One down...100 to go....

I just yesterday finished the first Maigret detective story I have ever read, Un Echec de Maigret--and to say that I'm enthralled and bemused is scarcely to overstate it.   As André Gide, a big-gun Georges Simenon fan, said (something to the effect), that "Simenon novels make you think and reflect after you've read them--like all really good literature."  Certainly that has been the effect on me.  What struck me particularly in this novel was our eponymous hero's excruciatingly exact use of the second person familiar:  at the beginning of the book he pointblank refuses to use it, and insists on being addressed as "vous," by someone he'd gone to school with, whom he detests, and whose father Maigret's father had detested.  Simenon, I gather, has incurred the fervent displeasure of feminists and women generally for his "misogyny"--and for having had sex with more than 10,000 different women    throughout the course of his long and not uneventful life:  I frankly don't see the connection, unless every time he had coitus with a woman it was some sort of exercise in conscious male superiority.  Nonetheless, in this my first Maigret detective novel, I find Maigret's interview at dinner with the murder victim's mistress ("kept woman" is really what she is) profoundly disturbing:  She calls him "vous," and he calls her "tu," like a servant talking with an aristocrat in a 17th century drama;  both find it (the disparity of their language) normal and comfortable--though it seems, sub-textually, to be saying that she is the sort of poor whore who has no rights or dignity of her own, and that she would find it confusing if she were treated as if she did.  There is no suggestion of tenderness or affection in Maigret's use of the familiar form of address with the kept woman, and there are several indications that Maigret, and his Creator, find her contemptible--a lower form of life in fact.  All of which (harsh, classist judgementalism) seems to be compensated for in Maigret's long interrogation of the "clochard" alcoholic, whom he treats respectfully and compassionately, using the polite "vous" for the first several pages, and actually giving him a couple of shots of his own brandy; but suddenly, with the affect of maternal tenderness, Maigret switches to "tu" at the conclusion of the interview, telling the poor drunken wretch that he's going to be detained for a couple of more days in comfortable quarters with a real bed, just so he can dry out (Well, he'll get a glass of wine for breakfast), get some solid nourishment and rest up.  Maigret's use of the familiar with his subordinates at the Palais de Justice seems matter-of-fact, business-like and affectionate--fatherly, so to speak.  All very, very interesting.

Anyway, having raced through it, I re-read it, and looked up our author and his works on the Internet--Un Echec de Maigret is apparently not one of the better Maigret novels--of which there are extant fully 101 exemplars; the best, by consensus of aficionados, being the first, written in the decade after 1922.  Well, I'll save them for last....