lucid”—singling out its clarity and sparseness, with no words wasted. They also talk about his style as being “assured” or “authoritative.”

            Another reason is that Stoner is a tragic hero who survives despite formidable opposition from those closest to him. His wife Edith (her “moral training,” the narrator tell us, was “negative in nature, prohibitive in intent, and almost entirely sexual”) is neurotic—an earlier generation would call her a hysteric. She hates Stoner and punishes him more ingeniously than does his department chairman, who also hates him, apparently because the chairman recognizes in Stoner an integrity that shames him, in the way that Shakespeare has Iago say that Cassio “hath a daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly.”

            Williams thinks Stoner is a hero, and so do I. The book is Stoner (1965).