Pietr the Latvian, which was originally published in serial form in French in 1930, is the first of Georges Simenon’s novels featuring Detective Chief Inspector Maigret, and is the first of Simenon’s novels that I’ve read. It’s no cosy mystery: it’s a gritty police procedural (albeit light on procedure) that moves back and forth between Paris and the port town of Fécamp, where Maigret goes in search of clues. Maigret is meant to be trailing Pietr the Latvian, said to be the head of an organized crime ring that specializes in fraud, but when the train that Pietr was on arrives in Paris, there’s a dead body on it, a man matching Pietr’s description who was shot at point-blank range. But by the time the body’s discovered, Maigret has already seen another man matching Pietr’s description leave the station. So what’s going on, exactly?
The pleasure in this book, for me, wasn’t so much in the plot/crime as in the atmosphere (uh, other than the atmosphere of anti-Semitism), and of course Maigret himself, who’s a big taciturn guy with a fondness for beer, sandwiches, his pipe, and the warmth of the stove in his office, though he keeps getting dragged away from it. I like descriptive passages like this:
It was November and it was getting dark. Through the window he could see a branch of the Seine, Place Saint-Michel, and a floating wash-house, all in a blue shroud speckled by gas lamps lighting up one after the other. (3)
Or this:
Wind and rain blew in squalls over the platforms of Gare du Nord despite the monumental glass canopy overhead. Several panes had blown out and lay in shards on the railway tracks. The lighting wasn’t working properly. People huddled up inside their clothes. (4)
Or this:
The Grands Boulevards looked as scruffy as they always did at 11 pm. The shafts of rain lit by the streetlamps were thinning out. The audience spewed out of a cinema which then switched off its lighting, brought in its billboards, and shut its doors. People stood in line at a bus stop, beneath a green striped lamp-post. When the bus came there was an argument, because there were no number-tags left in the ticket machine. (58)
And oh, Maigret. Some of the book’s action takes place at a fancy hotel where the man from the train station is staying; the manager is less than thrilled to have a big police detective in his lobby: “Maigret persisted in being a big black unmoving stain amidst the gilding, the chandeliers, the comings and goings of silk evening gowns, fur coats and perfumed, sparkling silhouettes” (15). At another point, in the same hotel, there’s this: “But Maigret had already moved off and was standing all clumsy and awkward in the middle of the lobby. He looked like a tourist in a historic church trying to work out without the help of a guide what there was to inspect” (85).
Leave a Reply