It isn’t normal to begin reviews of detective novels by discussing their last chapter. But Maigret and the Man on the Bench is not a normal detective novel – and its conclusion is so striking that it demands immediate attention.
If you’ve read the novel, you’ll know exactly what I mean. If you haven’t, I don’t think it’s giving away too much to say that in just 10 pages in David Watson’s (excellent) translation, Maigret discovers the identity of the murderer of Louis Thouret, the eponymous man on the bench. This murderer has barely been mentioned before in the novel, and Maigret doesn’t care about his identity. “This was the most boring part,” he reflects as he is writing up the case. Just six lines later, the book ends.
It’s possible to view this dashed-off ending as evidence that Simenon didn’t care either. The book was written in the early 1950s, when the author was allotting himself just 11 days to complete a Maigret novel. His heart – as he revealed in a 1955 interview with the Paris Review – was not with his beloved Parisian detective, but in the more serious romans durs he was writing concurrently.
read more @ The Guardian
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