This week I finished reading all of the stories in Maigret's Christmas, a collection of stories by Georges Simenon. The book is 405 pages long and only consists of nine stories, so some of them are very long (for a short story).
However the four stories I read this week are comparatively short:
- "The Most Obstinate Customer in the World" (36 pages)
- "Death of a Nobody" (34 pages)
- "Sale by Auction" (15 pages)
- "The Man in the Street" (14 pages)
Of those stories listed above, my favorite story is "The Man in the Street", the shortest story in the book.
The story begins with these two paragraphs:
The four men were packed close together in the taxi. Paris was in the grip of frost. At half-past seven in the morning, the city looked leaden, and the wind drove powdery rime against the ground.
The thinnest of the four men, on a folding seat, had a cigarette stuck to his lower lip and handcuffs on his wrists. The biggest of them, a heavy-jawed man in a thick overcoat and a bowler hat, was smoking a pipe and watching the railings of the Bois du Boulogne race past.
The man in the bowler hat smoking a pipe is, of course, Maigret. He is taking the man in handcuffs to take part in a reconstruction of a crime in a park. A man was shot through the heart as he walked home through the park at night. The reconstruction has been written up in the newspaper in hopes of enticing the real killer to come and watch.
Several onlookers at the scene are followed and two of those are questioned. Only one man continues to evade the police who are following him. This leads to a cat-and-mouse game where the man is followed for days through the streets of Paris. Maigret personally handles much of the tailing, hoping to force the man to lead the police back to his home.
I have previously read and discussed:
"Maigret's Christmas", the first story in the book. It is lengthy for a short story, 60 pages in this collection. It was first published in France in 1951.
"Seven Small Crosses in a Notebook", which is also about 60 pages.
The last story in the book, "Maigret in Retirement", which was 105 pages long. It has been published alone, as Maigret is Angry.
I have pointed out my favorite stories in this book. Only a few of the nine stories are related to Christmas. However, all of the stories in this book are well worth reading.
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Publisher: Harcourt, Inc., 1976
Length: 405 pages
Format: Trade paperback
Setting: France
Genre: Mystery
Source: Purchased at the Planned Parenthood Book Sale, 2021.
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