The Maigret Project (12) The shadow puppet

Penguin Books is currently publishing the entire series of Georges Simenon’s novels starring Inspector Maigret. In "The Maigret Project" I share some observations about each novel. 

Note: as some may notice, episode 11 in this series is missing, because I haven't been able to get my hands on the 11th instalment of the Maigret series yet. So, The two-penny bar will have to wait.

An average Maigret mystery, this one. A businessman is murdered and Maigret discovers that he used to work in the building where his bitter ex-wife lives. Moreover, the murdered man’s estranged son lives in another building, right next to his father’s mistress. Coincidence? ‘Some points became clearer. Others, on the contrary, became muddier, more worrying.’ 

The woman at the centre of The shadow puppet [L’ombre chinoise, 1932] – there’s always a woman! – is not a femme fatale (cf. Maigret #6) or a long-suffering wench who’s had enough (cf. Maigret #5), but a bitter lower-bourgeois bitch: Mrs Martin, the victim’s ex-wife. After receiving her in his Quai des Orfèvres office, Maigret feels the need to open the windows: 

he felt that vague unease one feels when forced to consider certain aspects of life one generally prefers to ignore. (...) ...the conversation with her had left him with a faint feeling of disgust.

The closing chapters feel rushed. A culprit is arrested, mainly because the story is running out of steam. A second culprit conveniently loses his/her mind. And the fact that mistress and son shared a building was, indeed, a mere coincidence. All in all, an enjoyable, even amusing episode in the Maigret series, but instantly forgettable. 

Stray observations: 

• The opening chapter is quite funny, since the concierge who informs Maigret there’s been a murder, insists that the police work as quietly as possible. Elsewhere in the building, Madame de Saint-Marc is giving birth and heaven forbid the bourgeoisie gets disturbed by the murder of a commoner. Just a funny detail? At first, yes, but Simenon turns it into pure atmosphere: ‘Silence, unusual in such situations, was the characteristic of this murder, as was the calmness, the twenty-eight residents all going about their ordinary business oblivious of the body.’ 
• Ever wondered what a 1930s French intellectual looks like? Simenon paints his portrait in chapter 2: ‘Despite the late hour, when Monsieur Philippe arrived, he was impeccably turned out, his dark, well-kempt beard, his hands gloved in grey suede. He was in his forties, the epitome of the serious-minded, well-brought-up-intellectual.’ Give it twenty more years and the fashion style of the Parisian intellectual would take on quite a different appearance. :-) 
• Simenon would revisit the Mrs Martin-character, to far better effect, in his novel Les soeurs Lacroix (1938, translated as Poisoned relations). Specifically he’d paint a picture of people who are reluctant to let go of the source of their unhappiness. Why did Mrs Martin not move out of that building, where she was likely to run into her ex-husband on a daily basis? ‘If only she’d listened to me, we wouldn’t have stayed here’, her husband says – proving Mrs Martin didn’t want to leave her unhappiness behind. The sisters Lacroix, in Poisoned relations, similarly keep on sharing a house, souring each other’s lives for no good reason whatsoever. 

Translated by Ros Schwartz.

Next episode: The Saint-Fiacre affair (to be published in November).