MAIGRET IN COURT by GEORGES SIMENON

Chief Inspector Maigret of the Quai des Orfèvres is, the first and, I would argue, still one of the best of the series of tired yet effective police detectives now known to us in the form of Donna Leon's Commisario Brunetti (Venice), Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano (Sicily) and going back, Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen (Venice), Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse (Oxford) and the estimable Van der Walk (Amsterdam) authored by Nicolas Freeling. There is also, of course, a growing band of Scandinavian models.

The backdrop to the Maigret stories, the first eleven of which according to the bibliography I have in front of me, made an appearance in 1931, is usually although not inevitably Paris, and the regular themes include almost consistent pipe-smoking not undertaken quite as furiously as Holmes was apt to do in an earlier generation, lunch (and dinner) at home prepared by the laconic Madam Maigret, and the failures of the heating system at the Quai des Orfèvres frequently leading to heat in summer and no heat in winter.

Unlike some of his more modern police procedural counterparts, Maigret usually has the support of senior members of the police department and of the judiciary whenever his methods shift towards unorthodoxy and Maigret in Court is a case in point.

The story has an unusual structure.  It begins with a long session in court focused on Maigret's evidence taken in the course of investigating a double murder.  The accused is a quiet frame maker, the deceased his aunt and her young ward, the motive robbery.  Despite the fact the case appears straightforward, it slowly becomes clear that Maigret is unsatisfied and has, via earlier chats with prosecution and judge, gained the opportunity to introduce evidence that casts strong doubt on what, pre-trial looked to be an obvious - guilty - verdict.  And, indeed, the accused is acquitted but surprisingly doesn't look too pleased with the outcome.

The tale then moves into a phase of standard police procedure with a platoon of detectives following the principal characters, in Paris, outside Paris and in the south of France.

It is here that Simenon's genius as a writer of fiction (and not just detective fiction) is displayed.  To Maigret, the real solution of the case is fairly obvious and has been so since the beginning of the trial. However for the frame maker and the reader, the answer is slower to underline itself although the former moves to resolution much more quickly than the latter (at least this reader).

At the end, we find the solution was clear and had always been, given the attested facts.  There is no Poirot-like twist here, no last minute fresh evidence of the kind so frequently revealed by Perry Mason.  Simenon is more subtle and less dramatic and as the last page is turned, one is left with a sense of the inevitability of Greek drama where what begins with death must also, as 'the Kindly Ones' take a hand, end with death.

Maigret in Court, published in 1960, is not the best Maigret novel I have read nor is it the one that I would recommend as an introduction to the oeuvre.  It is, however, to be commended for its construction and moreover for the fact it is a clever take on an ancient narrative tradition.



Maigret in Court (Maigret aux Assises), first published 1960; my edition - Penguin 2005 (first Penguin pub 1965)       

MONSIEUR PAIN by ROBERTO BALAÑO

Even the title of this novel is uncertain if not surreal.  In the author's 'Preliminary Note', Bolaño tells us the following: "Many years ago, in 1981 or 1982, I wrote Monsieur Pain.  Its fate has been haphazard and erratic.  Under the title The Elephant Path it won the Felix Urubayen prize for a short novel awarded by Toledo City Council.  Not long before it had been shortlisted in another provincial competition under a different title."

If this information is true it is at best confusing since, at least to my reading, there is no reason whatsoever why this story set in Paris at the time of the Spanish Civil War but harking back to events 10 or 15 years earlier, should ever have been called The Elephant Path or, indeed The Elephant Track (although this may be a translation issue) which is the title of the so-called 'Epilogue for Voices' which closes the book .

I say "if it is true" without wishing to doubt Bolaño, but he does use three first person characters.  The first, as quoted, presumably his own voice; the second through the main body of the narrative, the eponymous Monsieur Pain a survivor of the First World War horrors of Verdun and an amateur practitioner of 'animal magnetism'; and then an unknown 'I' in the Epilogue who provides brief biographical notes on some of the characters - I'm tempted to call them 'inmates' - of the story.

For example (from the Epilogue) and talking of how, post World War II, Monsieur Pain came to work at a cabaret: "How did Monsieur Pain come to work there? I guess it was after he lost his war veteran's pension at the beginning of the Occupation.  So it must have been in September, October or November of 1940 that he turned up at the House of the Old Companions looking absolutely pitiful, as if he'd gone for a month without eating so much as a mouthful of bread; Gandhi was plump by comparison.  I was fifteen at the time and working as the cabaret's errand boy."

Other reviewers have described Monsieur Pain as containing elements of Poe, Borges and even Chandler.  Borges, certainly, but I failed to find the horrors Poe would have imposed and there is none of the pace nor humour of Chandler in this story of an lone 48 year-old tangentially involved in the death, either by natural causes or as the result of a conspiracy, of Monsieur Vallejo - a poor poet.  Characters shift in an out of vision.  At one point Pierre Pain declares his love for Madame Reynaud, the widow of a man whose life Pain failed to save on his first and only attempt (prior to Vallejo) to use Mesmeric forces to save life in terminal decline. 

But Pain does not declare his love to Madame Reynaud but does so when talking to Monsieur Rivette, an aging sage who may, or may not know what's going on but is certainly not party to the suspicions that Pierre Curie, Marie Curie's husband, was killed by intent rather than by accident when run over by a carriage on the rue Dauphine in 1906.  These are told to Pain by the enigmatic Aloysius Pleumeur-Bodou (a.k.a. Maurice Feval) when talking about a friend, Terzeff, film footage of whom, working in a laboratory, has been grafted into a later movie, Actualité, that Pleumeur-Bodou has seen many times but still includes sections, he says, that he may never understand.    

At its best, Monsieur Pain occupies the interstices between sleeping and waking or between sanity and madness.  Pain dreams frequently and bizarrely; much of the conversation between Pain and Pleumeur-Bodu takes place in a cinema where Actualité is playing and is intercut with descriptions of, and dialogue from, the movie; the Clinique Arago, where Vallejo is dying, is a Escher construction of irrelevant staircases and half-finished rooms with non-sequential numbering; a warehouse where Pain spends the night in near total darkness is an unexplained repository "full of useless junk, but at first I couldn't determine the nature of the objects or the uses they might once have had."  And then we have the two half-described Spaniards who threaten Pain, bribe him (to stop treating Vallejo) and are then relegated to walk-on parts never again fully spotlit. Underlying all this are recurrent themes of drunkeness, rain, darkness and shadows.

The book that this story most strongly brought to my mind is Ishiguro's, The Unconsoled  which itself was, as I recall, described by The Times as a work of either genius or madness.  Exactly.

Monsieur Pain, first published 2010.  2011 UK edition by Picador 134pp. 

LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES by JEAN COCTEAU

I know it sounds like a bizarre thing to say, but I had the consistent feeling, through Les Enfants Terribles, that I was reading an Enid Blyton story gone bad. 

This, like much of Blyton, is a tale of children without adults.  From the outset, Paul's and Elisabeth's mother is ill.  She then quickly dies and other adults occupy only minor roles in what is essentially a modern take on a Greek tragedy written, so I gather, during Cocteau's cold-turkey period in 1929 when he was breaking a serious opium addiction.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, the plot is strange.  A tale first of two, then three then four children, all orphans, who live together - closely together - first in Paul's and Elisabeth's mother's Paris house and subsequently in a house owned by Elisabeth's momentary husband who dies in a car crash immediately after the ceremony leaving her to understand marriage as a series of meetings with lawyers.

A normal English version of the title is Children of The Game and it is The Game, a mental journey played in the interstices between sleeping and waking which drives the first three children (including Gérard, Paul's schoolfriend) through their later youth and adolescence.  The Game requires mementoes, treasures, a need to be together and to create a Blytonesque camp in the bedroom (a room seldom left - at least by Paul).  

A key treasure is a photograph of Dargelos, with whom Paul was obsessed while at school and whose stonefilled snowball,  which strikes Paul in the chest, results in Paul never attending school again.  But Dargelos doesn't fade; Agatha - a nascent mannequin who joins the group in the second-half of the book - turns out to be the spitting image of Dargelos re-establishing the obsession and unwittingly tightening the incestuous coils which tie Paul and Elisabeth together.

The pair are indeed terrible, consistently striking each other - even on a rare holiday in public - making faces at all around them, stealing, undertaking consistent verbal attacks and yet, at the same time, bathing together, defending each other, indeed loving each other.

This combination of unrequited incest and the reappearance, at least by letter, of Dargelos, forces the end.  Gérard is always in love with Elisabeth and later, Agatha falls in love with Paul and he with her although neither gets the chance to tell the other as Elisabeth, turned Greek Fury, intervenes to block such expressions of feeling and to persuade Agatha and Gérard that they're the natural (if unhappy) pairing.

When the four reunite after the wedding, Dargelos, the uncaring or malicious god of the piece, has sent Paul poison knowing Paul to be fascinated by such symbols of mortality.  Eventually, Paul takes the poison and Elisabeth shoots herself.  Bring down the final curtain.   

Written very quickly and gaining from that, Les Enfants Terribles, is a product of the febrile 20s when societal rules had been destroyed by the First World War.  It is a shocking tale magnificently constructed. 

Les Enfants Terribles, Penguin (my copy 1973) - translated by Rosamund Lehmann