A Maigret Christmas and Other Stories
by Georges Simenon
(Translated by David Coward)
A book review
As I write, we’re now well into December and
some of my reader friends have taken to social media to post photos of Christmas
trees built of dangerously teetering piles of books like some wintry version of
Jenga. I don’t really see the point. Don’t
get me wrong – you know I love reading and I love Christmas just as much. But surely, the best way to enjoy the season
in a literary way is to curl up with a book, ideally Christmas-themed, and a hot
mug of mulled wine? Surely a book in the
hand is worth a tree of them?
Penguin’s A Maigret Christmas and Other Stories
is just the type of book I have in mind.
This volume brings together three Simenon stories with a Christmas
theme, in a new translation by David Coward. The title of the collection might
be slightly misleading – of the three tales, only the first features Simenon’s
famous creation. On Christmas Day, Maigret is visited at his apartment by two
neighbours with a mystery on their hands – a little girl claims to have seen
Father Christmas in her room. Given that Santa has also deemed it fit to pull
up a couple of floorboards, it seems unlikely that the night visitor is the
real McCoy. Maigret solves the enigma without moving much from his home, thanks
to nifty brainwork, judicious phone calls and a little help from his friends
and colleagues.
The protagonist of the second story – Seven Crosses in a Notebook – is a humble policeman who has spent his career away from the limelight, manning a police station’s switchboard and keeping a list of the crimes carried out in the French capital. One Christmas, he finds himself thrust into the midst of an investigation, one which concerns his closest family. A boy is chasing a murderer across the streets of Paris – or perhaps it’s the other way round – and by the time the Police find them, someone might be dead. This story is actually better than the Maigret title piece – it is, in effect, a finely-crafted and well-paced mini-thriller. It also has almost Dickensian undertones as it brings us face-to-face with the “other” Christmas: that of the lonely and the downtrodden, that of the workers who need to spend Christmas night awake and away from their families, that of the poor who can barely afford to buy presents for their children.
This “social” subtext is also a central element in The Little Restaurant in Les Ternes (A Christmas Story for Grown-Ups). On Christmas night, two women witness a suicide in a little bar. One is Long Tall Jeanne, a prostitute and cynical woman of the world. The other is Martine, a young girl who happens to come from a town close to Jeanne’s birthplace and who is alone in Paris for reasons we do not learn. The women, shaken by the evening’s events, go out into the night. Jeanne, almost on an impulse, follows Martine, determined to save her from the clutches of dubious men who might take advantage of her. Nothing much happens in this story, but it’s an interesting psychological study. We are never sure what fuels Jeanne’s actions – is it a sense of sisterly affection, is it nostalgia for an innocence which she has lost, or a sense of jealousy towards a girl who is younger, fresher, more attractive?
Part of the pleasure in reading this collection is derived from the atmosphere of a retro Paris, where people still write letters, and even telephones are a luxury. A word of warning though – some of the attitudes portrayed are out of date as well. For instance, in the age of #MeToo, the image of Maigret lounging about in a dressing gown whilst his wife frets about serving him Christmas breakfast in bed, might raise a few eyebrows. But this is part of the package – a package which is, on the whole, très jolie.
Kindle Edition, 214 pages
Published November 2nd 2017 by Penguin (first published 1951)
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