Political theory and practice – Page 29

Les petits meurtres d’Agathe Christie (2009+), Season 2.

IMdB meta-data is 42 episodes (for all three seasons) of 90m each, rated 7.6 by 1067 cinematizens.

Genre: krimi, species Christie.

Verdict: Delicieux!

Season Two is set in the 1950s to the mid-1960s, specifically after 1954 because that is when the très moderne Facel Vega coupé automobile driven by one character came (briefly) on to the market. The ensemble cast includes the dumb blonde in the office, the super cop, and the ambitious and impetuous journalist. It is set in Le Nord, near, but not in the city of Lille. There is plenty of the rain for which the North is famous.

Supercop learns to appreciate the goodhearted simplicity of the blonde secretary who painfully types his reports, exploits a journalist’s youthful fearlessness to blunder into situations, and they in turn appreciate his tenacity in ferreting out la verité, as Maigret would say.

The plots are derived from Agatha Christie, some from the Tommy and Tuppence sequence, others from Dame Marple, and Monsieur Poirot, aussi, but re-potted into French soil, and given a French twist.

While Supercop is a man of many talents, we are spared a backstory and he does not have a painful private life (so trivialised in most cop shows). Indeed, he seems to have little private life at all but he does like slamming up crims.

The redheaded journalist has two first names, Alice Avril, and provides the energy. Marlène the secretary is the emoting and emotional sounding board, while Supercop is the electronic brain. Together they are a kind of family of siblings. He is the older brother who enjoys teasing and tormenting the younger sister journalist, while ignoring the older clothes-horse secretary whose head is full of romantic nonsense from women’s magazines.

Loved the episode where he got a mobile phone in 1954. Yep, a war surplus US Army field telephone the size of a suitcase, which he carried around only to have the Telecom reception drop out at crucial moments. Very realistic. Minitel would have to wait.

Although many changes have been made from the sources, the villains remain the same, in so far as I recall the Dame’s stories. When the ghosts appear in Silent Witness, no effort is made to offer a Cartesian explanation, Horatio.

The touch is light, the movement is brisk, the dialogue sparkles, the villains are ever so polite, though too often the immediate effort to avoid an investigation by labelling the death a suicide or an accident is clumsy and irritating. The worst example is the L’affaire Prothero. Memo to script writers, stop messing about and let the team get on with it. Though in that episode the victim is so repellent we could hardly wait for his demise.

On the other hand, there are occasional dream sequences that are a hoot, as when the journalist is confronted by a dissatisfied and armed reader! (Dare we hope Rupert Moloch has such dreams?) When Marlène gets carried away in a romantic revery straight out of the women’s magazines she devours every day. Or when Supercop realises he cares about each of them and recoils in horror because his armour has rusted. Then there is the singular appearance of his anti-Cartesian mother, the mystic. More mère, please.

The tomboyish journalist has some Cinderella transformations.

There is also some superb acting when the script calls for it. The episode when it seems Marlène has been murdered elicits terrific performances from both Supercop and Journalist as they realise how much they loved her for all her genial incompetence. And Marlène plays a double role as herself and her dowdy, miserable sister. Chapeaux! A reverse Cinderella. Even more memorable is one character actor who says not a line, but the guilt, fear, and shame that cross her face are remarkable in two short scenes.

Anachronisms, there a few. In one episode a school teacher remarks in passing that she is ’gay.’ Surely no school teacher in 1954 would publicly to admit to being a lesbian to anyone, still less a police officer, though Marlène’s stupefied reaction is of the time and place.

Seasons One and Three are set in different time periods with different casts, and from a brief look they do not appeal to me. Each season had six episodes but this team was so popular more and more were made over the years to a total of twenty-seven. Season One is set in the 1930s and Three in the latter 1960s.

These are available on You Tube with subtitles. As always with You Tube, it is best to be quick. There are indications that more have been made and the search has begun. Some episodes can be found subtitled on DVD called (Agatha Christie’s) Criminal Games. Good luck.

Le Bon Marché

One of the oldest and biggest department stores in Paris is Le Bon Marché. To read a history of the origins, foundation, and life of this great enterprise I thought would be amusing, informative, and diverting. My imagination ran ahead to consider the nervous bankers who staked the first investment in this new-fangled idea. Then there was the genius who recognised the opportunity. Once a going concern I imagined the turf wars among its sections and ego conflicts among its personalities. The decisions about display, say for example, ladies undergarments. Over the years more than one cashier must have been tempted by the grisbi. I wondered what famous names had started a career selling hair brushes there, or in the back sorting stock for the shelves. Then there would be the customers.… Rich pickings for sure!

Yes, reading about that great ship, its crew and its passengers, sailing through good times and bad would be great fun and interesting. What a cast of thousands from slumming aristocrats to charlatans and grifters, provincial girls leaving home for the big city department store and accountants giving up private practice, the civic bureaucracy that would have to approve everything from construction to opening hours, to say nothing of the opportunities for kickbacks on orders, featherbedding nepotism in staffing, creative accounting and more. Then there would be the changing fashions in clothing, but also in plumbing and kitchens that a successful merchant must lead and follow. To stay afloat BoMac, as habitués once called it, must have been reinvented more than once: that means change, which of course also means resistance. The stories must be myriad.

‘Bring it on!’ I cried.

Regret followed immediately when I read the first chapter. Perhaps I should begin with a Content Warning. Beware! The book was written by a sociologist. In the name of discretion I do not enter the title of the book nor the name of the author.

In the first quarter of the book there is no sign of a human being. Instead there are structures and forces, movements and phenomena, masses and elites, classes and cleavages, times and tides, change and continuity, abstractions and concepts galore. It is likewise encrusted with caveats and qualifications that obscure whatever the point may be. This defensive, small-target approach exhausts the reader long before it enlightens.

No one makes decisions, no one makes mistakes, no one does anything – the gestalt does it all through its mechanistic extensions. There are no agents, only structures. Yes, a few names are named, but they are Sims not individuals with wills, hopes, ambitions, and other human cargo. They function as chess pieces on a chequerboard of sociological theories and concepts.

Was it Gerald Durrell who once described a jellyfish as a process? The fish is itself 95% water, immersed in itself – water. It is hardly (5%) apart from the water. To think of it as separate from water is to misconceive it. To abstract the jellyfish from water makes it meaningless, inert, in a word, dead. That image came to mind as I read this book, well the Kindle sample.

I could go on, and the author certainly did, but well it is not reading for pleasure and profit. If suffering from a toothache, this is a book to read because the concentration and effort it requires will take anyone’s mind off a dental pain…. Perhaps I should try Émile Zola’s novel Au Bonheur des Dames (1883) for some of this story, but I do not associate reading the didactic moralist Zola with amusement or pleasure.

Castle Shade (2021) by Laurie King

GoodReads meta-data is 360 pages, Rated 4.11 by 3005 litizens

Genus: krimi, species Sherlock, hybrid Mrs Holmes.

Mrs Sherlock Holmes (yes, you read that right) tackles vampires in this outing. After a sojourn in Monaco (wherein Monte Carlo is a hill on which the richest live) the Holmeses have decamped to the Carpathian mountains in dark and mysterious Roumania. In fact, Sherl went alone earlier while Mrs was still settling Rivera hash, and then he returned to fetch her along for the ride. And not just the Carpathians, but, yes, Transylvania (and not the so-named county in Kentucky). Holmes learns Roumanian in a few hours. Well, he is Sherlock.

The trolls have been posting threats against Queen M’s youngest daughter, and after consulting the shade of granny Vicky, Queenie enlists Sherl to square the deal. There be vampires!? Well maybe, but more likely someone wants to create panic about such creatures to blame the Queen, using the same playbook found in D.C. of late: the bigger the lie, the better. Can the Moloch Media be far away?

They are riding to the aid of one of Queen Victoria’s grand offspring, Marie of Roumania, Queen by a marriage to a German princeling who found himself on the Bucharest throne. Later the post-War communist regime devoted much energy to denigrating her, suggesting that she might have done good works. The king is an invalid and the crown Prince a wastrel who resents his mother’s efforts to rei(g)n him in while dad-king is too enervated to cope, leaving Marie the top dog.

Could the plot to discredit her be political? Nationalists who reject a foreign queen? Communists who see an opportunity with the king and eldest son useless? Is it international with Hungary aiming to reclaim turf? Is it about money? Or….is the personal political and vice versa?

The telling is superb though the villain was not altogether convincing but the trip through Transylvania was great fun. Strange what one finds in castle walls.

The Princess Ileana who figures in this story died in 1991 after years as the Mother Superior in a convent in Ohio. From Princess of the realm to negotiating the roster for cleaning the toilets is her story.

Stallion Gate (1987) by Martin Cruz Smith

Stallion Gate (1987) by Martin Cruz Smith

GoodReads meta data is 384 pages, rated 3.66 by 1652 litizens.

Genre: thriller, krimi.

Verdict: overweight.

In arid New Mexico in early 1945 thousands toiled at a secret project. One peon was a New Mexico National Guard sergeant named Joe, an Indian of some ilk. Naturally, others call him Chief (and he does strut around like one at times).

The peons hate each others, GIs versus civilian contractors, white versus black, white versus red, Anglo versus European, residents versus interlopers, Yankee Doodles versus Red spies, pencil necks versus he-men, mathematicians versus physicists, Greasers versus Jews, everyone versus the local Indians, and on and on. There may be a war on with the prospect of a million more casualties to come, but these thousands have plenty of time for their endless, mutual animosities. True to life then.

The title speaks to the author’s contrivances. The test site was called Trinity and the trinity mountain peaks are mentioned early on and then forgotten as our protagonist insists on calling it Stallion Gate, and though there are references to wild horses in the vicinity none put in an appearance.

The author did a great deal of research and it is stuffed on the pages — about pottery, about Filipinos, about Indian spirits, about boxing, and about the physics, without any dramatic effect. Alas, sorry to say that, but it is true for this reader. Joe is a man among men, and among women who fall over themselves to get at him – every author’s wet dream. He is a boxer, a (modest) war hero, a man of his people, a thinker, a man who never sleeps, and who roams around this top hush hush facility at will because he alone is trusted by one and all.

His notional superior is a purebred cardboard.

Am I jaded? Perhaps. I read recently a leaner version of very similar story in Joseph Kanon, Los Alamos (1998), which seemed much less padded, and less boy’s own. It also offered a subtle account of the strange bedfellows General Grove and Dr Oppenheimer.

Mind you, there are some fine moments in Stallion Gate in the description of a sunrise or the reaction to the conscience of the scientists versus those million soon to be casualties, or for that matter the 70,000 casualties that had already been suffered on Japanese soil at Okinawa in the typhoon of steel. Had the Bomb been used earlier, many of those dead might have been spared along with the hundred thousand Japanese who died there.

There is a distant personal connection through the New Mexico National Guard which was deployed to the Philippines in 1941 just before the Japanese invasion. One of my in-laws was in their ranks, and he was not as lucky as Joe. Who, by the way, seems strangely incurious about the Filipinos who saved him. He talks of them as though they were a mere plot contrivance. Hmmm.

Lightness, we need it.

Listening to Lord Bragg’s ‘In Our Time’ podcast on Colette (1873-1954) the other day brought to mind Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984).

How so?

Bragg’s panel members were absolutely determined to read into Colette’s wondrous prose all manner of weighty and sharp points about gender, equality, class, history, power, and more. When Colette wrote her sinuous and sparkling prose about sunflowers in a field, according to the savants, she was subtly undermine the patriarchy or denouncing it. When she wrote charming vignettes about Claudine’s schoolgirl crushes on the film stars, she was subtly attacking social class. And so for the prescribed 45 minutes, but this time I did not exercise the option of listing to the bonus five minutes afterward, so tedious and tendentious did I find the recitation.

When I thought about it later, Kundera came to mind. As for the heavy-weights in Kundera’s novel, so for the Colette panelists, only meaning has any value at all. If Colette wrote about flowers because she liked doing it, was good at doing it, and found it satisfying as an end in itself, it does not have meaning at all to these scholars. They united in denouncing her most effervescent novel, Gigi (1944) categorically and repeatedly, including gratuitous ad hominem asides.

It seemed to me as I listened, and it seems to me now in hindsight that the panelists were pursing their own agendas and not Colette’s. That she wrote Gigi in German occupied Paris, living in constant fear that her Jewish husband would be arrested…. That did not enter into the discussion. The lightness of Gigi was much needed when she produced it. That is remarkable.

Before and during the war she published life-style articles and some stories in publications that were anti-Semitic, pro-German, collaborationist, and Vichy. Again our panelists were silent. I expect she did so to eke out a living in hard times and from 1940 there were no other choices. All that seemed much more important in her life than their abstractions about gender, class, patriarchy, capitalism, and other way stations on the tenure-track. Survival. And to survive she looked to light side, the bright side.

Nor was much said about her short but noteworthy career as a journalist of which she once said, in a lesson few journalists these days heed, ‘you have to see and not invent, you have to touch and not imagine…’ (By the way, she reported crime – robbery, rape, and murder – for a Paris scandal sheet, not flower shows.)

I read a long biographical introduction to a volume of her memorable short stories years ago, and cannot identify it today, but some of it stuck with me.

Enclaves, exclaves, counter-exclaves… Lost yet?

Trivia of the week. Amaze you friends. Bore your family. Drone on and on. See below.

When is an international border not a border at all? There are enclaves, oh hum, yes, we all know that. But do we all know about exclaves, yes, and counter-exclaves. Fascinating, yes?

Belgium and the Netherlands were once a single entity called the Spanish Netherlands. Within that unity there were all sorts of medieval fiefdoms compounded by political matrimony and varied laws of inheritance, Papal territories, duchies, principalities, free cities, much of it tracing back to Charlemagne. Spanish hegemony had left all those pieces alone to concentrate on collecting taxes and flanking the French. In the centuries the lords and ladies had swapped acres here and there, bought and sold some, left others as inheritances, and traded land back and forth in their domains. Then in a long series of conflicts the Spanish left and later at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 Belgium and the Netherlands divided into two distinct, sovereign nations – one a monarchy and one a republic – with an international border between them. Almost….

In 1815 not all of the rival claims to territory could be resolved and the great powers of the day, having divided the two, had no interest in such fine details in a couple of brand-new minor countries and left them dangling. Despite repeated efforts since then, a few of them continue to dangle to this day. Read on for enlightenment.

Baarle-Nassau is an incorporated municipality in the southern Netherlands near the border with Belgium, but NOT on the border. It is about sixteen (16) kilometres from the border. Yet some of it is in Belgium, yet it is wholly within the Netherlands and yet I repeat: some of it is ‘of’ though not ‘in’ Belgium. Sit down and take a deep breath.

Quiet in the back! It has nothing to do with diplomatic territory. There is no embassy in this hicksville.

Based on medieval practice, royal decree, rule of law, sanctified by the Roman Catholic Church, there were numerous exclaves (look it up as above) of a Belgian municipality called Baarle-Hertog within Baarle-Nassau. For the purposes of this exposition from now on let us refer to the Dutch community as Nassau and the Belgian one as Hertog. Make a note of that for the final examination. The fraternity brothers will want to copy that later when they recover from Saturday’s hangover before starting on Sunday’s after chapel.

With a similar basis in ancient ritual, church law, taxation, and inheritance Hertog in its turn contains within its constituents counter-exclaves of Nassau. While there are several maps that show this situation, none that I found make it especially clear. But I have included the best of the ones I found.

There are 22 separate Belgian exclaves in Nassau, some consist of a single residence, others are grassland, or one side of a street of shops. Within these 22 Belgian exclaves there are in turn 7 separate Dutch counter-exclaves, each within a Belgian exclave. Following so far? If not go back to the beginning and move your finger along the text very slowly. The border of these claves, en-, ex-, and counter-ex, run through buildings, between houses on the same side of street, and along the loading dock of a wine shop, and so on. In one frequently mentioned case the border bisects the front door of a private home, which accordingly has two street numbers, one on each side, 7 for Dutch and 22 for Belgian.

The total population of the two mingled communities is about 12,000, and these days its main source income is tourism as people come there to see the oddities. Selfies abound. A zig-zag international border runs down the main street so that two shops side-by-side are in different countries, complying with different tax laws, labor legislation, opening hours, social laws that define pornography, and so on.

The town has one bank and the border runs through it! Business is shifted from one side of the border inside the bank to the other as required. And, yes, before the Euro all the commerce took place in two currencies, Belgian Francs and Dutch Guilders. Daylight saving times also differed. For the literal minded that meant it could be 7:00 am in the bedroom and 8:00 am in the kitchen.

A stamped letter to a Dutch address 20 meters down the street mailed in a Hertog letterbox goes to Brussels to be sorted, then to Amsterdam, and then back to Nassau in a week. In contrast the Dutch postal system is not centralised and a letter from Nassau to a Hertog address with a Dutch stamp put in a Dutch letter box is sorted locally and delivered that day to the Belgian postoffice which then delivers it to the door.

Albeit a jigsaw puzzle, surface jurisdiction is clear, but underground is another matter. If a new apartment building is put in a Dutch counter-exclave within a Belgian exclave, the apartment building will produce more sewage, must the Belgians in the surrounding exclave pay for the pipes to be upgraded too carry it? And if they do, then the pipes must meet Dutch standards at both ends to integrate from the apartment house to the surrounding Nassau. And so on. The same would apply to an apartment block built in a Belgian exclave.

As to standards, the Dutch have strict zoning laws that lead to architectural uniformity, whereas the Belgians have no such scruples. One street will be Dutch uniform up to the border and then the houses will be ranch style next to terrace next to mock Tudor and so on. Then there is the state religion in Belgian but not so in the Netherlands. That effects church bells, church levies, Sunday opening laws, film censorship, and charity laws.

If a builder’s project straddles a boundary, then the building must satisfy two sets of building codes, labour laws, taxation… The result is that builders try to avoid that. The wine shop mentioned above is a case in point. The building is regulated by Nassau while loading dock comes under Hertog. In the case the bank both sets of regulations apply since the border bisects the bank rather than dividing into front and back. And you thought a development application for the local council was a pain.

There have been two mayors, two high schools, two of everything in this small town.

By convention, the location of the front door of a house, shop, building determines its nationality (and hence exposure to property tax, access to services, etc). If the front door is in a Belgian exclave though bulk of the house behind it is in the Netherlands, the whole property is treated as Belgian. Some property owners have arranged the front door(s) to be flexible so that it can shifted from one side to the other when taxes change.

During recent COVID lockdowns the Belgian and Dutch governments made slightly different rules, and they were dutifully reflected within the borders of Hertog and of Nassau. A Dutch restaurant was closed but the Belgian one next door remained open.

To deal with all the anomalies, at town hall they do a lot of talking at a conference table with the border drawn down the middle. But in what language do they talk, a question that became in whose language do they talk? Though local Belgians are Flemish and speak that language, the officials representing them have long insisted on speaking French. That insistence on French is partly a retaliation against the Dutch snobbery about Flemish as a dialect (of Dutch) that they cannot understand, so crude is it. After a time, the two sides settled on negotiating in English.

The European Union has avoided this problem, leaving it to the locals. Evidently they have found a way to deal with the blind-eyes of the central governments.

One wonders about the role those exclaves played in World War I when Belgian was conquered by Germany while the Netherlands remained neutral. When both countries were occupied in World War II, it unlikely that the Occupier paid any attention to these niceties, but… Well, maybe. And as soon as the uniformity imposed by the Occupier was removed, no doubt both parties reverted to their old ways. (I had long been convinced by the argument of the [Louis] Brandeis Brief that if people’s behaviour was changed by law, over generations their thinking would change. The laboratory of Yugoslavia demolished that belief where the old ways emerged.) And today one might wonder how policing occurs in this divided jurisdiction.

On the lighter side, a sit-com set in this burg would have endless possibilities for canned laughter from one side or the other.

Homework starts with the entry in Wikipedia. Then try B. R. Whyte, ‘En territories belge et à quarantie centimètres de la frontière (2004),’ a study of the Belgian and Dutch enclaves of Baarle-Hertog and Baarle-Nassau.

There are many videos on You Tube but the most informative is Stefan’s from History Hustle. Search for ‘The world’s Strangest Borders between Belgium and the Netherlands: Baarle-Hertog and Baarle-Nassau.’

P.S. There are many other oddities, I since discovered in Central Asia among the one-time Soviet republics and in the Gulf of Persia between Oman and the United Arab Emirates. You have been warned! Maritime boundaries are even more vexed.

A Three Dog Problem (2021) by S. J. Bennett

GoodReads metadata is pages 288 rated 4.23 by 48 litizens.

Genre: Krimi.

Verdict: Deft.

A very disagreeable housekeeper trips over a whiskey bottle and dies. Good riddance and all that. The tabloid press goes even more bonkers than usual. In distant Sydney the sanctimonious tones of the ABC are sounded since this housekeeper once talked to a Strine. It’s world news because the house the victim kept was Buckingham Palace and her employer is one Mrs Elizabeth Mountbatten née Windsor, Queen of all the Englands, and more.

All those Buck House officials lift the carpet to sweep the housekeeper (deceased) under it on the way to their knighthoods. Trouble is someone is standing on the carpet. Indeed, it is Her Self the Majesty who would like to know just how one trips over a whiskey bottle in a place where one has no business and one is not a drinker of spirits, and one is roundly disliked by so many. What really did happen? Of course, this one cannot be so direct. Circumspection is thy name, Queenie.

And while she is about it, HM would also like to know how a painting given to her personally many years ago by an obscure Tasmania artist went from her bedroom wall to a Royal Navy wardroom. Drinking tea there after cutting yet another ribbon (must 50 this year already!) when she noticed it. Too polite too inquire then and there, she went back home to check. Sure enough, not where it used to be. So hard to keep track of one’s 7,000+ paintings.

Do these two mysteries intertwine, the errant painting and the corpsed keeper? All those prim and proper (blinkered) officials in Buck House will never notice. Still something is not quite right about either the wandering painting or terminated housekeeper. No, this is a job for someone who cannot say ‘no,’ the junior Assistant Private Secretary (APS), late of the Royal Horse Artillery, gets the assignment. The instruction are ‘Find the route that painting took from the royal bedroom to the naval wardroom, and find out who put the whiskey bottle there to fall over (if that is what happened). And do so with such deft discretion that no one knows you have done it. Should keep you busy a day on two on top of all your other duties.’

QEII cannot do anything herself since she is scheduled twenty-four hours a day and under scrutiny from staff every one of those hours. Any deviation would be an earthquake. The portrayals of royal life are many and fascinating in these pages. The gravities on Her Britannic Majesty exceed those borne by most astronauts. The pecking order among the Buckingham Palace staff is positively Byzantine with invisible lines of demarcation guarded day-and-night by fanatics. The buck-passing and blame-shifting are constant. Is this is the incubus of McKinsey management.

The Palace officials (all stiff upper-lipped chaps) seem relieved that the obnoxious housekeeper is no more, and are happy to move on with no further unpleasantness. That is in the great tradition of McKinsey Management, blame the victim. Absent fuel, the tabloids find something else to lie about. Check Pox News or the Moloch Press for the latest in fiction. The chaps have even less interest in an odd painting of no market value that does not belong to the nation but to Elizabeth Mountbatten. No, to achieve satisfaction, HM will have to see to it herself, but – of course – she cannot be seen to be seeing to it. Good thing she has had years of practice of not being seen to be seeing to things, and getting them done. They call it reigning rather than ruling.

That there seems to be a systematic and extensive campaign of stalking and harassing women employed in Buck House soon becomes apparent to everyone except those stiff-lipped chaps who run the place. Even the none-too-perceptive police officer who had a look at the house keeper’s cadaver grasps that and says so, but the chaps don’t hear what they do not want to know. What happens under the carpet, stays under the carpet, that seems to be their mantra. Once under the carpet, everything is under control.

This is the second in this series I have read and lapped up. Though I admit there is far too much padding with descriptions of clothes, furnishings, and food. When that description is in Buck House it is part of the atmosphere but it carries on as the APS goes out and about and it does go on. And on. Every where she goes, we get the full-IKEA, full-Elle, and full-Gourmet accounts. Treacle.

While whingeing I add that I found the plot tangled beyond my comprehension. Still I enjoyed the ride and the insight into the life of Buckingham Palace. HM’s affection for the valueless painting is explained in a charming aside. The title, by the way, refers to the appropriate number of dogs to take on a walk if one wants to think through a problem. Fewer than three and they expect to be entertained by ball throwing; more than three and one spends the whole time minding them. Three is just right: Enough to entertain themselves but not so many as to distract one from cogitation. This is just one of the many charming nostrums to be found in the book.

Maigret and the Coroner (1949) by Georges Simenon.

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.

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.

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.

Madame Quatre et ses enfants (1991)

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.

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.