Intricate plot revealed piece by piece
Spurred by the TV series, Browsers bookshop owner Rachel Pope goes in search of the original.
I thoroughly enjoyed the TV adaptations of these Maigret novels and I hope you caught them, too. I thought they were worth watching for the clothes and the cars alone, let alone being excellent thrillers.
A very serious Rowan Atkinson played Maigret and I had his picture in my head whilst reading this novel, which was one of the ones adapted. The eponymous crossroads are the location around which the author cleverly constructed the entire novel.
Monsieur Goldberg, a diamond merchant from Antwerp, is murdered there, all the characters in the book live there, and the comings and goings through the crossroads are relevant as well. There is a garage/petrol station located there, as well as a grand but tired home inhabited by a Danish man and his sister and another home where an insurance agent lives with his wife.
This novel has it all, including gun fights and car chases, some even getting up to 60mph!!
Essentially, Maigret uncovers a racket where all but one of the characters are involved. It’s quite an intricate plot and a delight to have it revealed piece by piece. You discover who the murderer is in the very last pages – and rightly so.
However, I think the author was so caught up in the intricacies of the ‘‘racket’’ that we were not afforded a real look as to why this particular character committed the murder. It’s one thing to make money from crime, but it’s quite another to murder.
At the end of the book, you realise this man is going to swing for it and it did give me a bit of a jolt.
Maigret is a shadowy figure. You don’t get much personal information about him. His pipe is an ever-present prop used to accentuate atmosphere or dialogue. I assume as you read the series you glean personal information bit by bit.
Of no particular relevance, but because I found it horrifying, I’m going to mention a conversation Maigret had with the Danish man. He asked him if he smoked a lot. The answer was, ‘‘In the morning, in bed . . . Perhaps thirty cigarettes while I’m reading . . . ’’
Could there be a worse way to start the day? I confess I did wonder how long it would take to smoke that many cigarettes and a greedy self-indulgent part of me was in awe of how much reading you could get done in that time – every morning!
The novel was published in 1931 and, at a brief 135 pages, it’s a great read for a trip or a long flight. I don’t think its brevity means it’s lacking in any way at all.
Belgian-born but resident in Paris for much of his life, Georges Simenon wrote around 500 novels, apparently being capable of writing 60 to 80 pages per day. He was most famous for his Maigret series, of which there are a considerable number, and is supposedly the sixth most published author in the world.