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Georges Simenon

A Question of Choice in Noir Fiction

By Gregory Galloway

October 12, 2021

Who’s in control of your life? You? Or someone or something else? It’s a heady question, asked about as long as humans have thought about anything, and it’s at the heart of crime fiction, especially noir. Much of crime fiction is predicated on inevitability (chances are the detective is going to solve the case, order…

Feasting on Murder: A Highly Subjective List of the Top Ten Classic Foodie Mysteries

By Amy Pershing

February 23, 2021

How does one account for the sheer number of mysteries in which food, both for good and evil, features prominently? So prominently that it’s virtually a character itself—or at least a character witness. Perhaps it’s because food (the cooking of it, the eating of it, the sharing of it) offers so many lovely options for…

Review: Maigret and the Headless Corpse by Georges Simenon

By Jake Hinkson

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…

Review: The Night at the Crossroads by Georges Simenon

By Jake Hinkson

February 23, 2018

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…

Review: The Grand Banks Café by Georges Simenon

By Jake Hinkson

January 24, 2018

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…

Review: Maigret, Lognon and the Gangsters by Georges Simenon

By Jake Hinkson

January 10, 2018

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…

Georges Simenon and the Top 6 Maigret Mystery Novels

By Jake Hinkson

January 3, 2018

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,…

Investigate Thyself: Missing Person by France’s Patrick Modiano

By Scott Adlerberg

October 5, 2015

Patrick Modiano’s Missing Person focuses on a private detective, introduced as Guy Roland, who investigates himself. The location is Paris; the time period, the mid-1960s. I say “introduced as Guy Roland,” because from page one of this novel, we comprehend that we are dealing with a detective narrator with little sense of his own identity. “I am nothing,” is…

Voilà: Rowan Atkinson as Jules Maigret

By Leslie Gilbert Elman

September 10, 2015

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…

Fresh Meat: Death in Brittany by Jean-Luc Bannalec

By Scott Adlerberg

June 30, 2015

Death in Brittany by Jean-Luc Bannalec marks the debut of the internationally best-selling procuedural series featuring the coffee-loving Commissaire Georges Dupin who's just relocated from Paris to a quaint coastal town (available June 30, 2015). When it comes to crime, I read noir stuff primarily. Speaking broadly, I read a lot of crime fiction from…

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