Maigret's Dead Man by Georges Simenon

Maigret's Dead Man is Georges Simenon's 29th Detecive Inspector Maigret mystery, the longest so far and the most leisurely, taking it's time to tie together several puzzles.

Maigret is contacted throughout the day by an unknown man being pursued through the streets of Paris, frightened he is about to be killed. He is not wrong.

Nondescript in a raincoat and grey hat, he moves from café to bar, each call insisting on speaking with Maigret; the gang of men follows in relay, disappearing when police appear on the street. At two in the morning, his body is dumped from a car in the Place de la Concorde. A single wound with a knife. His face beaten.

It will take a postmortem and fine detection to discover that the man and his wife ran a café. She has disappeared. Maigret's colleague Chevrier and his wife step in and run the café as 'new owners' to see what happens. With mounting tension, the police seek a violent gang who rob elderly farmers and kill their victims. Maigret centers in on four Czech men and a woman, now pregnant by one of them, hiding out in a slum hotel—but who is the brains behind the gang, the one with the wealth of profits? As the gang begins to kill each other off, Maigret discovers how they are related to the dead man, his wife—and the ones who dumped his body, who were not the ones who killed him!

In Simenon's most accomplished mystery so far, Maigret continually moves forward in his dogged style until the obscuring curtain is whisked away and he glimpses the truth. With several threads of mystery, it takes its time for the picture to be completed, but it is entertaining all the way. Simenon never disappoints.

Also known as Maigret's Special Murder, this has been dramatized six times over the years—in Dutch, French, Japanese, and English for BBC Radio and BBC TV. A notable example is the excellent 2016 series Maigret starring Rowan Atkinson.

1948 / Tradeback / 236 pages