Category: Krimi

I came across Jacques Barzun’s ‘Catalogue of Crime’ (1989) and spent several evenings flipping through it, reading the 50-100 word reviews, each a model of composition, trenchant, clear, and definitive. I searched for reviews praising unfamiliar writers to broaden my horizons,  but also came across golden oldies like Raymond Chandler. Of Chandler’s ‘The Lady in the Lake,’ Barzun wrote…..
‘The exposition of the situation and character is done with remarkable pace and skill, even for Chandler. This superb  tale moves through a maze of puzzles and disclosures to its perfect conclusion. Marlowe makes a greater use of physical clues and ratiocination in this exploit than in any other. It is Chandler’s masterpiece.’
High praise indeed, the more so considering the source. If you don’t know Jack, it is time you did. Try Wikipedia for a start.
After reading the ‘Black-Eyed Blonde,’ reviewed elsewhere on this blog, I recalled this praise and decided to re-new acquaintance with it. I tried to find it as an audio book while travelling, but that did not work out, and that, too, is explained in another post. When I got back to the Ack-Comedy, while shelving the 18 kilograms of travel reading I came across the very book: ‘The Lady in the Lake’ in a 1971 printing from Canada which I must have purchased for .95 cents in graduate school penury. The back cover is long gone and the front cover is torn, but all the pages are still there with all the words.

Wow! What a trip. What an arrival. I was pretty sure I remembered the plot, and who done it, but even so there were twists and turns that surprised me. In fact, at one point toward the end I began to doubt my recollection. It did not seem to be developing as I remembered…. But then it did, after another turn and twist or two.
And what a cast of characters: Almore, the needle doctor; the icy Miss Fromsett; laconic Jim Patton who saves Marlowe’s bacon; Lavary, the oily lady’s man one time too many; huffing and puffing Kingsley; and Lieutenant Degarmo, who, in the end, was a cop; demoralized Captain Webber; malevolent Mildred; the hollowed out Graysons; the illusive Mrs Fallbrook; Bill Chess, the crippled war veteran; and more.
The strength of this title is that cast of characters. As in a Frank Capra movie, all the supporting actors are given their due. Each gets camera time; none is reduced to plot device, not even the very dim Bay City patrolmen. No two sound alike. The voices are all distinct. Although there are descriptive passages, they are largely just that without the sardonic metaphors, similes, and comparisons that Chandler could do like no one else.
I stress that ‘no two sounded alike’ because in more than one krimie an ostensibly diverse set of characters all use the same speech mannerisms, idioms, and syntax. When this happens the characters blend and I suspect that the author is unaware that these are distinctive mannerisms, idioms, and syntax. I refrain from mentioning the names of offenders. It is on par with those very tired clichės about ‘climbing’ into bed. The last bed I climbed into was a upper bunk bed on a sleepover as a child. No bed since then has needed climbing either into or out of. Yes, this is another pet peeve.
There is a 1947 film, starring Robert Montgomery as Marlowe. It takes far too many liberties with the novel, but evidently with Chandler’s approval.
Back to the ‘The Lady in the Lake,’ I have to admit that there were some dead spots. The most significant is the motivation of Mildred in the first murder of Mrs. Florence Almore. I never did quite get that. Moreover, it made no sense to me that Talley was there at the time to steal the shoe. But once done that set the ball rolling. There were a few passages that fell flat and some references that went over my head, e.g., ‘cheese glasses’ (p. 30), as in drinking glasses; ‘This is dum if I know whether I could or not’ (p.61); ‘those moustaches that get stuck under your fingernail’ (p. 187); and, the decor was ‘ashes of roses’ (p. 192). What colour is that? Cheese glasses? A moustache under a fingernail? Dum? You lost me, Ray.

Good Reads meta-data is 304 pages, rated 3.51 by 3,483 litizens.

Genre: Krimi: Species: Sunshine Noir.

Verdict: Brilliant, in a word. * * * * More, please!

Never thought I would say that a Chandler imitator bettered the master, but here it is. This is Philip Marlowe in the California sunshine of 1947 and he is in top form! This novel might as well be a lost manuscript of Chandler’s come to light, such a ring of the master does it have.

Every page crackles with sharp asides, deadpan dialogue, and show stopping imagery. Here is a sampler.

‘The telephone on the desk has the air of something that knows it is being watched.’

‘I was about to use my special deep-toned, you-can-trust-me, I’m-a-private-detective voice’ but she didn’t wait for it.

‘…there was someone else, and now I knew who it was. I’d known for some time, I suppose, but you can know something and at the same time, not know it. It’s one of the things that help us put up with our lot life…’

‘That’s a possibility I’d rather not have entertained. But once you think a thing, it stays thought.’

He had such an easy charm ‘you’d find yourself inquiring if he was all right and saying you hoped he hadn’t strained his wrist by having to keep that heavy-looking gun trained on you…’

‘The mist clung to my face like a wet scarf.’

‘My eyes felt like they had been lightly roasted in front of an open fire.’

‘I saw him walking down the street the other day and he didn’t look dead at all.’

‘I’m the hired help, but you’re talking to me like someone you’ve known all your life, or someone you’d like to know for the rest it. What gives?’

‘I stand at the window a lot contemplating the world and its ways.’

‘I don’t know your name,’ I said. ‘No you don’t…do you,’ she replied.

‘I was thinking about this and that, this being Clare Cavendish, and that being Clare Cavendish too.’

‘Of course I’d come. I would have gone to her if she had been calling from the dark side of the moon.’ [Amen!]

In context, each of these passages hits the mark! Marlowe smokes too much, drinks too much, pays too little attention to money, and hangs on like a bulldog. It just does not add up, so he keeps going until it does, add up.

The ride includes a coshing or two, a pistol whipping, rape, torture, four murders, and a suicide. Though most of the mayhem occurs off camera, Midsomer’s got nothing on this body count.

The femme fatale is very femme and very fatale, spy beautiful, as Chandler wrote of another of her kind. But also, at times, blushing and shy. Marlowe has a hard time squaring that circle. At the end, so does the reader.

Her mother steals the show at one point, she a self-made woman in the perfume business and mother of this Aphrodite is not at all what Marlowe expected when summoned. No airs, no graces, no manners, and no nonsense!
Though Marlowe is unaccountably slow witted about finding the missing man’s sister. In fact she finds him. He asked doormen, gardeners, and drivers about the missing man but not the sister. Go figure. Maybe it is a ploy; play hard to get she’ll come to you.

The gimlet was a give away to the cognoscenti.
Benjamin Black (John Banville)

Not at all sure why anything would be called Liberace in 1947. The man took that name in 1950 and was by no means well known at the time. The casual reference to a Rolex watch jarred in 1947, long before it became a status symbol for the idle rich. Marlowe is surprisingly incurious about the femme fatale’s brother. Ditto a reference to Air Canada flying direct LA to Toronto, Wikipedia says Trans-Canada Airlines took the name Air Canada only in 1965. That part was easy to check. More than 2,000 miles for a 1947 aircraft. OK the date is not specified.

By the way that title has been used before with a different meaning.

A Canadian krimie from the Sunshine coast of British Columbia on the eastern shore of the Strait of Georgia and just northwest of Vancouver, though populous and favoured by tourists, it can only be reached by ferry. Ergo it is somewhat remote.

Because of the mild climate, it is also favoured by retirees. In this story two brothers-in-law figure, both in their 80s. After a lifetime of putting up with each other, one kills the other. Ah, all those family Thanksgivings and Christmases are enough to drive anyone to extremes. Though here the palette is darker still. The deed is done.
The perpetrator prepares to face the police, but when the Mounties come to get their man, they ignore this frail old man in favour of suspicious types who may have been seen around. That is a nice set up. Once he has been passed over, the perpetrator decides to let it be. He does not blurt out the confession he had rehearsed but goes coy and vague. That of course, in time, makes the Mountie, Karl Alberg, who sticks with the case, suspicious.
Alberg finds the time to romance the local librarian, Cassandra, but neither of them seems very good at romance. The villain is a library user and their paths cross.
Along the way we find out more about the Mountie, who never wears the uniform, and the librarian, and Gibsons, the town. There is much gardening, I suppose because it rains so much there, as in Rain City, Vancouver.
I am not whether this is part of series. Nothing is said on the cover.
L. R. Wright
L.R. Wright has a number of titles, and perhaps I will try another.

While travelling I went looking for Chandler’s ‘The Lady in the Lake’ on Audible to test Jacques Barzun contention that it is the best of Chandler’s many good novels, but all I could find was a cut down dramatised version. I did listen to that and it had the essence of the plot but not enough of the prose. I also noticed ‘The Killer in the Rain’ and took it, too. This was a reading not an enactment.
‘The Killer in the Rain’ is a collection of early short stories by Chandler which, in this version, includes:
‘Killer in the Rain’
‘Goldfish’
‘Finger Man’
‘The Curtain’
Having read the complete Chandler oeuvre, I have read these stories but have not thought of them for years. Time to re-new our acquaintance.

 
Two things emerged. First, I heard characters, incidents, events, situations that Chandler re-worked later in his novels. It was interesting to realise that good as the stories were, they were improved when he re-worked them into the novels. Though there also people and events in the stories that did not make it to the novels, some pretty arresting ones, especially those goldfish and the small woman with the big gun.
Second, Elliot Gould was all wrong for this assignment. He just does not sound like California. He lacks the laconic sunshine in his voice of, say, Dick Powell, Robert Montgomery, James Garner, or Powers Boothe, all of whom have had a turn at Marlowe. Yes, I know Humphrey Bogart was also a New Yorker but he did not sound it the way Gould does.  Now perhaps it is because I know who Gould is that I say that.  But while I am saying it I will add that he sounds like a New Yorker.  
His diction is perfect; he does well in distinguishing the voices of all the characters, yet I quibble.  
There is more, perhaps I was also distracted because I know why he got the assignment.  He played Marlow in a Robert Altman film ‘The Long Goodbye’ in 1973 derived from Chandler’s novel of the same name. And that is my point, because that film was a parody of Marlowe. Its expressed purpose was to show how inept and unsuited such a figure as Marlowe was in the real word of crime and corruption.
To return to my theme. Gould’s claim to the job is that he was the anti-Marlowe. That niggled me, too. That made two strikes against it. I cringed at his New York voice and I just knew he had no sympathy for the character he was projecting. Had he any sympathy he would never have done the Altman film!
There are dozens of alternatives to listen to on my iPhone but I stuck out ‘The Killer in the Rain’ to the end. Why? Chandler’s prose.
Raymond Chandler
That man could turn a phrase, spin a metaphor, bite off a line, all in the warm California sunshine he could present a very dark, very black world.
The bad news is that Gould is the reader for most of the Chandler titles on Audible.
I discovered Audible Books with my first smartphone, a Samsung, and liked the idea. At that time I walked the honourable dog several mornings a week and sometimes in the afternoon, too. Kate and I were both working and we took turns.  When on dog walking duty I listened to talking books.
I was familiar with talking books on CDs and had listened to many on drives in the States, including much Marcel Proust. Those titles were all books that had been produced for voice. With Audible I also discovered books that were only Voice Books, just as there are books that are only Electronic books, v-books and e-books.  The first v-book I heard was a freebie from Audible, that must have been the business model to lure in customers, about letters to Sherlock Holmes’s address. It was a nice idea for a set up. I joined Audible and continue to subscribe.

A Swedish krimie in a series featuring the insightful Inspector Irene Huss. These are police procedurals of a high order. This is the second Huss novel I have read. Evidence is compiled and interpreted, witnesses are questioned repeatedly, and finally Huss sees something in it. The locale is well realised, as are the manners and morēs of contemporary Sweden in Göteborg, along with the weather.

This story revolves around arson and spans 15 years. Huss makes several mistakes but admits it and continues. She has grit, that is for sure. The Fire Dance of the title is very nicely done and makes sense. 
Huss, when not pursing murderers, copes with two teenage daughters who are fast outgrowing her influence. Her husband works as many nights as she does and that makes things difficult, despite the abundant good will of all parties. He is a chef in a restaurant.
That is the molasses, and here is the vinegar. 
There are far too many distractions, most of which do not develop either plot or character. There are repeated descriptions of rooms and clothes that contribute zero to the story. Yet in contrast, Angelika, a principal character, is left practically a cartoon figure there to be stupid, vain, and just get in the way, not a human being at all, but an annoying plot device.
In reality police work on many cases at once, true, but in this novel there is a second plot that occupies a quarter of the book and contributes nothing to the main story line. Art must reflect life, yes, but it need not repeat it word-for-word. 
If the superfluous description were substantially reduced and the secondary plot truncated to an aside the book would shed 100 pages, and increase the likelihood that a reader will finish it.  When an author spends so much space on descriptions and the secondary plot, readers begin to think that they somehow will play into the resolution.  That is the contract between krimie writers and krimie readers: If it is there, then it is relevant in the end.  Not so here. This contract goes double for procedurals which this title certainly is.
Huss’s home life is well handled but there is just too much of it. The husband’s collapse seems contrived and is wholly irrelevant. Yes, I know, life is like that, but this book is not life, it is art.
Finally, I just did not get the motivation of the villain.  It did not register, just voilà, he did it. Why? 
I felt very early that Huss jumped to the conclusion without any evidence that the victim had been held prisoner, when, especially given how strange the victim was, she just might have gone off on her own. Of course that is what happened but it seemed like Huss had read the book and knew the future! Equally, the initial description of the victim as icy and remote does not payoff. It is there, it seems significant, it is well written, and, it is irrelevant.

Commissario Guido Brunetti remains in top form. Age has not wearied Donna Leon. The prose is crisp, the place evoked, the people differentiated, the ear for dialogue is pitch perfect, including that all important element of many conversations — what is not said. 

This adventure takes Brunetti into the world of rare books when thefts from a specialist library come to light. To understand better this strange new world he seeks advice from friends of friends and others among the many strata and castes of contemporary Venice. Though the impact of tourism is mentioned Leon does not, in this book, dwell on it, perhaps remembering that those tourist dollars keep Venice afloat on its lagoon, much more so that any support from the government in distant Rome. 
Brunetti’s home life is evident but treated with a light and sure touch. Though we learn about some of his meals, the pitiless descriptions that populate some, many tiresome krimies is avoided. Likewise she seldom if ever describes clothing or even people. The exceptions to this lack of description are well judged to bring out a person’s character, not an automatic gurgitation to fill space that is so common in lesser works.
Once again, as often the case, Signorina Elettra finds out anything and everything about others, and gives nothing away about herself. Her private networks are more extensive and efficient than the police files. In addition, her hobby seems to be computer hacking. Some receptionist, she. 
That is the molasses, now for a touch of vinegar. The book suffers from the Foyle Syndrome, though not so pronounced as in some of her other titles in the series. The Foyle Syndrome? It is so named for Christopher Foyle of the eponymous television series. Over the years the lazy script writers for Foyle relied on plots in which Foyle alone is virtuous, unsullied, uncompromised, the only, the last just man in a completely corrupt world. Regular as commercials on television and just as repetitive, Foyle would show in each episode that his superiors and associates were all villains themselves, along with the target villain. His superiors and associates lied, cheated, stole, blackmailed, murdered as much as the target villains. Whew! 
Lacking in imagination, the writers evidently could think of no other way to emphasise Foyle than to contrast his white purity with the black hearts of ALL those around him.  One day, no doubt the writers will turn on Sam, his loyal driver, and reveal….   Well, something bad.  
I stopped watching Foyle, as I do not find saints quite as interesting to watch as the scriptwriters find it easy to write them.  Foyle’s sermons at the end were just too much. Agatha Christie novels are much more subtle than this.
There is a touch of this syndrome in all of Leon’s books, but it does not distract here. Comments on the general greed, corruption, and incompetence of Italy and Italians are matter of fact, like comments on the weather. The proximate embodiments of all that are his superior Patta and Patta’s attack dog, Lieutenant Scarpa. These two are ciphers at best, more plot devices to inject some tension into the proceedings.
Donna Leon

The novel offers very good sense of place in India, namely Goa and some of Bombay, too, evidently before it became again Mumbai. The two protagonists are an Anglo-Indian lawyer and his de facto wife. an American working for the ‘Times of India.’ I found neither of interest on any level but not ciphers.

The novel is an unremitting tale of corruption. All India and all Indians are corrupt, and the foreigners who come to India are either fools or even bigger villains than the Indians. All rather one-note, repeated on nearly every second of the 400 pages.
Having said that, the characterisations are vivid and the plot is ingenious, if disgusting. Against impossible odds our heroes prevail by turning the villains against each other. 
Goa is circled in red.
That the molasses here is the vinegar.There is 100 pages too much description of what every character wore each time he or she is seen, what is eaten for each meal by our heroes. There are rich descriptions of street scenes, one after another, till they all blend. No doubt life is like that but reading about it should not be. A reader will suppose at the start that somehow it all contributes to the plot but quickly tires of following it all, and then one, well, this one, realised it is window dressing, like sprigs of curly parsley on the plate. Conclusion? Best to skim and turn the pages quickly.  
Second in a series but I see no reason to persevere. Too many other good books to read.
Inside this fat book of 400 pages an editor like Elmore Leonard or Stephem King could cut out a good 200 page book that would read itself.  
Machiavelli is mentioned. ‘As the philosopher Chanakya, adviser to Mauryan Kings, had declared two thousand years before Machiavelli, the exercise of morality and the exercise of statecraft were separate arts.’   This is a reminder of Richard Christie’s account of the development of MACH IV personality scale which has preoccupied me for some time.
Paul Mann

Set in that wine capital in the period May – September 1940 when the world fell in on France.

In April 1940 in far away Bordeaux everyone laughed at the Phoney War and by September 1940 Jews went into hiding, tobacco went into the black market, jackboots were heard everyday and night, and an air of foreboding enveloped one and all. The night creatures emerged, thugs, hooligans, bullies, chancers, and their ilk. Decent people hid away as much as possible.

Bordeaux was in Occupied France and as a sea port it was especially occupied to keep people in as much as out, but it was administered by the French government that took up residence in Vichy.
The longstanding practice of posting newly promoted police officers away from home, the better to ensure their impartiality, meant that the Police Judiciare in Bordeaux had Alsatians who are half-German and half-French. Aside: The movement of the border in Alsace meant that in World War I Robert Schumann, later a French foreign minister, was conscripted into the German army and in World War II the French army, experiences that made him a life long proponent of European union. Back to the story.
The Gendarmes find a mutilated body and Inspector Jean Lannes arrives to investigate. There are too few threads to follow, and then too many. Political interference adds to the complications. Those problems fade into insignificance with the Defeat and the Capitulation in June 1940 and the subsequent arrival of the Germans. Yet Lannes continues to probe and push. His offsider Moncerre is a pit-bull on a chain, and Lannes has to restrain him at time. ‘Not now, Mon Brave. Our time will come. Be patient.’
This is the first of a trilogy and the case remains open at the end. The book is well written and includes Lannes’s home life, his fears for his children, his wife’s perseverance in the face of the unknown, the mixed attitudes of the Alsatians, the plight of Jews, the Stoicism of many, and the naked opportunism of others .…. All rendered in clear prose.
Allan Massie
Though it perhaps lacks the stifling atmosphere, and mastery of period detail, that Robert Janes conjures in the same period, it is much easier to read and follow than Janes’s cryptic prose, fractured syntax, and loose grammar.
I particularly liked Lannes instinctive response when on an official visit to Vichy he saw Maréchal Pétain walking in a public garden: Verdun. Respect. Salute. One old soldier pays tribute to another. Lannes has no taste for collaboration and sees no honour in defeat, but Pétain has more claim to respect than so many others.
Pedant’s note. The Vichy regime had administrative responsibility for the whole of France including the Occupied Zone and Paris. The reality of that attenuated with time and tide, but in the first days it was real.
Hitler’s New Order of Europe and in parallel Pétain’s National Revolution seemed credible in that time and place. The war was all but over. England would either succumb or make peace to save itself now that it no longer had French allies to die for it. The Third Republic and the French Revolution that it embodied had failed miserably. Time to turn from the past to the future. The young men and women in Lannes’s social, family, and professional circles are confused, dazzled, repelled, and attracted by it all. Will they do something stupid? Dangerous? Almost certainly. But which is more stupid and more dangerous defying the new reality or complying with it?
While there is much to’ing and fro’ing in Bordeaux, street names, cafés, hotels, Spanish Republican refuges, French refuges who arrive just before the Wehrmacht, the two most noteworthy events to happen in Bordeaux in the period the book covers are passed in silence. The first is the Dunkirk evacuation and the second is the arrival of the French government of Paul Reynaud from Paris. Let me explain.
Though distant Dunkirk is mentioned nothing more is said. Yet of the 350,000 soldiers evacuated from the Pas de Calais more than 100,000 were French. The war was still on and upon arrival in England they were put on trains and transported to Bristol, Swansea, and other ports where they were shipped to Bordeaux, on the assumption that the war would go on. All of this was done in a few days. They had no gear or weapons and the chain of command was gone, but they were able-bodied young men with military discipline and combat experience. I am not sure what happened to them in Bordeaux. I expect the malaise of defeat made it impossible for anything constructive to be done. Still the influx of 100,000 men with no shelter, food, etc. would surely have been remarkable.
Second, the Reynaud government declared Paris an open city in the hope that the Germans would not then bomb or shell it. That worked. It went on the road and stopped once or twice along the way before arriving in Bordeaux where it held its last meetings before it dissipated.

First things first, Agatha Christie is the Nile River of murder mysteries. Her flood of stories has enriched the soil for others, imitators, rivals, critics, competitors, parodists, and those who try their own hand. Miss Marple, Tommy and Tuppence, and most of all, the one and the only Hercule Poirot.
Agatha Christie, who said the secret to getting ahead is getting started. Amen!
Poirot revivus! He died in ‘Curtin’ published in 1975 but written thirty (30) years earlier and cached.
The Christie family has guarded her heritage with care. No cheap knock-offs, no tee-shirts, or coffee mugs, no theme tours of St Mary Mead.
Only occasionally have the Christies permitted films based on the novels, and according to the scuttlebutt amongst us krimieologists, the family has not been pleased by some of the movies. Ergo the exacting standards the Christies asserted for the Davis Suchet television series, and we viewers are grateful for the meticulous attention to every last detail, which is just what Poirot himself would do. As he says in this tribute volume, no detail is too small to be important. Only when seen in the proper context can the importance of a detail be determined. Order and method, that is the Poirot way.
This title is a Christie-inheritors approved work that is set in the London of 1928. There is neither war nor depression, yet. Money flow freely.

This Poirot is certainly Poirot. He is meticulous, scrupulous, fastidious, observant, perspecatious, easily irked and rather irksome himself. The little mustachios seem to twitch at times. The grey cells are evoked. But more important is the inner man who is compassionate and who detests the evil we do to each other without quite detesting the evildoer, or at least not in all cases.
Each character is well etched and distinguished, though I missed Captain Hastings, here replaced by a fledging police officer name Catchpool. Fee in the coffee shop is a winner and I am sure most readers want to hear more from her. Even Poirot is moved to remark on both her powers of observation and grasp of context, if lacking his unrivalled mastery, as he avers.
There is much to like in the book. If I have to make a criticism I would say that I found the repetitive dialogue as each character tells the story, and some of them tell it twice, and Poirot re-tells it again and again, tedious. We need more movement and activity. The author seems, however, to prefer talk, talk, talk, and more talk. All too much like a David Mamet play where the characters talk each other to distraction and the audience to sleep.
The plot, of course, is convoluted but that is to be expected, though why anyone would try to outsmart Hercule defies belief. Does not everyone know by now that he is world’s greatest detective and is never ever wrong! He certainly does his part to spread the word. However, the plot did not quite deliver the goods. There was a lot more trip than arrival, despite the many repetitions. Perhaps that is a quibble. But the monogram seems to have been there just to confuse things at the beginning, and some of Poirot’s revelations would have been trumped by police post-mortems if the wet-behind-the-ears Catchpool had followed procedure as per many other Agatha Christie stories.
Blue herrings there were a few, and some were never resolved on my reading. Rafal and that laundry cart in the front lobby is made much of when it occurs and referred to again at least once as a lead, and then never mentioned again though Rafal reappears. What did I miss? The hotel manager is such a larger than life character for the first half of the book and then all but disappears. When a character is given so much attention, the reader concludes that the character figures in the plot and is not just wallpaper.
There is an accompanying web site with some mini-videos of the books characters and episodes. Although the ones I watched did not jibe with the novel, so I stopped.
Overall, it is very good to see that Hercule Poirot is back among the crimefighters. Thanks to all involved in the resuscitation.
Sophie Hannah
Sophie Hannah has a long list of titles and I will certainly make a note to try one of them.

Maigret did not leap full grown from Simenon’s brow, as Athena did from Zeus. No, he developed overtime. This is one of the early titles.
It is high summer and Maigret wanders around, seemingly with few responsibilities. Madame (Louise) Maigret has gone away for the summer to visit her sister in Alsace, and in her absence he haunts restaurants and bars, and falls in with the crowd at the ‘Two-Penny Bar’ along the Seine in the Ile de France. When a crime occurs under his nose, he muses quite a bit and asks a few questions, but keeps drinking with the crowd, whose members do not seem to mind having a police officer in their midst.

His rapport with the English ex-patriot James is engaging. James keeps popping up and it is evident that he is part of the plot, despite his detached manner.

The sketches of summer heat and blinding light along the Seine make a reader feel warm.

Madame Maigret is, as ever, patient, and long-suffering in silence.
The published title in 1932 as ‘La Guinguette à deux sous’, it was translated into an English edition years ago as ‘The Bar on the Seine.’ A ‘guinguette’ is a small, rustic bar with music and dancing, often to be found in the countryside. Perhaps the equivalent English term is a tavern – nothing fancy and not much in the way of food. ‘Roadhouse’ might also apply.

In the French ‘deux sous’: one ‘sou’ + one ‘sou’ = two sous.’ There were 100 ‘sous’ in a franc in those days. A ‘sou’ bought very little, even in 1932. Hence the idiom, not worth a sou (‘ne vault pas un sou’).

For reasons best known to the translator, and I suspect even better known to the publisher, it has been rendered as ‘two-penny.’ Yet later we read of francs. How many pennies to a franc, one wonders.

‘Two-penny’ is not an English idiom, per my web investigation. It seems to be idiosyncratic, fabricated for this title. That is bound to communicate to the reader, eh!

Why do I emphasise this usage by devoting space to it? Because the justification proudly displayed on the Penguin web site for these new translations of the Maigret books that it is marketing is to offer more literal, more authentic translations closer to the original. We can be pretty sure no one along the Seine in 1932 was paying with pennies. One may also wonder about the business sense of deprecating one’s own previous products, too, because after all Penguin editors commissioned and published those earlier translations. If they were as bad as now claimed, does that not undermine confidence in the present crop? Well it does when pennies go into francs. What will future editors at Penguin say about these translations?

I am equally dubious about the woman’s bathing suit that graces the cover of the copy I have. I rather doubt it was worn in 1932. Most swim-ware at the time would have been made of wool, I suspect, and have likely been more modest than the red number on the cover. ‘Fuzzylizzie swimwear’ confirms my hunch.