Maigret Gets Angry by Georges Simenon

The pleasure of reading Simenon's Inspector Maigret mysteries is that each has a distinct tone; this one dealing with the momentum of grief and repression as a family tries to maintain its secrets.

In the second summer of Maigret's retirement, he is content shelling peas in his wooden clogs and farmer's shirt at a summer house in Meung-sur-Loire, when an elderly woman enters the garden, mistaking him for the gardener. Bernadette Amorelle is requesting the clever detective to look into the death of her teenage granddaughter Monita near their riverside estate in Orsenne. Being found dead in the Seine is different from committing suicide, and she asks him to find out what really happened.

The Amorelle and Campois families run quarries and tugboats on the Seine, merged when the two Amorelle daughters married the two brothers who run the Campois company. Monita was the daughter of Charles and Aimee, and when Maigret arrives, he finds the other brother, Ernest, an old childhood classmate. Ernest always made Maigret's hackles rise, and his sardonic manner, enhanced by wealth, is still odious. Ernest's youngest son, George-Henry, grew up with Monita and is now, for some reason, kept locked in his room. Maigret dines with the family at the sterile mansion—the family spying on each other, and no one speaking the truth. Only when George-Henry escapes from his second-story window do the cracks begin to form. To stop people from talking, Maigret is offered two hundred thousand to leave this matter alone. Why was he poking into their private business? And where is George-Henry?

As Maigret moves steadily into understanding each of them, the mystery is close to being solved. He even gets the chance to return to his old Paris headquarters to visit colleagues Lucas and Janvier, who are amused to see him as he was in his heyday. This twenty-sixth Detective Inspector Maigret mystery has one focus, seen through to justice at the end. As usual, the writing is crisp, entertaining, and always original.

1947 / Tradeback / 160 pages