Customer Reviews

Maigret Afraid

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A small, quiet French village dominated by a sense of social status is well described in this novel by Georges Simenon. The book has an amazing sense of atmosphere, of believable characters and situations, of the dark world in the pouring rain in which the three victims die... The moral of the book is concerned with the social statuses of the characters, of how the normal people despise the aristocracy, how the aristocracy despise the aristocracy and the citizens. The book is, like all Simenon, well-written and believable, even in the most fantastic situations, dragging the reader onwards and onwards, unable to put the book down.

Georges Simenon wrote dozens of books in the Inspector Maigret series--most of them very good. But there has to be a clunker once in a while, and "Maigret Afraid" is such a miss, in my opinion. In this torpid tale of small town murder, Maigret is a chance onlooker, and most of the (non)action takes place around him. To his credit, author Simenon has very successfully given the fictional town (in the Vendee) a convincingly dull atmosphere, with dull and unappealing residents. But the lifelessness of the place and people goes too far. Maigret, who has stopped briefly to say hello to a school chum, can hardly wait to skip the berg, and yet he hangs on to watch his old friend (the town magistrate) bungle one aspect of the three-murder case after another. Simenon's familiar injection of working class/bourgeois tension completely fizzles here and certainly adds nothing to the story.

There are plenty of wonderful Maigret books available and they're mostly quite entertaining. Not this one. Avoid it.

Don't be misled by the title. Maigret has not turned coward. He's afraid not for himself but for others who seem to be headed for trouble...

Maigret attends a police conference that makes him feel out of date. On the way home, he visits his old friend Julien Chabot, who's the Examining Magistrate for the little village of Fontenay-le-Compte. Another aging official like himself!

To the embarrassment of his friend, and the delight of many of the townspeople, Maigret walks into a tricky murder case.

The local people have a strong dislike for the leading family of the town and have pretty much decided that the murderer is among the town worthies. Maigret must work around all factions to get at the truth of the case. And it's not even his case!

In some ways this book feels dated. For example, Maigret is strangely tolerant of a young man who beats his mistress! But time spent reading Simenon is ever without its pleasures if you can put up with occasional displays of political incorrectness.