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Maigret Meets a Milord Omnibus

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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.

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.

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.

Included in this Omnibus are three of the first four 'Inspector Maigret' books (more like novellas) that Simenon wrote in 1931. They are both a police procedural as well as a murder mystery. They evoke a time between the two world wars that are seldom written about. You can feel the undercurrents of the French when they speak about the Germans or the Russians and still feel the 'grittiness' that followed the end of WW1.

Maigret is a large man for his times, he never smiles or laughs and sometimes will muse about his time in the 'trenches'. He knows the effect his size has on people and is not afraid to use it to intimidate witnesses or to get what he wants. His pipe is part of his hand and mouth and seldom found in his pocket. He is the kind of man who when he stands in front of you demands respect and attention to what he wants. Even before he announces that he is an 'Inspector of Police' people know that he has authority and will use it.

There are three stories included in this collections: 'Crime at Lock 14' which was the story in which he was introduced. It is a story of love, hurt and abandonment, and the ending is quite unexpected. 'Maigret and the 100 Gibbets' presents a problem to Maigret that comes from his constant need to understand why things happen. It is very much influenced by Edgar Allen Poe and the ending is 'Poe-ish' in style. 'The Strange Case of Pietr the Lett' hinges on finding out how one man can be in so many places at the same time, but never really there. The criminal is from that part of Europe that has undergone huge upheavals because of the end of WW1, and the break-up of the Russian Empire.

You have to keep in mind, the 'times' these stories are written in, they are post-WW1 Europe, that has been two years into the "Great Depression". Life is hard and most people see no future, just day to day drudgery and maybe starvation or life on the streets. At the same time, 'The Rich' are so far above the average person or worker to make them almost invisible. Money is power and people fear those who have it and know how to use its' power.