When I took my recently finished Japanese mystery novels back to the library, I picked up more books, including a Maigret novel by Simenon, into which I had dipped my toes a year or two back. I blasted through it over the weekend.
Simenon and Maigret provide their own flavor of fulfillment. The most purely procedural of novels, there aren't typically huge and dramatic reversals or surprises. Their pleasingness inheres very much in the neatness of the world in which they function, in Maigret's ability to logically work through human-sized puzzles and make his way to a conclusion, all the while dipping into the pleasures of France. A beer here, a recollection of his country house there, a walk on the beach. Oddly, more like the Scandinavian fictions of Henning Mankell or Stieg Larsson (in which the detectives are always eating and drinking generic "sandwiches" and "coffee") there is little descriptive elaboration of Maigret's pleasures. We don't learn too much about what he eats, though his wife does once make him a nice coq au vin. So it's not really like he's one of the sensualist mystery writers, the greatest of which may be Qiu Xialong. Still, one catches the groove of France. At least I did, but I also took the time to look up on Google Maps the places he daydreams about and travels to, just for a little taste of France.
Ultimately, the pleasure of Simenon's world inheres in its extreme orderliness. Not only does everything return to where it belongs, evidence of a monde bien fait which is common to all mystery novels, it never really gets too far out of joint to start with.
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