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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sombre evocation of a long-vanished way of life.,
This review is from: Maigret Meets a Milord Omnibus (Mass Market Paperback)
This title is an English invention, unhappily signalling a facetiousness absent from a sombre Simenon story about double murder, decdence, broken lives and betrayal. A literal translation from the French is 'The Carter Of The 'Providence'', but perhaps that was seen as too leading, even if it was Simenon's choice; another alternative, 'The Crime At Lock 14' is the most satisfying, centring on the important aspect of the novel: place. 'Milord' is set in that strange, marginal, now obsolete inter-war world of canal barges, perhaps most familiar from contemporary films of the period, such as 'Boudu Saved From Drowning' or 'L'Atalante'. Indeed, the star of those films, Michel Simon, would have been an obvious choice to play the main non-Migret character in any film of this book, the carter Jean, a taciturn giant whose face and tattooed body are buried in a mass of hirsute overgrowth, a man who sleeps in dumb animal warmth with his horses in the barge stable, and into whose eyes Maigret can't decide whether to read imbecility or the keenest intelligence.A beautiful, rich, well-dressed woman is found strangled between two sleeping carters in the tavern stable at Dizy, Lock 14. She is the wife of an elderly English aristocrat, disgraced Colonel Lampson, who is sailing along the canal tribuatry of the Marne on his luxury yacht The Southern Cross with his sleazy but charming companion Willy Marco, and his fat Chilean mistress. Despite his bearing and stiff-upper-lip, the Colonel conducts regular drunken orgies on board his yacht, and tolerated his wife's affair with Marco. The other principal boat in the story is the huge barge The Providence, run by a small, timid skipper, his garrulous, kindly wife and the carter Jean. Simenon characterises barge-life as a kind of shadow-world adjacent to, but unknown to, normal life around it, with its own codes, customs and language. Although these are floating homes, not tied to any one place and potentially unstable, their slow, regular movements up and down the river, and the rules they must abide by are as rigid, claustrophobic and monotonous as any settler's. But Simenon brilliantly captures the sense of a shifting communal life, competitive (the dense traffic on a small stretch of water means much jostling for pole position), but full of cameraderie and good humour, helping out friends in trouble, carrying messages from relatives, tipping canal-side officials. For a rooted outsider like Maigret, this world seems enchanted, his inability to crack the case matched by a terrible sense of suspension hanging over the twilit realm - it is only by breaking out of it, asserting his mobility by bicycle, that he can regain his detective prowess. Before that, he learns many fascinating facts about the mechanics of barge life, as well as its drabness and colour, its hierarchies of boats and petty bendings of the law, the land men, women and buildings who service it (lock-keepers, tavern- and shop-owners); a group world of work and routine in which transgressive individual desire can have the direst consequences. The way Simenon himself, like a narrative elastic band, suspends the tension, allowing us to soak in the character and atmosphere, before accelerating the suspense and action, is so gripping, this must count as an exceptional early Maigret.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent stuff,
By A Customer
This review is from: Maigret Meets a Milord Omnibus (Mass Market Paperback)
One of the very best Maigrets, in my opinion, and I've read most of them. This one is particularly memorable for its brilliantly evocative atmosphere.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the best Maigret's novel,
By ED (France, Normandy) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Maigret Meets a Milord Omnibus (Mass Market Paperback)
Read this book is a like a journey in the past (the firties) in the sailor's world and in the passion.The atmosphere is splendid, the characters are interesting. The story is superb. Read it you will not waste your time.
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