Maigret et le marchand de vin by Georges Simenon

Read: 21 July, 2009

According to my dear ol' mum, bless her French book-reading heart, there's an entire series of Maigret detective novels. For my own part, I've only encountered this one, so I'll have to take her word for it. In this episode, the owner of a wine distribution company has been murdered and Jules Maigret is called in to investigate.

Le marchand de vin is rather different from many of the detective novels I usually read. For one thing, it's an actual detective novel - in that the person doing the investigating is a detective in the police force. This introduces a rather different dynamic than I'm accustomed to. My detectives are usually sucked in to a mystery, often reluctantly, and half the story is trying find some way to convince the authorities to serve justice. But here, Maigret has the benefit of the authorities being on his side, but he's also constrained by this. There are rules to follow, and tactics that are simply off-limits.

I enjoyed how dependent this novel was on conversation. The focus was very little on the discovery of clues, but rather on the interactions between Maigret and his various witnesses and suspects. The whole book reads more like a play than anything else. As a result, character development is emphasized, but also somewhat more subtle. We're rarely told what characters are feeling, but are left to guess based on their verbal responses. This is fairly common in French literature, but I read so little of it that it made for a refreshing change.

As far as the mystery itself goes, it's fairly run-of-the-mill. It's written from a local's perspective, so it doesn't have the charm of otherness that Daphne du Maurier's Don't Look Now had, for example. Maigret is not especially "quirky" like Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe. In other words, there's no gimmick to the story. It's just a plain detective story, albeit of a higher calibre than most. It's well worth the read for fans of the genre, if only for exposure to how good an ordinary detective without some extraordinary selling feature can be.