Maigret and the Yellow Dog

Rating:
Summary: Maigret is an humanist
Review: Even if you dislike police novels, you have to read Maigret's novels (and others Simenon's non Maigret novels) because of the humanism and psychology in these novels. And more over, you have the pleasure to dive in the Simenon's atmosphere : close to impressionism (only few words to restitute an impression ...).
This novel, in particularly, is a good example of Simenon's art.

Rating:
Summary: Archetypal early Maigret.
Review: If I was to initiate anyone into the world of Superintendant Jules Maigret, 1931's 'The Yellow Dog' (a.k.a. 'Face for a Clue') is the book I would recommend. The story is set in the Breton harbour town of Concarneau, and begins with the non-fatal shooting of a prominent citizen one stormy night. His friends, card-playing regulars in the Admiral Hotel cafe, fear they will be next, and sure enough strychnine is soon found in their pernods. Escalating fear in the town is accompanied by a mysterious giant's footsteps and a yellow dog always present at the crime scenes. The Mayor who has sent for Maigret becomes exasperated when the policeman seems casually indifferent to the case, allowing further crimes to occur.

'Yellow Dog' is model Maigret for a number of reasons. It crystallises the Maigret detective method, rejecting Holmesian deduction or modish scientific procedures, the Inspector preferring to silently absorb the atmosphere of a place, the charactetrs and faces of its people. The progress Maigret makes with this infinite patience he keeps to himself, exasperating superiors, colleagues, citizens, even the reader. In these books, crime isn't static, a thing of the past to be frozen and endlessly analysed, as in Agatha Christie et al, but a fluid, ongoing part of the social fabric. The book introduces the young Inspector Leroy, who, throughout the series will become Maigret's most trusted ally. The narrative plays variations on Simenon's favourite themes, most especially the different levels of vice and transgression in French communities, hypocritically categorised by class. His charting the development of public fear into the violence of mob panic is terrifying and prescient.

But 'Yellow Dog' is especially notable for the clarity of what one might term Simenon's tripartite characterisation. First of all, there are the actual human characters, whom Maigret observes, and generously allows the freedom to reveal or hang themselves in their own words, waiting for them to play their petty charades and deceits, before breaking down to the truth. Though Simenon can be sentimental, on the whole, they are not a pretty bunch. Secondly, the meticulous evocation of place, with the vivid description of the harbour; the town divided into the Old, with its ancient, narrow, winding streets, and New, with its markets, gaudy hotels and the ever-recurring clock; the dingy tavern with its oppressive, aquarium-like windows; the persistant presence of dirt and trash, visible emblems of barely concealed social rottenness. And thirdly, the presence of the weather, mostly dark, windswept, beating rain, but breaking into festive plays of light. The story begins with a brilliantly atmospheric, cinematic panorama of the empty town in which the crime is almost incidental; the most forceful set-piece is literally cinematic, as Maigret and Leroy shiver on a roof, spectators looking down through a window-'screen' at a silent lovers' drama they can only partly comprehend.

Rating:
Summary: Archetypal early Maigret.
Review: If I was to initiate anyone into the world of Superintendant Jules Maigret, 1931's 'The Yellow Dog' (a.k.a. 'Face for a Clue') is the book I would recommend. The story is set in the Breton harbour town of Concarneau, and begins with the non-fatal shooting of a prominent citizen one stormy night. His friends, card-playing regulars in the Admiral Hotel cafe, fear they will be next, and sure enough strychnine is soon found in their pernods. Escalating fear in the town is accompanied by a mysterious giant's footsteps and a yellow dog always present at the crime scenes. The Mayor who has sent for Maigret becomes exasperated when the policeman seems casually indifferent to the case, allowing further crimes to occur.

'Yellow Dog' is model Maigret for a number of reasons. It crystallises the Maigret detective method, rejecting Holmesian deduction or modish scientific procedures, the Inspector preferring to silently absorb the atmosphere of a place, the charactetrs and faces of its people. The progress Maigret makes with this infinite patience he keeps to himself, exasperating superiors, colleagues, citizens, even the reader. In these books, crime isn't static, a thing of the past to be frozen and endlessly analysed, as in Agatha Christie et al, but a fluid, ongoing part of the social fabric. The book introduces the young Inspector Leroy, who, throughout the series will become Maigret's most trusted ally. The narrative plays variations on Simenon's favourite themes, most especially the different levels of vice and transgression in French communities, hypocritically categorised by class. His charting the development of public fear into the violence of mob panic is terrifying and prescient.

But 'Yellow Dog' is especially notable for the clarity of what one might term Simenon's tripartite characterisation. First of all, there are the actual human characters, whom Maigret observes, and generously allows the freedom to reveal or hang themselves in their own words, waiting for them to play their petty charades and deceits, before breaking down to the truth. Though Simenon can be sentimental, on the whole, they are not a pretty bunch. Secondly, the meticulous evocation of place, with the vivid description of the harbour; the town divided into the Old, with its ancient, narrow, winding streets, and New, with its markets, gaudy hotels and the ever-recurring clock; the dingy tavern with its oppressive, aquarium-like windows; the persistant presence of dirt and trash, visible emblems of barely concealed social rottenness. And thirdly, the presence of the weather, mostly dark, windswept, beating rain, but breaking into festive plays of light. The story begins with a brilliantly atmospheric, cinematic panorama of the empty town in which the crime is almost incidental; the most forceful set-piece is literally cinematic, as Maigret and Leroy shiver on a roof, spectators looking down through a window-'screen' at a silent lovers' drama they can only partly comprehend.

Rating:
Summary: The Patient Maigret Cuts to the Chase
Review: The English and American schools of crime detective fiction ultimately come from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter" and "Murders in the Rue Morgue," in which the solution of a crime is effected by the application of deductive reasoning from start to finish. These "tales of ratiocination," with Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes being the apotheosis of the reasoning investigator, are still the norm today in the English-speaking world.

Such is not the case in France, where Georges Simenon has created an entirely different kind of detective, Superintendent Jules Maigret. In MAIGRET AND THE YELLOW DOG aka THE PATIENCE OF MAIGRET (1936), a man named Mostaguen has been cut down by a bullet in the Breton seaside town of Concarneau. At the scene of the crime is found a strange ungainly yellow dog. The victim belonged to a informal (and somewhat unpopular) group of businessmen who got together for cards and drinks every night in the bar of the Admiral Hotel.

Superintendent Maigret is called in to investigate, along with Inspector Leroy. No sooner do they arrive, than attacks on the little group begin to ramp up: an attempted poisoning with strychnine, a missing local newspaper writer taken from his car leaving bloodstains behind, and the murder of a notorious philanderer. All these occur more or less under Maigret's nose. As the mayor begins to lose his patience with the big city investigator, the Paris press moves in en masse and camps out in the bar of the Admiral Hotel, kibitzing his every move.

From the start, Maigret and Leroy take divergent paths. While the latter attempts to apply close deductive reasoning, his boss hangs out in the bar and has his attention riveted to the barmaid, Emma, and the yellow dog, who is somehow drawn to her. He instinctively feels that these two are somehow at the heart of the investigation and slowly begins to add to his knowledge of these two until the fog lifts.

For most of the novel, Concarneau is besieged by foul weather; and the town is full of confused, frightened people who inevitably jump to the wrong conclusions and put pressure on Maigret and Leroy to follow up on their suggestions. Maigret not only keeps accumulating evidence but rudely ignores the press, the mayor, and the residents while marching to his own drummer. In the end, Maigret's instinct trumps Leroy's patient data-gathering and the wild surmises of the others, and everything falls together as the bad weather finally breaks, leaving Concarneau and us readers bathed in sunlight.

The brooding quality of the scene, the confusion of the other characters, and the mysterious, almost solipsistic concentration of Maigret are the ingredients that make this a most delectable detective novel. This is the tenth Maigret I've read, and he seems to get better with every book I read.