If the title of this blog rings a bell for you, you must be a fan of the mystery novels of Georges Simenon. When Inspector Maigret holds an interrogation at the Quai des Orfèvres, more often than not he orders beer and sandwiches from the Brasserie Dauphine, not only for the police officers involved, but also for the suspect. Nobody ever goes hungry (or thirsty) in a Maigret novel.

If you are not familiar with the Inspector Maigret mysteries by Simenon, I should back up a bit. The building at 36, Quai des Orfèvres, on the Île de la Cité, was for many years the headquarters of the police in Paris.

It is a real place invoked in Simenon’s novels. Not any more, though. Police headquarters recently relocated to a more modern facility in the 17^th.

The Brasserie Dauphine, however, is Simenon’s invention. The Place Dauphine, just around the corner from the Quai des Orfèvres, has always had cafés and restaurants, but today’s fashionable eateries do not look like the kind of place that would send out a tray of sandwiches and beer to the local cop shop.*

I read several Maigret novels recently while recovering from Covid. As one does. On the back of my second-hand copy of Maigret in Exile (translated from the French, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978) is a quotation from The New Yorker:

Georges Simenon has probably done as much for the common cold as the aspirin and more for travel than the overnight suitcase. Limp, semi-recumbent people all over the world wanly open his latest tale…and somehow, no matter what the outcome, close it with a feeling of inexplicable pleasure.

The only thing I would disagree with there is the word “inexplicable.” I think the pleasure of his books is quite explicable.

For me, one doesn’t so much open a Maigret novel as wrap oneself in it, like a comfortable overcoat, perhaps one smelling faintly of pipe smoke. It’s Paris in the 1940s or 1950s, the city of old movies and nostalgia. There are buses with open-air platforms at the back, you need a jeton to make a phone call from a bistro, and eagle-eyed concierges lurk within the entrance to every residence.

Adam Gopnick, writing about Simenon in the New Yorker in September 2022, says that the author “takes gray as his distinct and constant color.” I beg to disagree. Perhaps Gopnick is confusing the books with their publishers’ frequent use of black and white photography on the covers, particularly the old Penguin versions with their lovely typography. Here’s a typical example, taken from my own shelves.**

For me, the books are full of light and colour. Here’s the opening of Maigret and the Headless Corpse, which takes place in (and I do mean in) and around the Canal St-Martin:

The sunlight was beating down on the buildings along Quai de Valmy, sunlight so bright that it made you wonder why that stretch of the canal had such a sinister reputation. True, the paintwork on the fronts of the buildings was faded, the whites and yellows pale and washed out, but on this March morning, everything seemed as bright and clear as a painting by Utrillo. (p. 8)

I immediately thought of that spot on the Quai de Valmy with the colourful facades.

In Maigret Goes to School (1954), it is spring and “bright sunlight as cheerful as lilies-of-the-valley shone on Paris and made the pink chimney pots gleam.” Grey? The books set in winter, perhaps, but I wouldn’t colour all his work in grey.

Food is hugely important. Even junior officers need to eat. Maigret has three lieutenants at his beck and call – Janvier, Lapointe, and Lucas (they probably have first names and distinctive characteristics, but I can’t remember any offhand) – and Maigret wouldn’t dream of sending them to do surveillance or a house-to-house inquiry without ensuring that they have a square meal first. If they are far from the Quai des Orfèvres, he recommends a nearby restaurant.

Madame Maigret provides wonderful meals on the rare occasions Maigret makes it home for lunch or dinner. Here’s an exchange over breakfast from Maigret Hesitates:

“Do you think you’ll be back for lunch?”

“I think so.”

“Would you like fish?”

“Skate in black butter, if you can get any.” (p. 113)

I love that. Other men would simply have said “Yes, fish would be nice.” Alas, later that morning, Maigret finds a body, and Madame Maigret, whose patience is inexhaustible, must have had to eat the skate with black butter alone, if indeed she found any.

In Maigret Goes to School, the Inspector takes an interest in a murder in a small community near the coast simply because he hopes to eat oysters there. Alas, he arrives during the neap tides, when oysters are not available. (Don’t ask me. I have no idea what that means, and neither did Maigret when he was given the news. Apparently during certain kinds of ocean tides, oysters and mussels are not gathered or eaten.)

And the drinking, my dear, the drinking. White wine is for the morning. Just to get going or to obliterate the taste of bad coffee. Then one has a bottle of wine at lunch. Calvados in the late afternoon (well, Calvados any time it’s offered), and no end of libations all evening. There’s a funny scene in Maigret and the Headless Corpse in which Maigret and a provincial lawyer who has a crucial story to tell make a night of it with brandy. The following morning, Maigret wakes up with an unaccustomed headache, and for Maigret, that is saying something.

All of which is to say that what Simenon may have intended as background comes to the fore when I read the novels. The details give me quite explicable pleasure.

The plots are sometimes straightforward whodunnits that start with a body and end with the identity of the murderer, but some are “what-on-earth-is-going-on?” stories that draw you along in puzzlement (in Maigret Hesitates, the murder doesn’t occur until two-thirds of the way through the book). Maigret’s methods would not, of course, pass muster in real-life policing, but that’s the thing about fiction. You can get away with…well, nobody gets away with murder in traditional crime fiction, but detectives get away with the most unorthodox approaches to solving crimes.

None of the novels are more than 200 pages long. A perfect length for someone recuperating from Covid or undertaking a journey. Given the level of compression, the detail is sometimes sketched in, as in this rapid-fire description in Maigret in Exile, when Maigret is at a train station in a rush and needs to send a message.

A brasserie. A fat cashier. A railway timetable. A well-chilled glass of beer. “Could you bring me some writing paper and a ham sandwich… oh, and another beer!” (p. 79)

Imagine calling for writing paper in a modern railway station today. Imagine getting a well-chilled glass of beer.

The unravelling of each mystery involves a back story. The past is always present. The story is often told to Maigret accompanied by generous amounts of drink and, if the speaker is a man, a great deal of tobacco as well. After one long session over port and pipes, “The air was so thick with smoke it was almost impossible to breathe.” (Maigret in Exile, p. 77)

The stories are of affairs, betrayals, losses, estrangements, buried secrets, thwarted ambitions, and a range of passions. Sometimes the perpetrator is a sad soul more sinned against than sinning; sometimes he or she is a respected member of society who conceals a dreadful secret behind an appealing façade.

But the stories always end at the point at which Maigret knows who did what, how, and why, and hands the case over to the examining magistrate (juge d’instruction). The guilty party may or may not pay his or her debt to society in the end; but that is not Maigret’s (or the reader’s) concern. The point is to understand. What happens in the justice system is another matter entirely.

It’s flu season. I recommend laying in a stock of Vitamin C, chicken soup (or skate with black butter if you can get any), and Simenon novels to get through it all.

***

Text by Philippa Campsie. Photograph of Canal St-Martin by Philippa Campsie. All other images from Wikimedia Commons. The statue of Maigret is by Pieter d’Hont and stands in a park in Delfzijl in The Netherlands.

*One blogger argues that the inspiration for the Brasserie Dauphine was actually the Café Restaurant Aux Trois Marchés around the corner from the Quai des Orfèvres on the rue de Harlay. It is now gone.

**The crime in this novel takes place in the canal near Epernay, but the photograph is not of the canal at all, although at first glance it seems to be. And it’s not Paris; the roofs are all wrong. I was curious, as always, and took a closer look. After a few hours of hunting, I discovered that it is the Quai Ste-Catherine in Honfleur, at the mouth of the Seine. The houses in the photograph are still there.