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Le Commissaire Maigret
Police Judiciaire
36 Quai des Orfèvres
Paris...The Maigret Forum This is not a static website. It changes almost daily. The Maigret "Forum," an open bulletin board for notices, opinions, information and discussion related to Maigret and Simenon, has become the most active feature of this site. It's where new books, websites, articles and features are first announced and displayed, and includes an indexed archive of the entire past Forum... back to 1997!
Click here for the current Forum.
Here's a recent sample -
Maigret of the Month: Ceux du Grand-Café (The Group at the Grand-Café)
11/26/11 –
Unlike other stories presenting Maigret in retirement, in this one, the ex-Chief Inspector is not happy to be so... While in the other stories Maigret displays a certain degree of displeasure toward those who come seeking his aid, and is reluctant to leave his tomato and lettuce plants, here he feels differently.
We see him happily at work in his garden, hoeing and weeding in his clogs and straw hat, or taking memorable naps in his deckchair. Yes, but voilà: after three years of retirement, Maigret seems to be tiring of it (at least according to his author, who has him missing his time at the Quai...), and nothing had pleased him more than his place by the Loire...
We must also note that it started in winter, and in winter, clearly, there was no gardening, no question of naps in the sun, and it was much too cold for fishing... So what was left? Out of idleness, he lets his wife convince him to join the card players at the Grand-Café, and he gets caught up in the game, bogged down in habits of which he's not far from being a little ashamed...
And along comes a chance to escape from this numbness, to find once more his talents as a policeman... a murder has been committed in this peaceful and provincial village, and this would seem the chance for Maigret to have the perverse pleasure of digging around in the stories of these uneventful-seeming lives... However... astonishingly, Maigret does nothing about it. He refuses, to the great surprise of everyone, to become involved with the story, and makes no attempt to search for the truth. Or rather... we end up understanding, he had discovered the truth immediately, but, in a sense of "moral honesty", had refused to reveal it. And when he'd said to Angèle: "I don't know anything... I don't want to know anything...", in fact, Maigret had known, but couldn't tell what he knew.
It wasn't until three years later that he revealed to his wife what had actually happened with the death of the butcher. And if he spoke of it at that time, it wasn't so much to justify his past actions as to show his wife – and himself – that he was still a sleuth, a man of intuition, someone who understood... Well, it's time for his author to take him out of this retirement that weighs so on him, and for him to take up his active life again... In the texts which follow, Maigret will be once more "in service" (except for Maigret se fâche), as if it were above all his author who'd had enough of describing the peaceful and monotonous days of a pensioner fishing on the quiet banks of the Loire.
This story is also interesting in that it unfolds over a long period of time. Most of the stories have their action concentrated in a very short time... ten stories take place in one day (bea, fen, pig, err, arr, not, owe, eto, noy, noe), seven in two days (pen, lar, ber, man, amo, pip, obs), four in three days (pei, bay, ven, cho), and only six stories take one week or more (lun, ceu, sta, hom, mal, pau). This shows us the talent of the writer, who knows as well how to handle the short text to construct a condensed time plot as to describe one taking place over an extended period. Note that the length of the text is independent of that of the action... we find short texts in which the action time is short (for example, fen, with 15 pages), short texts where the action time is long (lun, 15 pages), long texts where the action time is short (not, 41 pages) and long texts where the action time is long (pau, 40 pages).
Murielle Wenger
A phenomenal author and his phenomenal character
Georges Simenon was by many standards the most successful author of the 20th century, and the character he created, Inspector Jules Maigret, who made him rich and famous, ranks only after Sherlock Holmes as the world's best known fictional detective. There is nothing commonplace about the life of Georges Simenon, and he and his works have been the subject of innumerable books and articles. The Maigret stories are unlike any other detective stories — the crime and the details of unraveling it are often less central to our interest than Maigret's journey through the discovery of the cast of characters... towards an understanding of man. Simenon said he was obsessed with a search for the "naked man" — man without his cultural protective coloration, and he followed his quest as much in the Maigrets as in his "hard" novels.
Steve TrusselThis site, first opened on August 29, 1996 as "Inspector Maigret," has spread in various directions from its beginning as primarily a bibliography of editions in English. The "new look" reflects various aspects of this development, but the bibliography remains a central feature.
Counting Maigret: statistics etc.For the forty-year period from 1931 through 1972, a new Inspector Maigret investigation appeared at the average rate about 2.5 per year: 75 novels and 28 short stories, 103 episodes of what has been called George Simenon's "Maigret Saga."
Full-length texts - reviews and articles about Maigret and Simenon, as well as new translations of stories, articles, (and even a novel!) which have never appeared in English.
Index to the texts and articles on various pages.
Articles from the Simenon symposiums, journals, program listings, and other not-Maigret-only Simenon material.
Gallery: Maigret covers and photos
Maigret paperback covers, postage stamps, theme music, locations... more.
Plots of all the Maigret novels and stories.
Shopping for Maigret: books on-line
The one-button, quick-links to the main on-line book dealers are still available, for shopping for Maigret titles.
Maigret on Screen: films and videos
Various aspects of Maigret on film and video.
Links to the rest of the on-line world of Maigret on the Internet.
background photo: adapted from "Two models for Maigret,
Commissaires Massu and Guillaume." [Ph. Keystone]
"Quai des Orfèvres on the Cité Island at night" [Jean-Pierre Ducatez]
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