Marple in French

Simenon wrote more than twenty volumes' worth of Maigret stories, maybe sixty or seventy stories in all, compared with maybe seventy Poirot and a dozen Marple stories from Agatha. With most of these last involving the more or less friendly participation of the local plod. While Maigret is the plod, working the story from the inside.

But Simenon does cut himself some slack. He allows a superintendent of police to do stuff that would normally be done by one of his inspectors or sergeants. He sometimes has Maigret acting ultra vires, that is to say out of area, while on leave or when retired. Giving his hero a slightly different point of view on the world of crime.

He also takes an interest in the relations between the plod and press, perhaps because he started life as a journalist covering crime, along with dog shows, beauty contests and all the rest of it.

And now, I have finally got around to plugging my gap in the collected works at Volume VII, Le Petit Docteur, a series of short stories about a country doctor, living quite near where Simenon was living at the time, 1938, at La Rochelle, who solves murder mysteries, rather after the fashion of Miss. Marple. Another point of view on the business of solving crime, with Simenon being both more interested and more up-front about how the change of point of view changes things in general.

He has also been quite interested in the way that detecting provides his doctor with opportunities for sitting around in cafés, which more or less requires the consumption of alcohol. While my understanding is that, while Simenon might have liked a drink, he was a long way off being an alcoholic. Perhaps he knew that plenty in the crime trade were.