Georges Simenon’s literary detective Maigret is due for a renaissance

When you think of the popularisation of detective fiction and the great literary sleuths of the 19th and 20th centuries, there’s a usual roster of names that come up.

Sherlock Holmes with his violin, pipe and heroin habit, Hercule Poirot with his exacting standards and that distinctive moustache, Miss Marple and her unassuming but sharp intellect.

Crossing over to the US, it was the hard-boiled private eyes of the 1920s and 1930s such as Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade that endured over the decades, their legacies shored up by incredible screen adaptations that established an entire genre.

The young’uns had Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, and, more recently, Australians got to revel in the adventures of Phryne Fisher.

But one name that should be among that pantheon is Jules Maigret, who appeared in more than 70 novels and almost 30 short stories from 1930 until 1972. That’s more than Poirot and Holmes combined.

Perhaps it’s because Maigret is a French-creation by prolific Belgian-born writer Georges Simenon that the English-speaking world hasn’t taken to him as much as they have to his fellow pipe-smoker, Holmes.

Detective fiction enthusiasts know, of course, but Maigret is long overdue a renaissance moment.

Simenon wrote them as accessible stories using clear language, and he could punch one book out in under a fortnight. In the first era of Maigret’s literary life, Simenon published 19 novels between 1930 and 1934.

The point is not to be smugly clever, but to entertain, and you could breeze through the pacey and stimulating tomes in one sitting.

Canonically, Maigret, who was almost never referred to by his first name, is a detective commissioner in a Paris police unit, written as middle-aged, depending on the book, somewhere between 45 and 55 years old.

Most of the mysteries are set in Paris, and he is very much a creature of the city of lights, he’s someone who fits so perfectly into that milieu, almost as if he and the city existed as one. Occasionally, you find him further afield across France, including adventures on the Cote d’Azur or in Bergerac.

He loves a pipe – he even lines them up on his desk at the start of the day – and is happily married, seemingly unburdened by some great past trauma.

What makes him different from some of his literary contemporaries is that unlike Holmes and Poirot, Maigret solves crimes by neither forensic methods nor deductive reasoning. He’s more about intuition and trying to understand the psychology of the victims and the perpetrators. He tries to walk in their shoes, and often without judgment.

He is distinct among that era for being embedded within the police department, rather than as an outside consultant.

That puts him in a very different position in that he doesn’t have the hard-boiled cynicism of Spade and Marlowe, but is still clear-eyed about how the flaws in the systems and institution, and how that affects individuals.

He is also essentially a middle-class cop rather than the gentlemen detective of Holmes and Poirot, able to walk in different worlds without being too ostracised by those below or above him. That amenability is a powerful virtue for a detective.

Throughout literature, there have been different types of detectives – the armchair sleuth, the hardboiled PI, the forensic cop – and Maigret spans and transcends those genres with various nods to each. It’s what makes so malleable and yet firm as a character to guide readers through all these mysteries.

While Maigret has existed a little under the radar relative to Holmes and Poirot, he has had many lives on screen across the past century, started with Pierre Renoir in a 1932 film adaptation of Night at the Crossroads.

On the big screen, he’s been played by French cinema icon Jean Gabin, as well as Harry Baur, Michel Simon, Albert Prejean, Charles Laughton and the convicted sex criminal Gerard Depardieu.

The character has had a more robust life on TV, having been adapted numerous times including in the French series Les Enquetes du Commissaire Maigret, and by the likes of Bruno Cremer, Romney Brent, Michael Gambon, Rowan Atkinson, and, most recently, in a British series which updates it to the modern day and is completely in English even though it is set in Paris and everyone is French.

There’s a new film, Maigret and the Dead Lover, out on September 3 that hopes to restoke the love for Maigret, starring Denis Podalydes in the title role. It is, suitably, very French.