Finally the first Maigret I really didn’t finish… Devilish clever and post-modernist and all. This is the real Parisian detective Maigret writing his memoirs about how he came to meet the Belgian writer Georges Sim, who became Georges Simenon, stealing his character and his name, his shape, his methods, simplifying his cases, and making him available to the public and even available to be played by actors who in no way resemble him. His resentment of this is very clever, very smart, and funny conceptually, but it doesn’t grab like a real Maigret novel. I’m not sure we want to be reminded of the fictional nature of the heroes of our novels. It’s confusing and runs against some vein, as if some character in a play was constantly to remind you he was in a play. Two cracking Maigret novels. One from the plane and one immediately afterwards...