Once upon a time, when I was really young, I read a couple of Maigret novels, though I couldn't tell you which ones. You'd think that as such a devotee of crime fiction, I'd have got back to Simenon well before now but that never happened. However, a friend has been reading and enjoying his novels for a while and was kind enough to give me two of them for Christmas -- a used copy of Maigret and the Wine Merchant and this shiny new book, which is one of Penguin's new Maigret series. Yes, starting last November, they are bringing out a new translation every month until, I think, next June.
Though I was more or less totally new to Maigret, I thought I knew what to expect, and Maigret and the Wine Merchant fulfilled my expectations. Here we have a prosperous wine merchant and serial adulterer shot to death outside a brothel in which he regularly rented a room to take whatever woman he could persuade to sleep with him, which seemed to be pretty much any woman who happened to walk into his office. I enjoyed it very much, not least for the detail of Paris in the late 1960s (for this is a late novel) and for Maigret's home life -- he's fighting off flu throughout the story and Madame Maigret is looking after him very solicitously, cooking him all his favorite meals and generally fussing over him. All very delightful.
But when I started The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien, which was written in 1930, I found myself in a wholly different world. For one thing, this novel belongs to a particular sub-genre of the crime novel of which I am particularly fond, in which a totally bizarre and inexplicable situation at the start is gradually shown to have a rational explanation. I don't mean just who murdered X -- what I'm thinking of is the sort of thing that Sophie Hannah does so brilliantly or, to give another example, Joy Fielding in See Jane Run, which I've just finished and in which, says the blurb
Jane Whittaker has awakened to a nightmare. She doesn't know her name, her age . . .or even what she looks like. Frightened and confused, she wanders the streets of Boston wearing a blood-soaked dress-and carrying $10,000 in her pocket. Her life has become a vacuum--her past vanished. . .or stolen. And all that remains is a handsome, unsettling stranger who claims to be her husband...
Yes, I digress. But Simenon's novel falls precisely into this sub-genre. Maigret is in the buffet of a railway station on the border of Holland and Germany, where he sees a nondescript, shabby man anxiously guarding a battered cardboard suitcase. Curious, he manages to exchange the suitcase for an identical one, follows the man to Bremen and spies on him in his hotel room. When the man discovers the case has been substituted, he wanders desperately around the city and then, having failed to find his own case, returns to the room and shoots himself. When Maigret opens the case, he finds inside it an old suit, dirty and bloodstained and several sizes too big for the man who has been carrying it around.
What the tramp had been keeping so protectively in his suitcase, a thing so precious to him that he'd killed himself when it was lost, was someone else's suit!
And indeed after this the plot thickens tremendously, as Maigret encounters several men in Bremen and later in Liege who are clearly connected in some way with the dead man, though it is impossible at first to imagine what the connection could be. One is a moody, successful businessman who tries to kill Maigret on a journey back to Paris, another a successful graphic artist whose studio walls are covered with pen and pencil sketches depicting the same gruesome theme:
A first ink drawing showed a hanged man swinging from a gallows on which perched an enormous crow. And there were at least twenty other etchings and pen or pencil sketches that had the same leitmotif of hanging. On the edge of a forest: a man haging from every branch. A church steeple: beneath the weathercock, a human body dangling from every branch.
Of course in the end there turns out to be a rational explanation of all this, though the story behind it goes back for ten years. The explanation is satisying enough, but as always with this kind of plot, it's the atmosphere of mystery and dread that makes the novel so superb. Naturally it is Maigret's persistance that eventually solves it, quietly and without fuss. But the novel is also notable for its psychological realism - the portrayal of guilt and fear, and their effects on the lives of otherwise successful ordinary men.
This Penguin series has been newly translated, and this one was done by Linda Coverdale who, say Penguin, 'has been honoured with the title of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters for her contribution to French literature'. I am extremely fussy about literature in translation and can get quite cross if I think a translation is clumsy. French is, I think, a particularly difficult language to translate well, for whatever reason, and because I know the language reasonably well, I sometimes find myself translating backwards to see how some rather odd construction might have been arrived at. I didn't have to do this very often here, so that was good.
All in all then, a very welcome new series and I am looking forward very much to getting hold of more of it. Highly recommended.
