Token lady

Vol.VI of the collected works is a collection of short stories from the period between the first and second series of Maigret stories - observing here in passing that Maigret retired at the end of the first series, retired to the point of having tidied up a nephew in difficulties with the milieu in a case taken after his retirement, a case in which Simenon could generate a bit of interest by pointing up all the difficulties arising from trying to do police work from the outside. I think the second series starts in medias res. I will no doubt find out in a few days.

Short stories which I have mostly found a bit tiresome. Maybe, in origin, the sort of thing that would have been published in a newspaper or a magazine - but too short for me. One's brain goes to all the bother of engaging in a new story and then it is over: I like a bit more return for all that effort at the beginning.

But at the end of the volume we have a short collection called Nouvelles Exotiques, in which the stories are a little longer and have the added piquancy of being set in foreign parts, mostly in the French African colonies of the time, full of louche expatriates with too much time on their hands and who take too much drink. Otherwise, reference 1.

This story is set on a small British ship, taking both cargo and passengers, which runs between Tahiti and Australia. A French pair take on the leading roles, which enables Simenon to make a bit of fun at the expense of his caricatured English, including a milady of menopausal years who is rather too inclined to take her pleasure with young men from the lower classes, of the wrong colour even, who cross her path.

But the real novelty is that the amateur sleuth in this story is the young lady of the French pair. The first and only time that Simenon allowed a lady, never mind a young lady, such an important role. Well fairly important. Amounting to a bit of feminine intuition - this despite her unmarried state - plus a bit of eyelash fluttering. Fluttering in the past at the young man who is the secretary of the governor of Tahiti, on the strength of which she flutters her eyelashes at the young telegraphist on the ship, to get him to send a telegram to the secretary. On which the secretary digs up the necessary and the job is done, without our needing to leave the ship.

Milady has falsely claimed that her jewels were stolen while she was on the ship to avoid public scandal at their having been stolen in the margins of a peccadillo in the margins of a louche night club in Tahiti. She is allowed plenty of rope by her husband (a minor ambassador somewhere in South America, absent for the duration), but not public scandal.

PS: a new to me phrase, arising when the passengers of our ship are sitting around in the saloon, a bit suspicious and cross with each other: '... on se regarda en chiens de faïence'. Which I thought rather good.

Reference 1: L'Enquête de Mademoiselle Doche - Simenon - circa 1944. Being one of the Nouvelles Exotiques in Vol.VI of the collected works.