Maigret’s Dead Man by Georges Simenon 1948

I continue to work my way through Simenon’s Maigret novels with this fine addition, #29 in the series of 75  republished by Penguin Classics in 2016.  I have three wonderful shelves of these books in my library in Vermont providing a colorful display from the original green and orange Penguins to the stark white bindings of the current Penguins and a pot-pourri of colors from other publishers who have taken on Maigret over the past nearly 100 years and which I’ve found in used bookstores from coast to coast.

This is one of Simenon’s best with more details than usual about Maigret’s methods, the slow coming to understanding of the victim and the criminal and how their dance together resulted in murder.  This book is also unusual in that there is gunplay and several killings, not the usual stuff of a Simenon psychological portrait.

The book starts with a phone call to Maigret from a frightened man who claims he is being followed and targeted for killing by several different men.  He doesn’t leave his name in that first call nor in the four subsequent ones in which he begs for police protection. The calls abruptly cease and later that night the caller’s body is found in Place Concorde. Perhaps because he had reached out directly to Maigret who had been unable to protect him, but the dead man became Maigret’s eponymous dead man.

Through a series of brilliant observations and conclusions and with the aid of his colleague, the forensic pathologist Moers, Maigret deduces that the victim is a small bar owner who frequents the race track.  The search narrows down until he identifies Lil’ Albert and ultimately captures his killers.

This is Simenon at his best with wonderful descriptions of Paris, especially the low life areas around Place Voges and the outlying sections along the Seine.  If you still haven’t read any books in this series despite my repeated recommendations, you could do a lot worse than to start with this one.