Pietr the Latvian (Inspector Maigret #1) by Georges Simenon

 “Inside every wrong-doer and crook there lives a human being. What he waited and watched out for was the crack in the wall, the instant when the human being comes out from behind the opponent.” — Georges Simenon describing Inspector Maigret from Pietr the Latvian 

This is the first book in the long running Inspector Maigret series by Belgian author Georges Simenon. After being notified that international criminal Pietr the Latvian is traveling to Paris, Inspector Maigret attempts to apprehend him. Things go wrong right away Maigret and begins searching through Paris for the criminal. 

Around the halfway point I put the book down and started wondering if anything other than following suspects around Paris was going to happen. I immediately picked the book back up, read a few more paragraphs and got my answer. Well played Mr. Simenon, well played. I was hooked. The rest of the book was a real page turner. 

All the questions that were brought up in the first half get answered throughout the second half. While the first half felt like a standard mystery or police procedural, the second half felt more like crime noir. One scene I particularly liked had Maigret interact with a suspect in a bar with no dialogue. While no words were spoken the encounter was still very intense. 

It’s a minor point but one thing I found distracting was the use of exclamation points. They’re used quite a lot. I was curious as to why there were so many but then I read the following from an article in The Guardian by Rupert Davies:

“The character of Maigret is introduced in Pietr the Latvian (1930). It’s a novel that bears some of the hallmarks of the hundreds of pulp novels Simenon had written in the previous years (a surfeit of action and exclamation marks), and this embryonic manifestation of Maigret is more of the alpha-male action hero than in the later novels…”

Aha!

At only 162 pages it was a quick read. I believe the other books are all around the same length. Apparently Mr. Simenon wrote them so each one could be read in a single sitting. 

There are 75 books in the series and 28 short stories. I’m looking forward to reading more.