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… Read more
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… Read more
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… Read more
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… Read more
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… Read more
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… Read more
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… Read more
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… Read more
I don’t know if we can say with certainty that Georges Simenon was the most successful writer of the 20th Century, but he would certainly be a top contender for the title. It wasn’t just that he wrote books that sold well around the world, it was that he churned… Read more
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… Read more
