This is an early Simenon Maigret story, and it shows it.  The story opens at the end of a 17 hour interrogation of a monacled Dane who is a suspect in a bizarre murder of a Belgian diamond dealer found in a neighbor’s car in the Dane’s garage at the Three Widows Crossroads in Avrainville.  Maigret fires his gun and even strikes a man and a woman in this early novel in the series, but of course he gets his man and it’s not the Dane.  A bit too much ethnic stereotyping in this one for me to like it very much.  The murdered man is described as “definitely Jewish-looking, a stubborn brow, curly hair, showy suit.  Someone used to living well, giving orders, spending freely.”