Maigret, again: The Grand Banks Café and The Dancer at the Gai-Moulin

"...understand and judge not." 

I've recently been making my way through Ellroy's LA Quartet, and after finishing The Black Dahlia and The Big Nowhere, I grabbed LA Confidential  from the shelf, opened to page one and just put it back.  I think my brain was telling me that I'd had too much for the moment and that it was time to take a break.  I knew exactly what I wanted to read -- Maigret.  These books are like reading comfort food for me.  

9780141393506

Penguin, 2014

originally published as Au Rendez-vous des Terre-Neuvas, 1931

translated by David Coward

154 pp

paperback

"If anyone asked me what the distinctive feature of this case is...I'd say it has the mark of rage on it."

It's June, which is normally vacation time for the Maigrets.  Every year they make their way to a village in Alsace, where La Madame spends her time with family "making jam and plum brandy."  There's a change of plan this year though,  as Maigret asks his wife what she thinks about making a trip and staying by the sea.  The destination he has in mind is Fécamp, a small seaside town north of Le Havre, and he tells his wife that they'll be "able to just take it easy at Fécamp as anywhere else."  While "objections were raised,"  it's a done deal: Maigret has received a letter from an old friend there asking for help for a former pupil of his, Pierre Le Clinche, who has been arrested for the murder of a ship's captain. 

Once in Fécamp, Maigret makes his way to the Grand Banks Cafe, where he finds the crew of the recently-returned Océan, whose captain had been found floating in the harbour just hours after the ship had docked.  He learns that the "evil eye" had been cast over the ship even before it had sailed -- a sailor had broken a leg while waving goodbye to his wife, the ship's boy was "washed overboard by a wave," the captain had seemingly gone mad, along with other disasters including rotting cod.  The sailors, however, are reluctant to talk to Maigret about their voyage; he is told only that it might not be a bad idea to  "chercher la femme," which, without spoiling anything here, turns out be sound advice.    It seems that other than picking up a couple of scattered clues here and there,  Maigret is stumped -- no one even remotely involved with the case, including Le Clinche,  will say anything.  The only thing he knows is that the case "has the mark of rage on it." 

The answers, when they come, are put together slowly; once again, the focus is more on the "why" of it all rather than the who, one of the key characteristics of a Maigret novel, or at least of those I've read so far.  As with all of these books, Simenon, via his detective, ventures into the often dark territory of human nature and psychology to arrive at his conclusion.  This time around the "why" is a true jaw dropper, and once the answer is revealed, the question to be asked here centers around the nature of guilt.  This one is well worth your time; don't breeze through it even though it's a scant 153 pages. 

9780141393520
Penguin, 2014
originally published as La Danseuse du Gai-Moulin, 1931
translated by Siân Reynolds
153 pp, paperback

"It's a banal case, in spite of its morbid nature and apparent complexity." 

As much as I enjoyed The Grand Banks Cafe, the better book is The Dancer at the Gai-Moulin, which completely threw me off pretty much from the start for more than one reason, and goes to show that sometimes going rogue is not a bad thing.  

There's something about a crime novel set in the seedier parts of a city that appeals, and this one is no exception.  Here it's the seamier side of Liège, which in real life is Simenon's home town, where the action takes place.  A plot to rob the till after everyone leaves the club Gai-Moulin goes awry when two teens, Delfosse and Chabot, stumble over a body on the floor of the club in the darkness.  A match is lit, and they are sure the body is that of the obviously-wealthy man they referred to as "the Turk", a stranger who had come into the club earlier that night, had bought champagne, and had been entertained by the dancer Adèle.    Needless to say they're petrified and take off.  The next day, a very rattled Chabot happens to see a newspaper article about a body found in a laundry basket on the lawn of the Botanical Gardens; surprised to say the very least,  the two meet up.  It's then that they realize they're being followed, but they make their way to the Gai-Moulin, as it would be completely normal for them to be there.   Strangely they discover that everything is like it always is, but they make yet another plan which very quickly goes horribly awry.  That is really all I'm going to say about plot because really, to know any more ahead of time will completely spoil the enjoyment of reading this book, which is so very different from all of the Maigret novels preceeding this one.   

While Simenon's series novels tend to get middling ratings from many readers, he's one of my favorite crime writers ever.   When I want to read something deeply noirish, I turn to his romans durs, but when I want something a bit on the lighter side it's definitely Maigret.   With Dancer at the Gai-Moulin, he offers a plot that may be somewhat incredulous, but when it comes right down to it, I just didn't care that he wasn't exactly following the mechanics of the typical detective/police novel. In fact, using the term "typical" in describing Maigret just seems wrong.     I was much more taken with the very clever  twists in the story as well as the seedy, noir ambience Simenon paints here, down to the "crimson plush" upholstery of a banquette in the club and the "shabby peignoir" and mules worn by Adèle in her room.   And that reminds me:  don't kid yourself that Adèle, the titular dancer at the Gai-Moulin,  has only a small part to play here.  She may not show up often, but she really does take center stage.   

Only 65 more to go!  I'll get there and probably love every second of  the journey.  

Maigret (and Simenon) again: The Night at the Crossroads

read in January

9780141393483

Penguin, 2014

originally published as La nuit du carrefour, 1931

translated by Linda Coverdale

151 pp

paperback

"The whole thing's a scream, don't you think?"

Yes indeed it is, and woe be to anyone who decides that the 151 pages comprising this book can just be breezed through in no time, because this is a clear case of brevity disguising complexity.  On the other hand, it's a novel that packs more of a punch when read in one sitting, which is how I did it -- as in the case of A Man's Head, I didn't want to stop reading once I started it.  It is a hell of twisty story, with Maigret at the helm once again to decipher just what's going on here.

The Three Widows Crossroads is situated along the main road from Paris to Étampes, just three kilometers from the town of Arpajon.   It is home to Carl Andersen and his sister Else, insurance agent Monsieur Émile Michonnet and his wife, and Monsieur Oscar, the owner of the garage/repair shop/gas station there.    It is also the site of a murder.  It seems that M. Michonnet's brand new car had gone missing, with Andersen's old "rattletrap"  car left in its place.  Michonnet called the police, who search Andersen's garage and discover Michonnet's car there.  They also find the body of a man who'd been shot in the chest in the driver's seat.  His papers identify him as Isaac Goldberg, a diamond merchant from Antwerp; Andersen and his sister  have fled on foot to Arpajon to catch the first train for Paris where they are picked up by the police.  As the novel begins, Maigret and his colleagues have been taking turns interrogating Andersen, who claims to know absolutely nothing about, his story never waivering throughout the entire seventeen-hour ordeal.  It is a case where the inhabitants at the Crossroads neither saw nor knew anything, let alone have an alibi.  Making his way to the Crossroads after Andersen's release, he speaks to Else Andersen and learns nothing.  He is expecting the arrival of Goldberg's widow, and she gets there while Maigret and his colleague repeatedly make their way "up and down from the crossroads" several times.  As she begins to get out of the car, a shot rings out in the dark hitting and killing Madame Goldberg, bringing the murder toll to two.  As one might guess, finding the culprit isn't going to be easy, especially with the suspects at hand. 

As Night at the Crossroads begins, a mist is hovering over the Seine, turning to fog in the wee hours of the morning as dawn makes its appearance.   Usually when a story begins in this manner, it tends to signal the reader that things are going to be hazy or unclear.  Combined with the darkness that enfolds much of the action at the Three Widows Crossroads, that is definitely the case here. I don't want to say anything else about the plot or how it unfolds, except that like most of the Maigret novels I've read so far, the plot is secondary while the psyche takes center stage. 

Once again, a number of readers found the reading to be slow or boring, which is sad for me to see because it's neither.  Perhaps the temptation to buzz through the novel without thinking overtakes people or maybe it's that there is very little in the way of physical clues to follow  as in a normal police procedural novel, where you follow along as the lead detective finds and makes known his or her dazzling discoveries.  This is not that, nor was it intended to be. Reading Simenon requires a measure of patience and some thought;  he doesn't hand it all to you on a plate.   Personally, I had great fun trying to put all of the pieces together in this strange puzzle where nothing is as it seems, and discovered more than one surprise while doing so.

from imdb

Off to watch the film.

A Man's Head, by Georges Simenon

read in January.



The story goes that when Georges Simenon  approached Arthème Fayard publishers to pitch his first detective novels, the reaction he got wasn't what he'd hoped for.  As quoted in Lucille Becker's Georges Simenon: 'Maigrets' and the 'romans durs' (Haus Publishing, 2006),  they came back with

"It's not a detective novel! It's not a real puzzle! It's not a chess game; it isn't even a good novel because there are neither good nor bad people, there is no love story, and it almost always ends badly ... [Furthermore], your detective is nondescript and not particularly intelligent. You see him seated for hours in front of a glass of beer! He is painfully ordinary!" (41)

The reality is that Simenon's Maigret is quite intelligent.   He sits. He observes. He drinks a lot of beer while doing both. He lets a roomful of suspects get on each others' nerves until the actual criminal reaches a breaking point.  He listens. He makes his way into people's heads so that he can empathize, sympathize and learn what makes them tick, something he manages to do not just with criminals but with everyone concerned.  Reading through what readers have to say about him, the inevitable comparison with Poirot or Holmes comes up a number of times, mostly when readers have been disappointed with the Maigret novel they've just read.   I don't really read crime fiction solely for plot or action; I could also care less if there's a love story involved, unless it's relevant to the evildoing.   I'm like Maigret -- I'm far more interested in the  motivating factors that speak to the why.  

9780141393513
Penguin, 2014
originally published 1931
translated by David Coward
169 pp
paperback

"It was a war of nerves."

The days are numbered for the prisoner in cell number 11 at the Santé Prison,  and he can't believe his luck when on October 15 he is able to walk out of his cell and onto the streets of Paris.  Actually, someone had left this convicted double murderer a note three days earlier, letting him know that his door will be left open, and that the guards' attention will be focused elsewhere.  The note also contained instructions that he was to follow in making his way out of the prison.  What Joseph Heurtin didn't know was that Maigret and the police were not only watching his every move, but had set up his escape.   Maigret himself had arrested him, but wasn't completely convinced that he was guilty.  As he had said to the examining magistrate, "That man is either mad or he's innocent," and decided he would prove it via an "experiment" to be "morally sure;" he also believes that once out on the streets, Heurtin will lead him to the real culprit since he is sure that the convicted man was not alone at the time of the crime.  A man's head is at stake, and  Maigret has ten days; once Heurtin walks out of the prison, the clock is ticking.   

Maigret has no idea of what he's let himself in for when he finds himself going head-to-head with an adversary whose disturbed psychology and "dangerously sharp intellect" seems tailor made for Maigret's method of getting into his opponents' heads, giving the title of this novel a definite double meaning.  Little by little, with some measure of imaginary nail biting I waited  for that moment when, with Maigret's help, the bad guy would crack and the "war of nerves" could finally come to an end; only then did I realize how much tension I was holding inside.  While some readers found the lack of action to be an issue, the telling flat  and in some instances "boring," I found myself so caught up in it that I needed to finish the novel with no interruptions.  What happens in  A Man's Head  so nicely highlights, as Scott Bradfield so aptly describes it in a 2015 essay for The New York Times, that Maigret "rarely solves crimes; instead he solves people,"  which is precisely why I read and love these books.  

Very much recommended for people who are more all about the whys in their crime reading.  

*****

from imdb

I recently watched the 1933 film based on this book via the Criterion Channel,   La tête d'un homme directed by Julien Duvivier, and let me just say that anyone who found the book a bit on the dull side would not say the same thing about the film, which as one imdb reviewer  noted the director had turned into "something approaching a Gothic horror tale."   Holy crap -- that's a great description of it, for sure.    I was a bit taken aback at the beginning when the entire crime that put Heurtin in prison played out in full instead of unraveling little by little as was the case in the novel, but it worked and worked extremely well, since there's much more of a sense as to the disturbing psychological makeup  of Maigret's adversary from the outset.  This character is so creepy that the same imdb reviewer noted about the actor who portrays him, "With him on screen, one could even describe the screen itself as haunted."  Also a great description, and beyond apt.

from La Serie Maigret

If you prefer, you can catch the French Maigret series episode based on the novel on MHz, starring Bruno Crémer, my favorite Maigret.   The TV version  offers a version that is more subdued and sticks closely to the novel.

both are terrific.

The Blue Room, by Georges Simenon

9780141399041
Penguin, 2015
originally published as La chambre bleue, 1964
Translated by Linda Coverdale
156 pp

paperback

"How could he have guessed that this scene was something he would relive ten times, twenty times and more -- and every time in a different frame of mind, from a different angle...?"

A hot sunny day in August, a hotel room, and two people have just finished making love, "bodies still flushed with sensation and minds slightly dazed."  Caught up in his own sort of post-sex floatiness, haze, afterglow -- whatever you want to call it -- Tony Falcone is dabbing at the blood on his lip where his lover/mistress over the past eleven months, Andrée Despierre has bitten him, barely listening to her and quietly responding as she asks him a series of questions, words that to him "hardly mattered," since for him, "They were talking for the pleasure of it, as one does after making love..."  and

"Right now, nothing seemed important to him -- he felt good, in tune with the universe."

Still in this frame of mind, where "only the present mattered,"  halfheartedly listening to Andrée, she asks him if he could really spend the rest of his life with her, and he, in a non-thinking sort of way answers "Sure..."  But his happiness is interrupted when looking out the window overlooking the Place de Gare in the town of Triant, he sees something that causes him to grab his clothes, run out of the room and head to his car -- Andrée's husband Nicolas, who is heading right for the hotel.  It may seem that Tony's managed to escape, but in reality, he's already trapped in a nightmare. He just doesn't know it yet. 

However, we know that something has happened just three pages in as Tony describes a "psychiatrist appointed by the examining magistrate" asking him questions about that day, and "studying his reactions."  It's that series of questions, the conversation between Andrée and Tony that he is asked to remember, but why we don't exactly know.  It is that scene which he will be called upon to "relive ten, twenty times and more -- ... every time in a different frame of mind and from a different angle." And indeed, the conversation crops up several times throughout this story, and as we begin to learn what has happened that puts Tony in front of an examining magistrate, it takes on more meaning each time.

But Tony, who is married to a wife he loves and has a young child, struggles to make everyone understand about his affair with Andrée and the blue room, where for him,

"nothing was real. Or rather, its reality was of a different nature, incomprehensible anywhere else." 

Outside of that space they'd never been a couple; as he says, "they were an 'us' only in a bed" there.  For him, their lovemaking was intoxicating; both shared "an animal pleasure" he'd never known with any other woman.  She is, to Tony, the fulfillment of his sexual desire and passion.  But more importantly, as things progress, we hear from Tony that no one can really understand the present without an understanding of the past.  As he says,

"They thought, all these people in Poitiers, policemen, magistrates, doctors, even that unnerving lady psychologist, that they were going to establish the truth, when they knew nothing about the Despierres, the Formiers, and so many others who were important in their own ways."

As in most of his work, Simenon launches us quickly into the past, which ties directly to the present while the principals try to get to the truth.  But we are quick to learn that truth here isn't exactly absolute -- although Tony tries to be as honest and candid as possible, past and present circumstances are "True and false, like all the rest of it."   But the author does something more here, taking us beyond the past and present into the future, and does it so skillfully that it just becomes part of the flow even as he makes the shifts.

 With Simenon's gift for detail, his focus on human nature and his characters, his ability to produce a sort of claustrophobic atmosphere that only becomes more confining as time goes on, and his excellent economy of prose where every word, every phrase is carefully measured and never wasted, The Blue Room  offers an intense study of a man who unwittingly creates his own hell and becomes trapped, with no possibility of escape;  as he is continuously questioned, he is also forced to face his own role and his own responsibility for what has happened.

The length of this book might fool you into thinking that you can buzz through it in a day, but don't do it.  There is so much going on here and it needs to be given your utmost attention because everything, and I do mean everything in this story matters.  I did about 40 pages per day just to absorb it all, and even after a second read, I'm sure there's much more that I could get out of it.  It is, quite frankly, genius writing, but then again, most of Simenon's books are.

Beyond highly recommended, especially for readers who want a challenge and who want to take the time to get underneath what seems to be a fairly cut-and-dried story. Trust me -- it is anything but.

*The Square of Revenge, by Pieter Aspe

9781605984469
Pegasus Crime, 2013
originally published as Het Vierkant van de Wraak, 1995
translated by Brian Doyle

hardcover

Ahhh, the joy of finding an entirely new crime fiction series to read is unmistakeable, especially as it's summer. The Square of Revenge, by Pieter Aspe, is the first in a series of novels to feature Inspector Pieter Van In of Bruges and it's the first book of the series to be published in English.  The next book, The Midas Murders, is slated (according to Amazon) to be released December of this year in the US -- and I've already preordered it.  Considering it's the first in a series, it's pretty darn good.

What appears to be a robbery at an upscale jewelry store has police puzzled. Everything has been cleaned out, giving the crime the earmarks of an ordinary burglary, but there are no signs of forced entry. The security company has a taped record of the store owner's son saying he will be switching off the burglar alarm, but he was away all weekend and left no such instructions. The safe had been opened, quietly and professionally.  Finally, it turns out that all of the jewelry had been put into a bath of an acid solution called aqua regis, which pretty much destroyed everything.  On top of everything else, when Pieter Van In's superior calls him about investigating the crime and then later decides that the case should be shelved because of  politics and the owner's (Ludovic Degroof) disdain of publicity, in Van In's mind, something doesn't add up.  All Van In is supposed to do is to supply a police report, and the case is technically to be over.  The deputy prosecutor, Hannelore Martens, however, thinks otherwise, and insists that a public radio appeal be made to elicit any help from potential witnesses.  She hands Van In an envelope with her contact details, and he notices that it is addressed "for you, bastard," and contains a 5-word square of Latin words, setting him on an investigatory track toward a motive based on revenge.  His idea is reinforced when later, Degroof's grandson is kidnapped and held for an even more bizarre ransom, but trying to get the strange and eccentric Degroof family to talk or to level with Van In is like pulling teeth, even though one of their own may be in danger.  He is also hampered by the politics surrounding various players in the investigation and those at a higher level.

The summary on the top of the front dustjacket blurb calls this novel "heart-pounding," and while it's good, I probably wouldn't have described it that way.  While there's a good story here with more than one puzzle for the reader to work out, it's really the characters that drive this book -- especially the lead, Van In.  He's beyond good at what he does, is well respected by his coterie of police friends who know him well,  and has worked his way up the ladder to assistant commissioner and head of the Special Investigations Unit.  He's hates "small-minded intrigue," and is a bit tired of the kinds of cases that normally land on his desk, since "spectacular crimes and real tension were a rarity." Divorced, in debt, and a heavy smoker, he is often sidelined by his boss's son-in-law, whom his boss tends to put on the more sensational cases, only to be bailed out by Van In when there's a problem.  He also has no problems breaking or bending the rules when the need arises.  He can be snarky, which is a good thing, and though he has some measure of personal angst, it's not's worn on the sleeve like so many other protagonists in other crime novels.

Not to give away the show, but  the message left behind at the jewelry store hints at the Knights Templar, and I do have to say that when I saw this, my first thought was "Oh no, please don't go down that alley."  Fortunately Aspe didn't. I just wanted to get this out there so no one balks when they get to that part and to let readers know that there's no trace of  The DaVinci Code revisited here.  My only issue with this book is that as the story headed toward the big finish, things started happening at a lightning-quick pace that seemed downright implausible.  While generally I set my brain mode to "suspend disbelief" when I read most crime novels, events buzzed by so fast (on the part of the police) that the action became downright implausible. I get that the time frame is a bit narrow here but still. Otherwise, I was pretty happy with this first entry into a new series, and can't wait to start the next one. 

Readers of lighter crime fare will probably enjoy this book, although as I said earlier, much of the subject matter is not what I'd recommend for those who like cozy mysteries.  On the other hand, if you're looking for something gritty and edgy, you won't really find that either -- The Square of Revenge lands somewhere in between and makes for a good intro into a new series and a new set of characters to watch.   

crime fiction from Belgium

No Sale, by Patrick Conrad

9781904738978
Bitter Lemon Press, 2012 (UK)
originally published as Starr, 2007
translated by Jonathan Lynn
270 pp
paper


Patrick Conrad is a new author for me, although he has a long history of writing under his belt encompassing essays, poems, romans noir, novels and screenplays.  He also adds painting, and directing movies for television and the big screen to his list of talents.  His writing in No Sale won him the Diamanten Kogel/Diamond Bullet Award in 2007, honoring the best writing in Dutch crime fiction.   It ranks up there with one of the strangest novels I've ever read (in a good kind of way), taking a metafictional approach incorporating the dark world of film noir into a police investigation of a  bizarre set of murders to create a rather surreal reading experience. 

At the very core of this novel is the enigmatic Victor Cox, a man in his 60s who teaches History of Cinema at Antwerp's Institute of Film and Theatre Studies.  Cox also owns an impressive collection of "cinema props  and curiosities," and is teetering at the edge of retirement as the story opens.  He is married to Shelley, who has disappeared.  Shortly after Cox reports her as a missing person to the police, a body is discovered jammed underneath a jetty between two yachts in the water off the Bonaparte Dock.  Once the dead woman is identified as Shelley Cox, the detectives, Lannoy and Fons Luyckx (nicknamed "The Sponge") get to work.  The first person on their list is her husband Victor, who as Lannoy so aptly notes, is

"an absent-minded professor living for years alongside his wife but who doesn't quite understand what is happening to him in the real world."

Shelley, however, had a "split personality," one side of which she lived out in the seamier side of town, the Docklands, where she became Dixie, so the detectives realize that her husband may have had nothing to do with her death.  Eventually he is cleared of being involved, but Cox is soon back in the detectives' collective sights when a chance remark gives The Sponge cause to connect Shelley's death with the earlier murders of two other women. As years go by, and a number of women also meet rather bizarre ends, the detectives begin to realize that Cox has some sort of connection with each one of them, but evidence collected at each scene fails to yield any tangible association leading back to Victor as their killer.  But Victor isn't so sure -- his growing attachment to one of his young film students with a strong resemblance to Clara Bow (or Louise Brooks)  has left him treading the thin line between reality, dreams and the plotlines of his favorite classic noir films, which serve as a distorted lens through which Victor views his world.  After he retires, he finds himself "increasingly at home in a fantasy world that evoked the bygone charms of the Twenties and Thirties."

While several noir films are necessarily explored in some detail here in keeping with the plot, Conrad also employs the same contrasts of light and dark in his descriptions of Antwerp and the people who live there.   At Shelley/Dixie's funeral, for example, he writes:

"On the left, the world of night: the inhabitants of Docklands, the pub and cafe owners, the faded revellers, the knights errant of darkness, the ghosts and shades that rarely brave daylight and who had accompanied Dixie to the bitter end of her insoluble quest. On the right, the world of light: Victor Cox, pale and overcome by emotion, surrounded by his students and the complete faculty...And then what was left of Shelley's family...Also a few senior officers, including Aimé Butterfly in civilian dress, who fits in everywhere -- and therefore nowhere -- and does not know which side he should choose."

and later, when Victor is out taking a stroll before ending up in the red-light district called the Vervesrui,

"The night is bright and the sea breeze blowing out the purple north over the bay of the Scheldt smells of iodine. The coloured lights of the bars and restaurants opposite are reflected like thousands of trembling serpents in the inky waters of the Bonaparte Dock. Cox strolls along terraces that are still packed full at this late hour and looks almost tenderly at the festive crowds...On the Nassau Bridge he stops and stares at the motionless water, at the tar-smeared jetties along the gangway where Shelley's corpse drifted among dead rats, empty plastic bottles and rotting vegetation. "

No Sale is not only related via a dual-narrative format (Victor's story and that of the two detectives) that eventually come together,  but also, like any good noir novel, addresses the dual natures that exist within some of the main characters and the drama that  is played out in terms of their own respective views of reality.  Even the city is afforded its dark and light shadows and tones.  Reading this book gave me the same uneasy feeling as when I'm sitting in the dark watching a suspenseful film and wondering how things can get any worse, and the layering of film noir into a murder mystery heightens the effect. Then again, there are some comedic moments (especially involving Clint Eastwood and Dirty Harry) to provide relief.

As a crime novel, the plot is intriguing, and while it's not too terribly difficult to figure out what's going on after Victor has his moments of epiphany, it was often a bit of a stretch of credibility in terms of the contrivance of the murders to fit within their given frames.  But then again, this isn't so much a novel you'd read for the solution to the crimes but rather one to be enjoyed as a more intense focus on human nature.  It's also a cool way to explore film noir -- even if you know absolutely nothing about it.  


Definitely recommended -- it's not your average crime novel but something even better.

 crime fiction from Belgium

#2 read - 2013 International Dagger eligible