Tag: Georges Simenon

My Year in Novellas 2026

Published on by Margaret14 Comments

For the SEVENTH year in a row, Cathy of 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck are co-hosting Novellas in November as a month-long blogging and social media challenge. A novella technically contains 20,000 to 40,000 words, but to keep things simple they define it as any work under 200 pages.

I’m beginning with looking back at the novellas I have read since the end of last year’s Novellas in November.

  1. The Christmas Clue by Nicola Upson
  2. The Aspern Papers by Henry James
  3. Homeward Bound by Hamza Yassin
  4. The Christmas Guest by by Peter Swanson
  5. The Rose and the Yew Tree by by Mary Westmacott (Agatha Christie)
  6. Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym
  7. Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey
  8. The Third Man and The Fallen Idol by Graham Greene
  9. Maigret in Vichy by Georges Simenon
  10. Maigret and the Old People by Georges Simenon
  11. Maigret’s Pickpocket by Georges Simenon

I hope to write more about the ones I haven’t reviewed yet.

These are some I haven’t read yet:

Maigret Defends Himself by Georges Simenon – When suspicion turns on Inspector Maigret for a crime he did not commit, he must use every investigative tool in his arsenal to clear his name.

Seascraper by Benjamin Wood – this follows shanker Thomas Flett as his quiet life in a small English coastal town is forever changed over the course of one fateful day.

Grief Is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter – Goodreads tells me this is part novella, part polyphonic fable, part essay on grief, Max Porter’s compassion and bravura style combine to dazzling effect. Full of unexpected humour and profound emotional truth.

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers – the fifth book in the Peter Wimsey series, in which he unravel the mysteries of ninety-year-old General Fentiman’s death.

Brief Answers to the Big Questions by Stephen Hawking – his final thoughts on the universe’s biggest questions in this brilliant posthumous work.

North to Paradise: A Memoir by Ousman Umar – The inspiring true story of one man’s treacherous boyhood journey from a rural village in Ghana to the streets of Barcelona—and the path that led him home.

Maigret and the Old People: Book Beginnings & Review

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

Friday Book Snippets combining Book Beginnings on Friday and the Friday 56, is co-hosted by Anne@HeadFullofBooks and Olivia at Bemused and Bookish.

Directions: Share two snippets (a sentence or short paragraph) from a) the book’s opening and b) page 56 (or another page) from the book you are currently reading. No spoilers, please.

This week I’m featuring Maigret and the Old People by Georges Simenon, book 56 of 75 Inspector Maigret.

1st snippet, Chapter 1 :

It was one of those exceptional months of May, the kind you only encounter two or three times in your life, and which have the luminosity, the smell of childhood, memories. Maigret called it a ‘May of hymns’, because it reminded him both of his first communion and his first spring in Paris, when everything was still new and wonderful to him.

2nd snippet, page 113:

Here everything was too perfect. Everything had a logical explanation, everything except the old man’s death.

Description from Goodreads:

When a wealthy aristocrat is found murdered in his home, Inspector Maigret must navigate a high-stakes case in the moneyed world of Paris’s upper crust.

Maigret is called to the home of Armand de Saint-Hilaire, a highly respected diplomat who has been found by his housekeeper, shot dead in his study. Maigret is urged to be discrete in his investigation, but after interviewing everyone concerned, the inspector is at a loss to the identity of the perpetrator—until he comes across a series of letters spanning decades between the victim and a widowed woman. As Maigret uncovers the details behind the pair’s relationship, he gets closer to discovering the tragic truth behind the official’s demise.

With the pressure mounting, the inspector must navigate class divides and his own position in society to uncover the killer. Maigret and the Old People is an absorbing mystery and a thoughtful examination of the different worlds money creates.

My thoughts:

Georges Simenon wrote 75 novels and 28 short stories featuring Inspector Jules Maigret, published chronologically in French from 1931 to 1973. I’ve been reading the Maigret books completely out of order for years now and I think they read well as standalones. Maigret and the Old People (aka Maigret in Society) is the 56th book, first published in 1960, so one of the later books in the series. My copy is an e-book, translated by Shaun Whiteside and published by Penguin. It’s a novella of 159 pages.

I really enjoy these books, following Maigret’s life and career as he ages. As the title indicates old age is one of the themes in this book. Maigret himself is aging, nearing retirement and, apart from him, all the characters are aged between 65 and 85. It begins as Maigret is remembering his childhood, thinking of his communion and his first spring in Paris. He is feeling both light and melancholy, reflecting about his awe when he first entered the Police Judiciaire building, and realising that the Seine hadn’t changed and neither had the anglers who were still in the same spot, as if they hadn’t moved from it. This is one of the things I enjoy about Simenon’s writing, the way he describes the setting, as in the opening sentences so that we know that is spring in Paris, followed by the insight into Maigret’s thoughts and his nostalgic mood.

The novel is full of Maigret’s memories of his childhood, spent in the shadow of the chateau owned by the Count and Countess of Saint-Fiacre where his father was the estate manager. It is in this frame of mind that he investigates the death of the former ambassador, the Count of Saint-Hilaire, who had been found shot in his study, by his housekeeper of 42 years, Jaquette Larrieu. Maigret is asked to be discreet, but with no obvious motive or suspects, he is hampered. He proceeds with caution, not wanting to make hasty judgements. But, he had lost his confidence

… unprepared in the face of people whose existence he hadn’t even suspected. All their attitudes, their ideas, their reactions were alien to him, and he tried in vain to classify them under any particular category. (page 146)

He finds a bundle of letters from Princess Isabelle of V, who had been a lifelong friend of Saint-Hilaire’s. The two of them had fallen in love, but she had married Prince Hubert of V, of one of the great French families. So for fifty years they had written to each other every day, but they had never met.

After interviewing everyone concerned, Maigret is still puzzled. And so was I. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I particularly enjoy Maigret’s methods of investigating, his intuition and the way he spends time pondering the psychology of the characters. I also liked the glimpses into his past, explaining his awkwardness with the aristocracy, as well as the insights into his life with his wife, Louise, usually referred to as Madame Maigret.

I have no expectations that I’ll read all 75 of the Maigret novels, but I’d like to read as many as I can.

Spell the Month in Books May 2026

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

Spell the Month in Books is a linkup hosted by Jana on Reviews From the Stacks on the first Saturday of each month. The goal is to spell the current month with the first letter of book titles, excluding articles such as ‘the’ and ‘a’ as needed. That’s all there is to it! Some months there are optional theme challenges, such as “books with an orange cover” or books of a particular genre, but for the most part, any book you want to use is fair game!

Jana hasn’t added anything to her blog since January and as she was expecting a baby I’m thinking she’s been busy since then! So, for May I’m featuring books I’ve read in the past two years to spell the word May using the first letters of the book titles. The first two are nonfiction and the last one is a Maigret murder mystery.

M is for Maiden Voyages by Sian Evans

This book covers a wide range of topics that fascinate me – not just travel, but also social history, both World Wars, the sinking of the Titanic, emigration, the impact that the ocean liners had on the economy. and on women’s working lives and independence, adventure and so much more besides.

It is a ‘collection of selected biographical tales, both cautionary and life-affirming, about dynamic women on the move, set primarily between the two World Wars, during the golden age of transatlantic travel.‘ (page 25)

A is for Appointment in Arezzo: A Friendship with Muriel Spark by Alan Taylor

In July 1990 Alan Taylor first met Muriel Spark and her friend Penelope (Penny) Jardine. Their meeting led to a friendship and since then they met frequently during the last fifteen years of her life. With sources ranging from notebooks kept from his very first encounter with Muriel and the hundreds of letters they exchanged over the years, this is an invaluable portrait of one of Edinburgh’s premiere novelists. 

Y is for The Yellow Dog by Georges Simenon

This begins with the shooting of Monsieur Mostaguen, a local wine merchant, followed by the appearance of the yellow dog, a big, snarling yellow animal, and then an attempt at poisoning for Inspector Maigret to investigate. No one knows who the owner of the yellow dog is. The locals had never seen it before and they all viewed it with fear and suspicion. Maigret keeps his thoughts to himself until the end of the book, when like Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, he explains it all.

Spell the Month in Books – March 2026

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

Spell the Month in Books is a linkup hosted by Jana on Reviews From the Stacks on the first Saturday of each month. The goal is to spell the current month with the first letter of book titles, excluding articles such as ‘the’ and ‘a’ as needed. That’s all there is to it! Some months there are optional theme challenges, such as “books with an orange cover” or books of a particular genre, but for the most part, any book you want to use is fair game!

The options this month are Pi Day, March Madness or Green Covers. I know very little about the first two options and although earlier this month I posted a Top Ten Tuesday post on books with green covers (in honour of St. Patrick’s Day , here are five more books with green covers, all crime fiction novels that I’ve read. The descriptions in italics are taken either from Amazon UK or from Goodreads.

M is for Maigret’s Memoirs by Georges Simenon

This is a fictional autobiography by Georges Simenon writing as Maigret, beginning in 1927 or 1928 when Maigret and Simenon, calling himself Georges Sim, first ‘met’. Maigret looks back to his first ‘meeting’ with Sim. He fills in some of the background of his early life and talks about his father and how he first met his wife, Louise. Simenon had written 34 Maigret novels before this one and Maigret took this opportunity to correct some of Simenon’s inaccuracies.

Simenon drops facts and information piecemeal in his Maigret books and one thing I particularly like in Maigret’s Memoirs is that it is all about Maigret, but I did miss not having a mystery to solve.

A is for Alibi by Sue Grafton

Set in and around the fictional town of Santa Teresa, California, based on Santa Barbara, where Grafton has a home in the suburb of Montecito, this is the first book in the alphabet- titled series of books featuring Kinsey Millhone, a private investigator. Laurence Fife, a prominent divorce attorney with a reputation for single-minded ruthlessness on behalf of his clients, is murdered. His wife, Nikki was convicted of his murder. On her release eight years later, she hires Kinsey to find out who had really killed him.

It’s a fast-paced book, easy to read and with no gory details.

R is for Rather Be the Devil by Ian Rankin

Some cases never leave you.

For John Rebus, forty years may have passed, but the death of beautiful, promiscuous Maria Turquand still preys on his mind. Murdered in her hotel room on the night a famous rock star and his entourage were staying there, Maria’s killer has never been found.

Meanwhile, the dark heart of Edinburgh remains up for grabs. A young pretender, Darryl Christie, may have staked his claim, but a vicious attack leaves him weakened and vulnerable, and an inquiry into a major money laundering scheme threatens his position. Has old-time crime boss Big Ger Cafferty really given up the ghost, or is he biding his time until Edinburgh is once more ripe for the picking?

In a tale of twisted power, deep-rooted corruption and bitter rivalries, Rather Be the Devil showcases Rankin and Rebus at their unstoppable best.

C is for The Case of the Howling Dog by Erle Stanley Gardner

A dog howled by night in the quiet of Milpas Drive, and drove Arthur Cartright crazy with terror. He begged lawyer Perry Mason to bring a warrant against its owner, who, he said, had taught the dog to howl in order to drive him mad. According to superstition the howling meant a death in the neighbourhood, and Cartright appeared to believe it.

But Mason believed that a deeper fear than superstition was impelling his client and when both the dog and its owner were killed he took up the challenge and set himself to find the murderer.

H is for Hallowe’en Party by Agatha Christie

This begins with the party given by Mrs Drake for teenagers. One of the guests, Joyce Reynolds, a boastful thirteen-year old, who likes to draw attention to herself, announces that once she’d witnessed a murder. It seems nobody believed her and yet later on she is found dead, drowned in the tub used for the bobbing for apples game – someone had believed her and had killed her. Mrs Ariadne Oliver was at the party and she asks Poirot to help in finding the murderer.

The next link up will be on April 4, 2025 when the theme will be: Easter OR Pastel Covers

Maigret’s Doubts by Georges Simenon: a Novella

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Maigret’s Doubts by Georges Simenon, translated by Shaun Whiteside is the 52nd Maigret novel (first published as Les scrupules de Maigret in 1957), and published by Penguin in 2018, one of the books in the Maigret Capsule Collection, a selection of twelve of Georges Simenon’s iconic Inspector Maigret titles.

Description from Goodreads

Inspector Maigret finds himself caught in the middle of a husband and wife duo’s case of “he said/she said”—with murderous consequences

An unusually quiet day for Inspector Maigret at the Quai des Orfèvres is disturbed by a visit from mild-mannered toy salesman Xavier Manton. Maigret is taken aback by Manton’s revelation that he suspects his wife of plotting to poison him. And when he receives a visit from Madame Manton expressing her own grave concerns later that day, he finds himself deeply conflicted, unsure of whom to trust. Maigret heeds the advice of his seniors and begins investigating the couple—and with every turn, new complications arise. When the case comes to a boil and a body is discovered, everyone, including Maigret, is shocked.

Maigret’s Doubts is an engrossing mystery of marriage and deceit that forces the reader to question whether our brilliant inspector may be fallible after all.

My review:

I recently reviewed Simenon’s earlier book, The Yellow Dog, which baffled me because I had little idea about what Maigret was thinking or even doing. Maigret’s Doubts is just the opposite as it is very clear what he is thinking as Simenon describes his thoughts in detail.

It begins on the 10th January, after the holidays finding detectives at the Quai des Orfèvre, strangely quiet with little to do except dull administrative tasks, a period of dead calm. Maigret wasn’t in good form, feeling lethargic and wondering if he wasn’t coming down with the flu. And he’s worrying about his wife’s health after their family doctor has told him he’s prescribed her some pills at the same time telling him there was absolutely nothing to worry about. It makes him melancholy as he realises they are both getting to the age of minor ailments that need attention.

A visit from Xavier Marton, the head of the toy department at the Grands Magasins du Louvre, a model train specialist, breaks into Maigret’s melancholy, telling him that he thinks his wife wants to poison him. Later that same day his wife, Gisèle also visits Maigret and tells him that her husband is having delusions, leaving him unsure who is telling him the truth. The next day, Manon visits Maigret again and warns him that if his wife poisons him, he’ll shoot her before he dies. But it soon becomes clear that Manon and Jenny, his wife’s sister are in love, although not actually having an affair and that Gisèle, on the other hand, is having an affair with her employer, Monsieur Harris.

Maigret is puzzled by what Manon and his wife have told him and asks Dr Pardon his family doctor for his opinion and consults books about psychiatry, making this book more of a psychological study than a police investigation. Maigret isn’t faced with a crime that has been committed but one that could be committed. But it was just as possible that it wouldn’t be committed at all.

What he had to do this time was not to reconstruct the actions and gestures of a human being, but to predict his behaviour, which was difficult in a different way.(page 114)

But Maigret doesn’t find the books of much help:

In the end he got up, as a man who has had enough threw the book on the table and, opening the sideboard in the dining room picked up the bottle of plum brandy and filled one of the little gold-rimmed glasses.

It was like a protestation of common sense against all that scientific gobbledygook, a way of getting back to earth.

I really enjoyed this book, although not a lot actually happens. Maigret fears that there is going to be a murder but who will be the victim and how can he make an arrest when no crime has been committed? The narrative moves at a slow pace as the tension steadily rises culminating in a murder as the book moves to its end.

Novellas in November is hosted by Cathy at 746 Books and Bookish Beck.

The Yellow Dog by Georges Simenon

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

The Maigret books are also a good choice for Novellas in November, they’re all under 200 pages. I’ve been a Maigret fan for a long time, ever since I was in my teens, watching the TV series with Rupert Davies in the title role. And I’ve been reading the Maigret series as I’ve come across the books in libraries, bookshops, and more recently as e-books, so not in the order they were originally published.

Penguin| 2014| 164 pages| My own copy| 3*

This is a short review because, once more I’m behind with writing reviews. The Yellow Dog is the 5th book in the new Penguin Maigret series, translated by Linda Asher. It was first published in 1931 and also published in a previous translation as A Face for a Clue. It’s a tale of small town suspicion and revenge.

In the windswept seaside town of Concarneau, a local wine merchant is shot. In fact, someone is out to kill all the influential men and the entire town is soon sent into a state of panic. For Maigret, the answers lie with the pale, downtrodden waitress Emma, and a strange yellow dog lurking in the shadows…

It’s only 134 pages but with a slow start it did seem longer than that. It begins with the shooting of Monsieur Mostaguen, a local wine merchant, followed by the appearance of the yellow dog, a big, snarling yellow animal, and then an attempt at poisoning for Maigret to investigate. I wondered what the significance of the yellow dog was and who it belonged to; no one seems to know. The locals had never seen it before and they all viewed it with fear and suspicion. I’ve read some of the earlier Maigret and have noted before that I’ve been confused and baffled, with little idea of what was going on and it was just the same with this book. Maigret doesn’t seem to be very concerned about the man who was shot and seriously injured, nor about the attempted poisoning until there’s a murder and another man disappears. He walks around the town, observing but not actively investigating.

Simenon is good at conveying atmosphere and skilled at setting the scene and drawing convincing characters in a few paragraphs.  As the book begins there’s a south-westerly gale slamming the boats together in the harbour in Concarneau and the wind surges through the streets. Contrast the weather at the beginning of the book with the change by the time Maigret is getting close to clearing up the mystery – the weather turned fine, with a vibrant blue sky, the sea sparkled, and ‘the Old Town’s walls, so gloomy in the rain, turn a joyful, dazzling white.‘

I don’t think this is one of the best Maigret book, but it is puzzling with Maigret keeping his thoughts to himself until the end of the book, when like Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, he explains it all.