Maigret and the Headless Corpse by Georges Simenon is the 47th book in the Maigret series, where a man’s dismembered body is found in a canal and only Maigret can uncover the killer. Maigret and the Headless Corpse was the 47th mystery Georges Simenon wrote about the Chief Superintendent of the Paris Police, and it might…
The Night at the Crossroads by Georges Simenon is the seventh book in the Maigret series—a sensational tale of deceit and back-stabbing in an isolated community. The Night at the Crossroads was Simenon’s seventh book in the Maigret series, released in the insanely prolific year of 1931. After the publication of the first book in the…
The Grand Banks Café by Georges Simenon is the eighth book in the Inspector Maigret series, a gripping novel set in an insular fishing community. There’s a subgenre of mystery fiction that we might call the Interrupted Vacation. This plotline finds our hero on holiday when—wouldn’t you know it—a body pops up, and the detective…
Maigret, Lognon and the Gangsters by Georges Simenon is the 39th book in the Maigret series, where Maigret goes up against a group of American gangsters and finds he just might have met his match. Maigret, Lognon and the Gangsters (aka Maigret and the Killers) was the novel that made me a Maigret fan. I…
The Belgian novelist Georges Simenon was a monster. I’m not talking about his failures as a human being, which apparently included being a faithless husband, a wartime opportunist, and a problematic father. No, I mean, he was a monster in the sense that he worked like a beast. Over the course of his decades-long career,…
To play a convincing Sherlock Holmes you need to be long and lean. To play a convincing Poirot you need to be… well… David Suchet. To play Georges Simenon’s great detective Jules Maigret, the requirements aren’t as specific. That’s one of the great things about Maigret. We know he’s a gent who enjoys a pipe…
In spring, is there anywhere more seductive than France? In case you're itching for some armchair travel, here are links with something to fill any francophile crime fan with joie de vivre: Looking for a simply huge list of reading recommendations? From different styles and eras, here's an assortment of thirty different books set in…
I’ve always found Police Inspector Jules Maigret to be a comfortable, comforting specimen of sleuth—comfortable in his own skin, comforting in his routines. Spawned in 1931 by Belgium-born author Georges Simenon, the much-chronicled Maigret plied his trade in the streets of Paris for a hundred and three adventures (75 novels and 23 short stories, with…
The Twenty-Year Death by Ariel S. Winter (available August 7th) is a single book made up of three crime novels told across decades—from the years 1941, 1951, and 1961—each capturing the style and setting of a giant of crime writing from the era: Georges Simenon, Raymond Chandler, and Jim Thompson. The three stories together tell…
It is commonly said that truth is stranger than fiction, and while I won’t go quite that far, I have to admit that the truth can be quite strange at times. Criminals can be extremely creative, with the most creative often being the most successful. As G.K. Chesterton wrote in his Father Brown story “The…
