One of Simenon’s better Maigret stories in which the  Chief Inspector moves into a boarding house while his wife is away so he can immerse himself in the shooting of his colleague Janvier who had been on watch outside on surveillance for a robber.  Maigret over days gets to know everyone in the house  (including a young couple named Saft!) as well as on the block and slowly forms his idea of what happened, ultimately cracking the case.  But the real beauty of this story is Simenon’s summary of what Maigret brings to his work—-a deep understanding and respect for the everydayness of everyone’s life.  As Simenon summarizes, “It was just an ordinary stretch of street, with almost no passers-by, a sidewalk on each side, some houses, a few hundred people living in the houses,, men who left for work in the morning and came back at night, women who did their housekeeping, children yelling, old people enjoying the fresh air at their windows or on their doorsteps…..Charming people as Mademoiselle Clement would say. The sort of people you meet everywhere, who hada to find enough money every day to eat, and enough money every month to pay their rent….What would they have found if the street had been gone through with a fine-tooth comb?  A majority of what are called decent people, probably.  No rich ones. A few poor ones. A few semi-scoundrels, too, no doubt.  But the would be murderer?”  Simenon and Maigret’s deep fascination and understanding of human nature is well summarized.  Of course, Maigret gets his man.