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A review by furfff
Maigret in Court by Georges Simenon
3.0
Not the best one in the series by any stretch, with a lot of overt problematic aspects (at least for me) and yet... it's a really interesting one that, if rearchitected, could have been great. There's even something in the bones of this one that I could see being lifted by another modern writer and turned into some noir classic. That said...
It's a weird book structurally, with far too much telling and not enough showing, with the first half of Maigret being called on to testify as an expert in court, and then in the second half with Maigret playing armchair quarterback on the phone, sending members of the force to do his investigation while he gets exhaustive recaps on the phone. As the plot unfolds, there's a lot of rich stuff here, in terms of the double murder itself, as well as the specific circumstances that seem to exonerate some and implicate... who? But there's a smaller story here between the brothers and the wife of the one that feels underexplored (and again, ripe for revisiting by some other author).
The Maigret episodes I tend to like the best are the ones where the case feels almost incidental to the smaller opportunities that are taken to evoke landscape or a character's interior or (as Simenon often excels at) both. This book is fairly light on the further shading of character. In fact, the final page's attempt to suggest the degree to which all of this affected Maigret himself feels... unearned. So what I do like about this book isn't the character development and isn't even the actual plot, but the idea of the plot was super intriguing.
So while this one doesn't get as high a rating as others from me, I will continue to recall it for the interesting "ideas of a novel" that it raises, even though it itself doesn't entirely succeed.
It's a weird book structurally, with far too much telling and not enough showing, with the first half of Maigret being called on to testify as an expert in court, and then in the second half with Maigret playing armchair quarterback on the phone, sending members of the force to do his investigation while he gets exhaustive recaps on the phone. As the plot unfolds, there's a lot of rich stuff here, in terms of the double murder itself, as well as the specific circumstances that seem to exonerate some and implicate... who? But there's a smaller story here between the brothers and the wife of the one that feels underexplored (and again, ripe for revisiting by some other author).
The Maigret episodes I tend to like the best are the ones where the case feels almost incidental to the smaller opportunities that are taken to evoke landscape or a character's interior or (as Simenon often excels at) both. This book is fairly light on the further shading of character. In fact, the final page's attempt to suggest the degree to which all of this affected Maigret himself feels... unearned. So what I do like about this book isn't the character development and isn't even the actual plot, but the idea of the plot was super intriguing.
So while this one doesn't get as high a rating as others from me, I will continue to recall it for the interesting "ideas of a novel" that it raises, even though it itself doesn't entirely succeed.