 Maigret's Boyhood Friend (1968)
Diligent dilettante that I am, I always like to have a connoisseur choice for my "favorite" thing in any given category of pop-culture. This accords me the illusion of incredibly broad and deep understanding of all things, a bubble that is usually burst after about half an hour of conversation with me, when it is revealed that I pretty much don't know jack shit about anything. However, I do like to have that connoisseur pick in my pocket … get me talking about reggae and I will steadily avoid any mention of Bob Marley, and rave on about the Heptones. Start talking cult movies and I'll steer clear of Ed Wood, driving you instead toward The Apple. Offer me a drink, and instead of fulfilling expectations with a vodka tonic, I'll politely request a Pimm's and lemonade. All of which makes me look much more well-rounded than I actually am. But rather than fill out the shallow areas, I continually seek more areas in which to acquire a tidbit of knowledge … just enough to seem like I know my shit. To that end, I recently decided that I needed to have a favorite mystery author. The attractively non-retro covers of some 1980 reprints of some 1960s novels by Belgian-born and Paris-fixated author Georges Simenon sealed the deal. My favorite mystery author would have to be Simenon. And so now I had to read some. Simenon is actually one of the most widely-published authors of all time, translated into millions of languages and all that, but his books have fallen into disfavor over the years. Mystery writing seems to be a lot like magazine journalism, hastily cranked out by its writers and disposed of by its readers on a monthly basis. Yet this made me all the more intent on loving Simenon. The more out of fashion, the better … especially if the obsolescence has no particular coolness factor, a la blaxploitation films (incidentally, my favorite there is Friday Foster … you wanted me to say Foxy Brown, I'm sure).
Wait, am I reviewing a book or my own well-travelled self-contempt? Anyway, Simenon wrote hundreds of books, mostly chronicling the detective work of Chief Superintendent Maigret, who is much more workmanlike than a Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot. He would turn a book out in ten days, and I'd bet that they're all nominally-edited first drafts. The books are widely praised for their evocation of mid-20th Century Paris, mostly Montmarte. That's not why I like them, though. I like them because they are so boring. Maigret is not particularly astute or flashy … he just gathers facts, questions witnesses, trudges through his day, has a few apertifs, goes home to dine with his wife, and ultimately solves the mystery more or less by the mystery solving itself. In this way, the books come off like novelizations for individual episodes of "Law & Order" … not even that – novelizations of the first half hour of individual episodes of "Law & Order." They're pretty much just about getting the job done, on every level. Maigret's Boyhood Friend finds Maigret investigating a murder in which one of his old schoolmates may or may not be involved. The twist is that, despite mounting evidence, he is reluctant to think that the man may have done it, so it explores the idea of how one's professional judgment may be colored by personal acquaintance, however tenuous. It's extremely repetitious … lots of stops into Parisian bistros for a drink, lots of contentious conversations between detective and suspects, lots of workmanlike dialogue. Yet, like a familiar local bistro, there's something comforting about it all. No sense of urgency or emergency … just the confluence of a writer and his invented character both punching the clock until things are resolved. I admire that. This is by no means an excellent book, even as light reading for a rainy night, but its laziness is like a frozen pizza. Satisfaction with the least possible amount of effort. It's what dilettantism is all about, anyway.
Review by Hamish Sandwich |