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This week Mr Slang writes in praise of Simenon’s great detective: “a very French policeman, compounded of French characteristics and set among the most clichéd of French backgrounds”…

I am reading Maigret. Tout Maigret, since it is (a) Maigret in his entirety, and (b) in French. I am not showing off, it is very easy French. Georges Simenon, the Belgian who created this most French of all detectives (he left an Englishwoman to find a job for one of his fellow-countrymen), alleged that he wrote to a vocabulary of just 2,000 words. I have not counted, but there is certainly a sense of recognition as book follows book and I require decreasing recourse to the dictionary. True or false it is a neat figure, geared like much else in Simenon’s life, to self-aggrandising publicity and the maximising of earnings. Size mattered. The three books written a month, the ten thousand women bedded, all play similar roles. The book production line slowed, though he was truly a phenomenon, and as for the women, someone assessed it as three conquests per day, every day. If you say so, Georges.

I have read four volumes to date, which means 36 consecutive novels. There are five more volumes in the series, which will bring the total to 78, plus one of short stories. It is possible, though perhaps not immediately, that I shall then start again. In time I may start the rest of Simenon, the 100-plus roman durs. If I last.

We know, or Evelyn Waugh told us, that we are born Americans and die French. I did not open a Maigret before I was 60. Perhaps I had exhausted the catalogue of the hard-boiled, gutted it for slang citations and consigned the eviscerated remains to the bin. Perhaps the frenzied pace was tiring me. Perhaps the Commissaire appeals to my dotage. When I moved to Maigret I began with English translations, too many of which are second-rate, and, it turns out, too inventive: what business is it for a translator, especially of so basic a vocabulary, to start adding, subtracting, changing? Yet I found that that this was done, especially prior to the Fifties. So I turned to the French which has the bonus of containing the entire canon. And on I go.

Why do we read Maigret? Not, certainly, for the plot. Like those of Philip Marlowe, Maigret’s investigations do not bear too much analysis. But then I have no interest in plot, the last chapter’s wretched assemblage, the denouement, the explication. Just blame it on the butler. Who cares. What I want is words. As ever.

There is an element, I fear and must admit, whereby one reads for stereotype: an alternative, one hopes a more authentic take on those onanistically popular tales of an ad-man’s sojourn in some ex-pat plague-spot where the Range Rovers have exiled the Citroens and the butcher and baker have been replaced by estate agents whose shop names pun on ‘frog’. Simenon strove quite intentionally to create a very French policeman, compounded of French characteristics and set him among the most clichéd of French backgrounds. The seaside town, the fishing village, the provincial capital –it is remarkable how often this commissioner of the Police Judiciaire works outside Paris – and each set in a world as timeless in its own way as Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle. It is not an idyllic world, nor even a Utopia – blood flows far too copiously – but it is a dream world. Maigret’s France woke up a long time ago. He remains there; and via the stories we – however foolishly – can at least visit.

Another stereotype: the sensuality. Maigret smokes – a pipe stuffed with rough tabac gris – and drinks – white wine, cognac, calvados, various eau de vies and always beer. He eats – blanquette de veau, fricandeau à l’oseille, tarte aux Mirabelle – whether in restaurants or, when he manages to get home, at Madame Maigret’s table, Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking made culinary flesh. He seems uxorious, but few others seem to manage, and Simenon, taking his creation for flesh-and-blood or perhaps a version of himself, hinted that there might have been affairs. The stories have women who would have been worth it. Or perhaps not, since Maigret is above all a soloist. There is the team of colleagues – Lucas, Janvier, Torrence, ‘little Lapointe’, Moers the forensics man – and le patron is father to them all. But he is an absentee father. Like Fred Vargas’s Amsberg, who might justifiably be seen as his modern incarnation, Maigret does as much, even more inside his own head as he does on the street or in his office. His colleagues do not always understand, other than that if left alone, the boss will work things out. The self-proclaimed ‘mender of destinies’, he cannot solve crime without first working out the mentality of its perpetrators.

We read him, as we read the classic hard-boiled heroes, as a class warrior. Devoid of frills and artificiality, he offers respect to neither. Less aggressive than a Marlowe or a Continental Op, brandishing their American egalitarianism, but indomitable in his refusal to bow to privilege, whether of wealth or aristocracy. It is not easy for a man who was the son of the steward of a great chateau and had hierarchy imprinted on his being, but it is done.

And above all we read him because he takes on the role of god. The investigators of detective fiction’s absurdly named ‘Golden Age’ were accountants, totting up their nit-picking lists, their only triumph in the production of the misplaced figure that has momentarily upset society’s calculations. The hard-boiled dicks may play god, with deadly weapon in hand, but they are at best angels, of the avenging sort. Maigret, like Terry Pratchett’s Sam Vimes, at least in his evolved version, is something more. There is the law, Maigret’s ostensible master, but Maigret, empathetic above all, makes his own choices. Not every murderer will end on the guillotine: some, however guilty, will go free. Sometimes one infers that Maigret leaves others to do his job; sometimes, after stepping into a mind and drawing out its motives, he prefers to walk away.

Jean Gabin [above] played him, as was right and proper, but Simenon’s favourite screen ‘Maigret’ was a Briton: Rupert Davies [below]. ‘You are his flesh and bones!’ cried the author. The show launched in 1960 and the series lasted three years. There were complaints that Maigret drank excessively and the Americans, frightened by the lack of moralising, refused to buy it. The BBC, much prevailed upon for a DVD, have yet to come across.

[The video above stars Rupert Davies in ‘Maigret’s Little Joke’. Youtube has the episode in multiple parts, which can be found here.]

image ©Gabriel Green

You can buy Green’s Dictionary of Slang, as well as Jonathon’s more slimline Chambers Slang Dictionary, plus other entertaining works, at his Amazon page. Jonathon also blogs and Tweets.