What better way to start a new year than to curl up with a Chief Inspector Jules Maigret novel.  This one, written in 1949, was the 30th of Simenon’s 74 Maigret books, and an excellent one it is.  Simenon takes us back to 1913 when Maigret was a young policeman working as the secretary to the Chief Inspector in the Saint-Georges police district. His main duties are to deal with the vagrants, drunks, and prostitutes who are hauled into the jail each day, but one night when he’s the lone policeman in the station, a young man with a bleeding nose runs in claiming to have heard a shot fired in a house after seeing a woman calling for help from a window.

Turns out that the house in question is the residence of one of Paris’s distinguished old families, and Maigret’s Chief, who is of the same social class and a friend of that family, is more interested in protecting his friends than in solving the crime. Nonetheless, he allows his young charge to proceed with the investigation quite confident that Maigret will come up empty-handed.  Silly Chief Inspector!

Maigret solves the complicated murder and in the process begins to develop the unique skills that will serve him well throughout his long and distinguished career in the Police Judiciare.  When his father died suddenly, Maigret had to drop out of medical school and ended up in the police as follows: “The profession he had always yearned for did not actually exist. As he grew up, he had the sense that many people in his village were out of place, that they had followed a path that was not theirs, purely because they didn’t know what else to do.  And he imagined a very clever, above all very understanding man, a cross between a doctor and a priest, a man capable of understanding another’s destiny at first glance….People would come to see him the way they consulted a doctor.  He would have been a sort of mender of destinies.  Not only because he was clever.  Perhaps he didn’t need to have an exceptional mind but simply to be able to live the life of every man, to put himself in anyone’s shoes.”

And there you have it, the total explanation for how Maigret works and why he does it, and this in the 30th book in the series.  In the bio at the front of this reissued Penguin Classics edition, Simenon is quoted as saying: “My motto, to the extent that I have one, has been noted often enough, and I’ve always conformed to it.  It’s the one I’ve given to Maigret, who resembles me in certain points….’understand and judge not.'”

The book’s first page of this reissued classic is filled with blurbs lauding Simenon and Maigret.  Faulkner, Muriel Spark, Peter Ackroyd, Andre Gide, Anita Brookner, and John Banville all sing his praises as do I.  Worth reading this entire series and this would be a good one to begin with.