Maigret and the Coroner (1949) by Georges Simenon.
GoodReads metadata is 176 pages, rated 3.61 by 544 litizens.
Genus: krimi; species Maigret.
Verdict: Fresh though #32 in the series.
While on a busman’s holiday travelling the United States to observe policing, Detective Chief Inspector Maigret finds himself in Tucson (Arizona). Wherever he has gone on this study tour a local law enforcement officer has been assigned to squire him around. While each officer does the duty, none particularly wants to be a tour guide, nor did Maigret himself welcome that task when Inspector Pike from Scotland Yard came calling. Sympathising with his host(s), he tries to be agreeable.
In Tucson the FBI agent who picks him from the train station soon parks him in a coroner’s court to observe the American way, while the agent goes back to work. In his European suit and necktie with pipe Maigret is one conspicuous fish out of water. As he watches and listens, he finds it difficult not to interrupt with his own questions. He knows enough English to follow the testimony but, well, he probably could not formulate his questions properly anyway.
The first half or more of the book is the parade of witnesses giving contradictory statements related to the night Bessie Mitchell died, mangled by a railway train out in the desert. Was her death suicide, accident, manslaughter, or murder? That is the question.
The inquest continues and Maigret is soon hooked, and that pleases his host. At night in his hotel room Maigret writes summaries of the day’s testimony for review, a task usually left to Lucas back in the office on the Île de la cité. Even so there remain questions that have not yet been asked.
Maigret observes the natives with an anthropological eye: they are clean, polite, addicted to Coca Cola, and there is the racial variety of white, black, red, and yellow among the jurors, witnesses, and audience. He is also painfully aware that others are observing him, too. But he simply cannot appear in a courtroom without a necktie and coat! Despite the 45C temperature which has killed the AC. (At least he is not wearing the sweater Madame Maigret insisted he take.)
Five young air force men were with Bessie at one time or another during the night she died, and they are much in evidence with their shaved heads and stiff posture. Maigret is surprised that the inquiry does not focus directly on them, but every now and then he senses an underlying pattern in the interrogations that reassures him that there is purpose within the apparently haphazard proceedings.
His efforts to strike up conversations during recesses with others in the audience do not take, and he mutters to himself. The usual masterful Maigret is treading water.
The end is ambiguous and this reader felt that a number of the threads, like the dented car, were not resolved. Yet the trip was so much fun for being different that there are no complaints.
Simenon spent months in Arizona where he lived in a rented house and typed his Maigret stories more than once. Perhaps while there in residence he did attend a coroner’s court. It is certainly a change of pace for both Maigret (and Simenon) to observe, comment on, and participate in American life.
Maigret’s World (2017) by Murielle Wenger and Stephen Trusell.
Good Reads meta-data is 245 pages rated 2.83 by 6.
Genre: Manual.
Verdict: Frequent Readers of Maigret only.
Georges Simenon (1903-1989) wrote 75 novels and 28 short stories featuring Maigret from the first in 1929 to the last in 1972. At the height of his powers, he published six novels and more stories in a year. Whew! The Maigrets were not his only fiction. He also wrote what he called romans durs, numbering more than a dozen along with scores of short stories. Double whew! But wait there is more! He also published more than a score of other novels under several pseudonyms. That brings the total of novels to a 100+! Is there is such a thing as ‘Triple whew!’ Then there are the volumes of an autobiography! Wikipedia suggests that 500 publications bear his name. (I have read a couple of the romans durs and they are memorable but that is for another time. Suffice it to say that these are his ‘hard’ [in the sense of durable] novels. We might say ‘serious novels.’ Or in the language of bookstores these days ‘literary fiction.’)
Readers of Maigret often comment on the atmosphere Simenon creates in each story, usually but not always set in a Paris enclave. Indeed it is the central motif of the Maigret stories that he enters a (nearly) closed world and gradually learns to navigate it so as to understand the attitudes and motivations of its inhabitants. He comes to discern first the wind waves on the surface of the locale, the tides, and then the underlying reefs and shoals and later the wreckage now submerged, to extend the metaphor. That microcosm may be a stable at the Longchamps race course, a dilapidated mansion in Ivry, a nightclub in Pigalle, a flotilla of canal boats plying the River Seine, an automobile factory shop floor in Belleville, a brothel in Montmarte, a private clinic near hôpital Val de Grace, a cul de sac like Rue Mouffetard (where I stayed once up a time), a student boarding house at Montsouris, a luxurious apartment in St Germain, and so on. Each time Simenon stamps the reader’s visa for this world.
He draws these places with such economy that most of the novels run to 150 pages in a Penguin edition. The style is impressionistic not descriptive. Often the reader has no reason to know what a character is wearing, eating, sitting on, or even looks like. Those Ikea, Elle, and Gourmet details that deaden while inflating so many krimis are often absent. It is true that sometimes he does describe a character and place in these terms to reveal character and situation. It is not done mechanically but rather as an organic part of Maigret’s immersion into the cast, costume, and the play that is performed in that milieu. The handbag Louise Laboine carried was carefully described and later that proved decisive. A reader learns to trust Simenon. If he describes something, it will prove to be relevant to the story, not a mere ornament to fill pages.
Liège
In each case the novels are deeply rooted in the geography and culture of France. The aroma of aioli is in the air. That is Piaf on the radio in the background. Cloudy Pernod is the drink.
Yet after his early successes Simenon wrote nearly all of his novels abroad. A few were written just over the Jura mountains in Switzerland, but a great many (scores) of these very French novels were written either in Vermont or Arizona in the United States. In each state he hired a cabin and set up a typewriter. Snowed-in among the White Mountains in Vermont, or sun-struck in the Sonora scrub of Arizona, he evoked the streets of a rainy Paris, a bone chilling winter near the Ardenne forest, a seedy bar in Montmartre, a dentist’s immaculate mansion in Neuilly, a flop house in Pigalle, a respectable bourgeoisie home on the banks of the Marne, or a small hotel for commercial travellers in the banlieues…
Reminded of his preference for visiting the States puts me in mind of another Yankeephile, Jean-Pierre Melville, the film director, who likewise had an affection for the USA. I wonder if Melville ever filmed any Maigret story. Certainly the stories have been filmed by some of the greats in French cinema, Jean Renoir, Julien Duvivier, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Marcel Carné, Bernard Tavernier, Henri Verneuil, and – yes – Jean-Pierre Melville.
Everything from the size of Maigret’s shoes to the colour of his neckties and preferred pipe tobacco is to be found in this catalogue raisonné of les chose de Maigret. What a spreadsheet of facts these two über-nerds have compiled from the Maigret oeuvre. After objects they move onto Madame Maigret, including her wardrobe, and his only friend, Dr Pardon. Then onto the Quai des Orfevres where we meet the quatre fidèle: Lucas, Janiver, LaPointe, and Torrence. Maigret’s relationship with each is discussed, particularly through the use of tutoiment. Yet the more such fine distinctions are magnified, the more they blur. Voilà, Simenon was not consistent throughout the oeuvre. He did not work from a spreadsheet it seems.
While Simenon and Maigret have been subjected to much examination, this volume is not a commentary on the stories, but a catalogue of details. For the some of the scholarship try the Centre d’ètudes Georges Simenon at the Université de Liège.
In the Maigret oeuvre English characters occur now and again, and I am sure some PhD has been devoted to dissecting them, but I cannot locate it right now. Among the English (speakers) I count Inspector Pike who visited Quai des Orfevres, the deceased Mister Brown, the vanishing Monsieur Owens, the seldom sober Sir Walter Lampson on the canal boat, the likeable rouge James in the two-sous bar, the wastrel Oswald Cark, the elusive Colonel Ward, the mental Miss Simpson, and, well, there are probably others.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 31 minutes of runtime, rated 7.6 by 78 cinematizens.
Genre: Krimi, sub-species: Maigret.
Verdict: Different.
Set-up: Maigret is about to go on vacation with his colleague Inspector Vaimber and the latter’s brood, when an odd inquiry arrives. To handle it, Vaimber will have to put off his departure, disappointing his wife and numerous children. Knowing that Madame Maigret was not that keen on a fishing holiday, Maigret volunteers to look into the matter so that Vaimber can continue with his clan.
Thus, Maigret meets the enigmatic Madame Quatre, so called for the room number of her hideout in a boarding house. Her two tweenage boys are a brat pack of the first rank. She has fled the family home with them after seeing – she claims – the corpse of woman on the floor of the conservatory late one night while her very, very handsome husband was digging in the garden.
What follows is more Hitchcock than the usual Maigret. First and foremost is the ambiguity of Madame Quatre, played with screen-cracking intensity by Marianne Basler. Did she see what she said that she saw? Is she perhaps the villain, shifting the blame on to her husband, who now has himself vanished? Has he become her victim? Is she the villain? Slowly the mystery peels away.
Marianne Basler
To find out, stretching credulity, Maigret goes undercover taking a room at the boarding house. The atmosphere and inhabitants of the house conjure that the Henri-Georges Clouzet classic L’assassin habit au 21 (1942). Ensconced Maigret observes Madame Quatre unobtrusively (as if this bear of a man could be anything but obtrusive).
Maigret is outside his milieu and on his own to protect her and the children while ascertaining the truth of the matter. As he follows her narrative it seems ever more credible despite the lack of tangible evidence, but then he draws back, is he succumbing to a folie à deux? Has he become infected by her psychosis? She is so very convincing because she is so very convinced herself but is that enough? To gain some distance he brings another, younger officer into the house and this latter’s questions snap Maigret out of his trance. In this story he is even more passive than usual.
For three-quarters of the film, we just don’t know whom to believe and neither does he. Both the body count and the tension rises. Nor are we quite sure whether there will be another victim, or who it might be, until …. The villain emerges from the fish tank. Well, sort of.
The direction by Phillippe Berenger is excellent. Even the staircase contributes to the plot when the ankle bracelet is spotted. The screenplay is twisted but sustains interest, and the obvious turns out to be true all along. The number “4” is crucial in a way. If it had been done by Claude Chabrol the cinemaistas would be shouting it from the rooftops.
I cannot identify the title of the original Simenon work (short story or novel). Maigret Takes a Room is not it.
Dominique Roulet is credited with writing dialogue whose work from other films is excellent. I wonder if this was an original story? She did the adaptation of eight of the films in this Maigret series. The screen credit is ambiguous in the attribution about whether it is an adaptation or an original.
P.S.
I have watched several others upon which I may comment later. I have been watching one each evening when the Plex server performs as advertised. Have given up watching the TF2 news for a while as a relief from the daily dose of murder and mayhem, preferring to get my French lesson filtered through these films for a while. So as not to forget these others include:
Maigret et la vente à bougie (1995) – the cat deals with two mice when the candle goes out.
Maigret en Finlande (1996) – more images of watery Helsinki. Why the pipe smoker has a cigar at one point while staring definitely at Maigret is lost on this viewer.
Un Meutre de première classe (1999) – didn’t make use of train. The noisey consul disappears without explanation as above suspicion. The closed world of the railway carriage is dissipated in both screenplay and direction. Tant pis.
Maigret dans un jardin potager (1999) – intense but cryptic. Superb acting from the two warring sisters and for once a uniformed officer gets some dialogue.
Maigret chez les riches (2000) – credibility snapped. How murder saves the family name is lost of most viewers.
Maigret et la croquese de diaments (2001) with the great Michael Lonsdale as a red herring. Set in a canal lock near Belgian border but makes little use of it. Strangely enough the credits cite Lonsdale as Michaël with an umlaut that his name did not have. And, yes, he is ‘Michael’ and not ‘Michel.’ He appeared in an earlier episode which I watched out of order, and in the credits for that one, his name was correctly rendered.
Maigret et le marchand de vin (2002) – skips basic police procedure, does not question the maid, and accepts that no one recognises or thinks to mention the fired accountant. Contrast to others beating witnesses, his approach is softly, softly.
Maigret et la princess (2002) – Maigret at his best as detective and as a person. From the novel Maigret et les vieillards (1960), which title more accurately reflects the story. Slowly he comes to realise what motivates the occupants of the mansion. It was all so obvious that he did not notice it at first.
Maigret et la demoiselle de compagnie (2004) – from the short story La Vieille dame de Bayeux, in which a cardboard judge obstructs Maigret and then does a volte face to stay within running time. The sleazy villain is played perfectly.
IMDb meta-data: runtime of 1 hour and 24 minutes, rated 7.1 by 91 cinematizens.
Genre: Krimi, Maigret
Verdict: Superb.
Maigretistas will instantly recognise Saint-Fiarce as the tiny village where Maigret was born and raised. In the film he is accompanied by his wife, Louise, who has a thing or two to say to him as the plot unfolds. Nicely done. For once Madame Maigret does more than make the coffee. In the book, which I re-read after watching this film version, he is alone. In both there is a letter in which a murder is announced: à la of Agatha Christie.
In the book, the letter is sent to the local plod who passed it up the line and by chance Maigret saw a photograph copy of it on a desk in the Quai des Orfevres, and decides to go and see for himself. In the film, the letter is sent directly to Maigret lui-même as a personal challenge. In neither case is there an adequate explanation of why the letter is sent at all, though perhaps it was part of the plan to implicate the Count, as below.
The murder is ingenious, and kills the widowed Countess de Saint-Fiacre. Her wastrel son, the Count, is the obvious villain who wishes to hasten his inheritance. He is played in the film by Jacques Speisser who is marvellous as the troubled, tortured, intelligent, sensitive, confused, angry, and brutish Count de Saint-Fiarce. The pain in eyes at times is evident, even when his words belie it.
In the book, the final denouement at dinner is entirely the handiwork of the Count, casting Maigret as a spectator. In this film version the suggestion is that Maigret and Count have conspired to set it. The doctor is also effectively enlarged in the film. Indeed, in the film the Countess is also given a personality lacking in the book. The plot against her and the count is much more elaborate in the book than in this film, too.
In both film and book it is also apparent that, though the sanctimonious priest will not violate the confessional, he will take matters into his own hands, infuriating Maigret.
The story has been filmed at least three times before.
The high points of this version include Madame Maigret telling Jules to pull his socks up and stop mooning about like a schoolboy, and the Count’s anguish.
Jacques Spiesser
By the way, Spiesser is still at work as Magellan in an eponymous television series that has been running since 2009. He has also played second-fiddle Danglard in the Adamsberg krimis.
IMDB meta-data is run time of 1 hour and 25 minutes, rated 7.0 by 99 cinematizens.
Genre: krimi, Maigret (bien sûr)
Verdict: (Où est Fantômas?)
Long-serving and long-suffering Inspector Joseph Lognon is shot in the street and lies comatose near death; Maigret comes to investigate. Lognon is a recurrent figure (six times in all) in the Maigret oeuvre, and we know a little about him. He is dogged but unimaginative, a slave to his invalid wife at home, and while conscientious to a fault he seems jinxed at work, i.e., if there is hole then he is the one who will step in it. Maigret is one of the few people who is patient enough to suffer Lognon’s constant bad humour.
Now that I have seen four of these 1990s revivals of Maigret, clearly the aim was to re-new the franchise by changing the settings, and in some cases, revising the plots. The aim was not to be faithful to the text, but to refresh them for a new audience. One might think of the 1940s Rathbone version of an updated Sherlock Holmes foiling Nazis. Or so I imagine the spiel was. In any case, this episode works well. It is transposed from Montmartre to Helsinki. That means Maigret must work with and through a translator, and the few Finns who speak French do so slowly with a word-order syntax. Thank you very much.
In the novel the above-suspicion art dealer is Dutch, but here he is Swedish, perhaps, to play on Finnish prejudices about big brother. Once again a German with a murky wartime past is inserted into the plot who is not in the book. In the 1990s I would guess that the noticeable tinge of hostility to Germans is in the producers not in the audience of the day.
Again, now that Maigret is in far Helsinki there is no team, but only the telephone which is put to much use since all the persons of interest have French connections. It takes an hour to make a call to Paris, and the reception is terrible. Plus there is that long distance lag and echo in the voices. Remember that?
Once again Cremer is fine as Maigret, slow, persistent, and motivated since Lognon is a brother-in-arms, though a secretive one with a chip on his shoulder. To capitalise on the location shooting, a second film was done in Finland.
Yes, I read this book, too, and in neither the book nor the film is the title quite explained. The woman who paints upstairs before the windows once wears a white robe to mislead Maigret. Did she ever do it before? Or did the mad and bad Igor wear it? But the red-headed Englishman was the shooter.
Answers in the comments below.
Having a spent a few days in Helsinki years ago, in this film I enjoyed some of the streetscapes, waterfront, and art deco architecture, but got no glimpse of those giants that guard the central train station.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 28 minutes, rated 7.6 by 95 cinematizens.
Genre: Krimi.
Verdict: Shrouded.
A one-man flying squad of Maigret arrives at the crossroads where he spends a long night, well, several of them. The film is atmospheric, much of it at night on a flat plain where there are three dwellings around the intersection, each about on a hundred metres apart in a triangle: the garage/petrol station with house, the salesman’s new and modern – circa 1947 – villa, and the weathered, brooding gothic mansion. At the petrol station is the garrulous proprietor and his taciturn wife along with a spiv and a pensioner to do the work. The salesman lives with his scowling wife in that villa. At the mansion is the sou-less Baron and his sister. These latter two are German, and the baron was disfigured in the war on the Russian Front.
The only interaction among the three is at the petrol pump. The salesman uses a lot of fuel on his calls, while the Baron drives to Paris once a month in a rattletrap to deliver his latest designs and get paid. The sister is seldom seen at all. The wife watches the crossroads from her perch in the kitchen window. The garage proprietor is the only one out and about, here and there at all hours. Trucks taking produce to Les Halles pass at all hours of the day and night, many stopping for petrol and a few words.
The Carrefour des Trois Veuves is so named for the three widows who once lived in the mansion and who, according to local legend, murdered each other (no doubt in a quarrel over the TV remoter having no man to hog it). It is late autumn with leafless trees, damp and dank air, and waterlogged fields, stretching away. The soggy, foggy atmosphere is well-rendered. (It was filmed in Luxembourg.)
Maigret has arrived because a Belgian diamond merchant has been found shot to death at the crossroads. Later when she arrives his widowed wife, too, is shot dead. The NRA hunting season is in full swing, targeting Belgians rather school children this time. Per his normal modus operandi Maigret moves into a nearby auberge and walks about absorbing the ambience, meeting the people of the crossroads who number no more than eight. Both the wives bear husband-inflicted bruises about which he asks, only to be fobbed off by the women.
It is a different set up from the book. The biggest difference in all of three films I have seen so far is the removal of Maigret from Paris and the second most significant is the absence of his team: Lucas, Janvier, LaPointe, and Torrence. Lucas is the dogged 2iC with an encyclopaedic memory for files; Janvier supplies the muscle assisted by Torrence, and young LaPointe is the fresh face who is good at getting people to talk to him. None have surfaced in these episodes to date. Tant pris.
In the book the foreigner is Danish and no baron, but remains a struggling artist with his sister. The sister is played by an actor who married a baron and perhaps that generated the idea of titling the brother. Though why he is made a German is anyone’s guess, and it jars since the Maigret books seldom (never?) refer to the wider context. Bruno Cremer once again brings Maigret to life. Slow, uncertain but persistent, surprised but steadfast he ploughs on.
In the film there much more gunfire than one expects from a Maigret title, and I read the novel to see if it is there, too. Yep Maigret in a very un-Maigret gesture does shoot a hole in an inner tube in the garage to see what is inside it. Yes, there is shoot ‘em up in the book as in the film. By the way, he carries the gun in his coat pocket! Not NRA recommended.
The Baron is so obsessed by his sister/wife that he tries to protect her, even knowing she conspired in his attempted murder by gunshot and later herself tried to smother him with a pillow. A moth to the flame is he. Will she be lucky the third time?
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 31 minutes, rated 6.6 by 74 cinematizens.
Genre: krimi.
Verdict: Convoluted.
Between assignments, Maigret is on a busman’s holiday staying in Cannes at a de luxe hotel by the invitation of its manager, an old friend from Paris, and while there….! A cadaver appears in elderly M. Owens’s bathtub in room 412 and Owens is nowhere to be found. The deceased is a young man, while the missing Owens is an aged cripple. The local inspector barges in and throws his bantam intellectual weight around, seizing on the obvious, overlooking the subtle, while the bemused Maigret looks on.
There is a wanna-be starlet throwing herself and francs around, a sinister-looking doctor who is impossibly handsome, a demure nurse to M. Owens, a blind masseuse, an oily art dealer, and more. The ingredients are many and spicy.
Of course, as viewers realised long before the local plod, it was Owens in the tub. The Marcel Proust rugged-up invalid-look was a disguise for a young art forger whose value seems to have been eroded by his drug addiction, and his accomplices doubted his continued silence, so they ensured it. The nurse was not as she seemed, as the blindman told Maigret, her perfume is that of a rich woman, not a servant. Her transformation from dowdy to chic is good but not as convincing as a Cinderella turn by Isabelle Adjani. (I don’t remember which of her films but it was remarkable.)
Then there is the dog.
The plot is so complicated it required a lengthy expository scene at the end and I still didn’t get it. There is a neat scene midway through where Maigret overhears a private conversation through the air conditioning ducts, but nothing is made of it later.
This story derives from a Simenon short story which I found online and read. It differs from the screenplay. Much simpler, though still cryptic. The film is full of gratuitous red herrings, a veritable school of them, absent from the story. The blind man, the starlet, the art dealer, and more are not in the story but added in the screenplay. They certainly colour the tableaux, but I found the plot incomprehensible even after the explanation. Of the additions, the blind masseuse is the most interesting, while straining credulity.
I rather think the production company hastily beefed up the short story to do a second film while on seaside location for Maigret and the Liberty Bar, a superior film.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 31 minutes, rated 7.5 by 88 cinematizens.
Genre: krimi.
Verdict: languid.
Chief Inspector Jules Maigret is plucked from his Paris office on the Ile de la Citè and put on a train to Antibes in the far south. He arrives from a grey and wet Paris, exhausted by the journey, to a blinding sunshine and the gusting mistral as though landing on another world. He is dazzled, disoriented, and overdressed, and not particularly happy to be there. He finds the local inspector a tiresome puppy underfoot and sidelines him, leaving him petulant but obedient.
Monsieur Brown, hero of the Resistance, has been murdered and someone in the national government wants a quick and clean resolution that does not open old wounds. To investigate Maigret sheds the puppy and immerses himself in Brown’s milieu, and what a milieu it is. There is a rather grand seaside villa, all that remains of Brown’s pre-war fortune when making money seemed important to him, now occupied by a mother-daughter combination, one being his mistress, and at times Maigret is not sure which, or even if both. Inside the villa it is a dump: the three lived in a few rooms, which had not been cleaned or tidied since the Liberation.
After his slow and patient questioning, the resident women say that Brown went off on holidays of three or four days every month, claiming to have no idea where he went or what he did, though he always returned with some money to live on the for the next month.
The local puppy-plod had settled on these two residents as the culprits and went no further but the lugubrious Maigret sets out to retrace and re-live the last of Brown’s short holidays. In nearby Cannes he finds the garage when Brown parked his car during these sprees, and then he bar hops in the neighbourhood until he finds the Le Liberty Bar, which like Brown fell into dilapidation after the war. Dark and seemingly empty, Maigret walks through the bar and into the kitchen to find the occupants who matter of factly offer him a seat at the table where they are just finishing lunch and he joins them, sitting where Brown sat, he learns, for it is here that Brown spent those days away. The proprietor is an older woman whose sole tenant is a young prostitute. At times others, like a waiter from the casino, come by for a drink or a meal and likewise sit at the table in the back like family.
Soon Maigret, still befuddled by the constant long hours of sunshine and the disturbance of the mistral, slowly acclimatising to the warmth of the Midi, goes into orbit around the Liberty Bar and slowly unpicks the stories of each of its inhabitants. Maigret is unhurried, annoying his impetuous colleague who wants to arrest the two residents of the villa, but Maigret stalls. He probes occasionally, but mostly watches and listens. Pascale Roberts as Mado, the owner of the bar, gives a superb performance of increasing complexity. She differs from the woman described in the novel but who cares.
Brown was Australian and his family intrudes into the affair in search of a will for it seems there is a fortune (from the sheep’s back) tied up in a business which provided Brown the monthly income he collected on his away-days. This seems a promising lead and Maigret examines it. Another red herring is the Bar’s prostitute and then her pimp. But whatever road Maigret takes it always leads back to the Liberty Bar.
* * *
There is much eye-candy of the Riviera. Finding the film diverting, I wanted to read the novel and ordered it on my Kindle while watching and started to read it later that night. Is that convenient or what!? The script sticks very closely to the text, though there is more explanation on the page than on the screen.
Such a change of pace from AmerBrit shouting and shoot ‘em ups that pass as mysteries. The placid Cremer moves at a snail’s pace, studies one scene from several angles, and soaks up the ambience in silence. Needless, to say some of the addled commentary on IMDb finds this ruminative approach inert, whereas I find it inviting. Among the many incarnations of Maigret, Cremer ranks high. Moreover, these are lavish productions with plenty of enhanced sets and artefacts of the Post War era. For the interiors the rooms are fully furnished; the automobiles are the real thing and so are the clothes. This story has been filmed at least three before according to the IMDb.
There is also an absence of the cheap cynicism that substitutes for thought in so many krimis. If shouting is the Amer disease in cop shows, the Brit disease is cynicism in which everyone is evil at heart except the paladin, think saintly and sanctimonious Christopher Foyle or Vera Stanhope who are both holier than all other thous. In contrast, Maigret meets many ordinary people who do not all harbour deep and very dark secrets and he gets to know and like some of them, including some thieves, pimps, and lowlifes who eke out a living doing little harm to others.
Another BritAmer crutch missing from the Maigret screenplays is the interfering, pettifogging, incompetent superior getting in our hero’s way. This trope has been worn so thin it is see-through and yet remains commonplace. Indeed, it has spread to krimis beyond the English language. The otherwise admirable Martin Beck Swedish series has featured a number of such cardboards. Regrettably, I note this stereotype appears in one of the Maigret episodes.
Nor is Maigret always right. He makes mistakes, he cannot always find the decisive evidence even when he is certain what happened, and in at least one of the novels he is stymied and gives up the investigation without a conclusion, thinking that maybe later something will emerge and he can start again. Equally, he does not always have the last word. In one of the stories when he is questioning the widow of a man just murdered, he says to her that her husband was engaged in a crime. She shows him her Auschwitz tattoo and say ‘That is a crime, Mr Policeman!’ That the husband was fencing stolen jewels was nothing; rebuked, Maigret went silent. (Yes, he did go the morgue later and find a similar tattoo on the cadaver of the husband.)
This is episode 2 of season 7 of the series that ran from 1991 to 2005 with Bruno Cremer in the eponymous role. There are 54 episodes in total. I have about half of them lined up on the Plex server. (The others aren’t available at this time.) The original plan had been to complete the oeuvre of all 85+ Simenon stories featuring Maigret, instead time and tide caught up with Cremer from all that pipe smoking and throat cancer killed him. It has a parallel in the effort to do the complete Sherlock Holmes with Jeremy Brett which was likewise stymied by the disintegration of the lead.
Goodreads meta-data is 244 pages rated 3.97 by 252 litizens.
Genre: krimi
Verdict: Tenderfoot badge.
Second outing for Archer.
Trying too hard. Every page has another etched metaphor in the description. Seems more intellect went into those metaphors than into the characters who seem lifeless stereotypes, and this is from a reader who greatly admires RM. This volume has a nice introduction by John Banville, himself a kriminologist of note.
The screenplay for the 1975 movie is far more coherent and creditable. Not often I admit that. Plus the shift to NOLA adds immeasurably to the atmosphere, Copain. The bayous, the mist, that bridge to somewhere, the Cajun music (but no cuisine), the Spanish moss, the corruption, the magnolia trees…. Murray Hamilton made a larger than life villain in the film and not the cipher he is in the book. This is krimi country that James Lee Burke now owns lock, stock, and many gun barrels.
Footnote: Tenderfoot is the first of forty-seven boy scout merit badges. Impressive, huh? Just remember that one is for paper-making, and I don’t mean journalism.
GoodReads meta-data is 208 pages rated 3.68 by 144 litizens.
Genre: biography.
Verdict: A singularity!
Josephine Baker (1906-1975) of East St Louis Missouri was illiterate and unwanted, married at age 13, and abandoned at 15, all of this does not sound like a good start in life. Yet before she was twenty she had a national reputation, soon followed by an international one, and a career singing, dancing, and starring in film.
She started in show biz by washing dishes in a gambling-club kitchen at about fourteen. In breaks she watched the floor show and volunteered to work unpaid as a maid for one of the performers after finishing in the kitchen. That performer began to teach this teenager to read and write as recompense for her work, and invited her to come along on tour, and off Baker went without a backward glance. (She was slow learner and even years later while she could read printed text with difficulty, say on programs, but she could not decipher even copperplate writing, and barely do more than scrawl her own name.) Then one night at another club, a member of the chorus line fell ill, and the director grabbed Baker (because she was the same size for the costume) and put her at the end of the line. Not knowing what to do, she stumbled around and got laughs. The director liked that, and the audience applause ‘electrified’ her, she said later. She was, as they say, stage struck and stayed that way, beginning a fifty year career on the boards that end in a 1975 swan song.
In the earliest days, travelling with a troupe of women, she experienced lesbian sex and that stayed with her, but she also liked men when they were available. She was a lifelong switch hitter.
This might be the place to indicate a conflict within her that the author handles well. On the one hand, Baker wanted a conventional life of husband, home, and children such as she had seen in magazines and movies, but never experienced personally, but on the other hand the limelight’s beckon was irresistible and the gaudy and bawdy life of sex and drugs that went with it. At times she oscillated between these two poles.
As a dancer she had a daring (topless at times and that banana skirt), an energy, a vitality, and physical wit that caught the eye of a producer preparing a revue for Paris and looking for fresh talent in the States, who recruited her. At no more than sweet sixteen she went from last in the line chorus girl sharing a room with three others with one meal a day, to a luxury suite on an ocean liner bound for Europe. The transition went to her head and for years thereafter she behaved like a spoiled brat rock star or oafish star athlete with tantrums, laziness, rudeness, and so on. Some of those outbursts arose from the clash of those two poles: domesticity versus show biz.
In time — years — she did grow out of these childish ways but she was never the professional who was on time, on target, on budget. She was often late, unprepared, and exhausted. But once she got in the limelight, the current flowed. Late, yes, but never absent. She always turned up.
She was one of those who put the ‘Roar’ into the Roaring Twenties, and she pretty much did, on this telling, take Paris by storm. As a teenager, she was the headliner of Folies de Bergère with her picture plastered onto every kiosk in Paris, playing to sold out houses eight shows a week. Her petulance did not intrude on the stage, though she often missed rehearsal and ad libbed her way through. In this period she waged a campaign to sing rather than (just) dance, and when a lead singer got sick, Josephine stepped in because she had learned all the songs.
Men, there were more than a few moths attracted to this flame. She soon learned that white men might shower her with gifts, take her to Maxim’s, buy her astounding clothes, pay for ever grander apartments as a trophy, and adorn her with precious jewels, but marriage was, as one said, ‘out of the question.’ Her conclusion from these experiences was a personal declaration of independence, made possible by the money she was raking in; she would buy everything for herself. Ergo she thence turned down and sent back innumerable gifts from many rich and famous men (and some women). She still liked men, but on her terms, not theirs. P.S. She also still liked women.
A producer in her first years in France had been a mentor who tutored her in French, table manners, dressing and so on as part of his investment, and now, in these subjects, she was motivated to be a quick learner. Through the years she remitted money to her mother and siblings in St Louis. After the War she convinced all of them to join in France and she bought and remodelled a chateau for them.
The boite du nuit patrons kept coming during the Great Depression and the money kept coming, if in smaller quantities, and she kept spending it, trying hard to outdo other celebrities with bizarre behaviour and dress. All that has a contemporary ring to it. She concentrated more on singing, in French, than on dancing, and that extended her career. She also branched out into products like hair gel, clothes, and jewellery, reaping the profits. She became one of the richest women in the world, and perhaps the only one at the time who had made all the money on her own talents. It was at this time that she began supporting children’s charities, giving away a great many francs with no tax benefit in so doing. However much money came in, more went out. She always spent faster than she earned, and in time that deficit caught up with her.
In 1934 she married a Frenchman, a Jew, and became simultaneously French and Jewish in so doing according to the laws of the day. At the time she added the accent agui to her name to make it French – Joséphine. Briefly, they had the home life a good part of her had always longed for, but then happily pregnant, she miscarried and that tragedy came between them, a year later the husband decamped, and she became ever more temperamental, while throwing herself even more frantically into work.
She made a French talkie called ZouZou (1934), and by this time was fluent in conversation. She never liked movie-making because there was no audience. Having toured European capitals several times with critical, popular, and financial success, in that year she accepted an invitation to return to the United States to star in a production of the Ziegfeld Follies. She and her European entourage arrived in New York on a luxury liner to great fanfare at the docks thronged by journalists and photographers. Off they went to the first class hotel booked for the group, where she alone was denied registration because of her race, and she was likewise denied at three other downtown hotels, before she gave that up to bunk with a woman journalist who had accompanied her from the pier. Welcome home! Everything went faster and further downhill from there, the show closed, and she returned to Paris.
There are many clips on You Tube.
Came the Drôle de guerre in 1939 and she volunteered for service and went to entertain the Allied troops, being well suited to do so with a repertoire of English and French songs familiar to the lads et les gars. She was paired with the likewise bilingual Maurice Chevalier, who was a mega-star of the day with the ego to match. He regarded her as a cheap nightclub chanteuse and insisted that as he was the star her act precede his as a warm-up. (And, non, before you ask, he would not do a duet with this parvenu.) He got his way and regretted it. In school, town, and church halls with hundreds of bored young men who had been away from home for weeks and months, she was a sin-sation and they would not let her leave the stage, demanding encore after encore, enraging Chevalier waiting in the wings. He threw a fit and stormed off, leaving her with a one-woman show, which incidentally won her fame among Brits and expanded her fame in France beyond Parisians.
Came the Defeat in June 1940, she was approached by a brother of a stage manager: it could be arranged that she would be invited to perform in Lisbon, would she then carry a message encoded in her sheet music? Bien sûr, because ‘I owe France everything.’ The bet was that since Portugal was a friendly neutral, the Germans would permit the trip. That worked and she did it again, and again, and no Gestapo inspector would be inclined or able to read the sheet music. Then a tour of French North Africa was arranged for the same purpose where she fell ill and after an emergency operation she got blood poisoning and was long confined to a hospital bed in Rabat where she lay when Operation Torch was executed. Bitter though she had become about American racism, she nearly danced in the street when she saw the Stars and Stripes on the shoulders patches of the GIs. Soon she was entertaining more troops across North Africa, Free French, Brit and Commonwealth, and Yankee. Four shows a day with a jeep ride over no-roads to the next camp for months, which – given than she was still recovering from repeated surgery when it started – wore her down. These travels were burning in the day time and freezing at night, and often required sleeping on the grounds or in the vehicles. General Charles de Gaulle asked her to accept induction into the French Women’s Auxiliary Army, which she did with enthusiasm. She also embarked on a fundraising campaign for de Gaulle, starting by selling her jewellery and clothes. She would say later in jest but also in truth that she gave France the clothes off her back in return for a uniform. By the way that illness in Morocco ended any prospect of children.
Despite the wartime rhetoric of equality, when she returned State-side she was once more barred from hotels and restaurants in Boston, Miami, and again in New York City. In this latter instance she complained vociferously and was then labeled a communist agitator by no less a figure than Walter Winchell – king of the airways at the time – who, with the respect for facts one associates with Pucker Up on Pox News, later also styled her a fascist. (Local lout-mouths like Alan Jones have long aspired WW’s crown.)
More important in cementing her reputation as a pinko was her insistence on performing only to integrated audiences. She turned down astronomical fees from segregated venues – what could be more Un-American than that? Worse, whenever this happened she made it known through the press that a certain promoter or venue refused to allow an integrated audience. Joe Louis, Jack Robinson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Robert Warren, and other civil rights activists soon flocked to her shows. It was at this time that she discovered a talent for public speaking and she went on the stump for civil rights. That put her on one of J. Edgar Hoover’s many enemies lists which often made it difficult for her to get an American visa, one requiring the direct and personal intervention of the United States Attorney-General Robert Kennedy.
There is a long story about her Rainbow Tribe which I will omit. Suffice it to say she collected orphaned children as she had earlier collected animals for a private zoo. Superficially the intention was good, but the execution was abysmal. There is an appendix devoted to these children.
She never had any sense about money, and that caught up with her in the latter 1950s when a postwar generation of performers competed for opportunities. Protracted and painful was the decline, she had to sell everything to keep the bailiffs at bay, the jewels, the cars, the houses, … the clothes [again]. By the time she was sixty, Baker was destitute and homeless, singing in the Paris equivalent of the St Louis clubs where she had started forty-five years before. Under these pressures the old, volatile temper vented and she became just about impossible to deal with. It was a speedy, downward spiral.
She was saved from herself by Princess Grace of Monaco who paid her debts, bought her a house, and set up a trust fund with a modest income and a principle that Joséphine could not touch. In return Baker performed regularly at Red Cross fundraisers. And there is a remarkable story of a journalist sent on a publicity interview prior to one such event going to Baker’s apartment a day early by mistake, and…. A bent, shrivelled, bald, shrunken old women dressed in a ragged robe, shuffling, drooling, and sniffling, answered the door and wobbled walking to the sofa. Slowly Journalist realised this was Joséphine Baker herself. Yet, the day after when the gala opened she was straight, coiffured, gleaming, vigorous, vital, and glittering, offering a full-throated performance with dancing, jokes, and many encores. The show had to go on and it always did. Despite the chaotic life she led over the years, she honoured every performance contract and delivered on stage. At times critics found the material poor but no one ever said she did not give it the works once in the spotlight. Audience attention was the eau de vie to which she was addicted.
At the last of these galas she did an impromptu singing and dancing duet with Mick Jagger, and over night died of a heart attack. One obituary writer said with some truth that she had danced herself to death.
The concoction she used to straighten her hair since the early 1920s had led to the baldness. Her diet was terrible and, given the milieu, she no doubt drank alcohol to excess and used drugs though the book is silent on these matters.
Loose ends: She marched in every Bastille Day parade wherever she was in France, wearing that auxiliary uniform with her service medals attached. She was on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on the great day that Dr King spoke, and did many fund rising performances for the NAACP when she was Stateside, and became very close to Coretta Scott King who tried to get her to move back to the country of her birth.
* * *
Seeing on Télévision France 2 a report on the interment of Joséphine Baker’s remains in the Panthéon (in Paris), prompted my interest in finding out more about this legend. So I did what book worms do and went looking for a biography. A title for young adult (= old enough to vote) readers suited me fine. That means it contained sidebars to explain some of the historical context, like the Depression, Folies Bergère, and the like. Many of the other titles on her that I checked were marketed for the salacious tales, sensational gossip, and Pox News value it seemed from my sampling. Compared to that pap, this one appeared sober, sane, and straightforward, no striving for shock value or gutter glamour. The author has a number of other biographies of the same sort.
Peggy Caravantes
Stepping back from the details of those other titles, it seems to me that many of the biographers do not take Baker seriously, despite the lip service to the contrary, but rather present her as a particularly determined party-girl made unique in the time by her colour, her expatriate life in France, and her longevity as a performer. Few of these titles, perhaps fearing that they might scare off readers, hint at the depths, determination, and moral core she must have had to live her own life, let alone perform the services that led to the Panthéon. They just cannot quite get beyond the banana skirt with anything but platitudes in so far as I could judge from the Kindle samples.
