You'll know immediately from the title that we're talking about Inspector Jules Maigret, and so this must be by Georges Simenon (1903-89), the Belgian crime writer whose work was admired by authors as diverse as Ernest Hemingway, Andre Gide, and Andrea Camillieri (and whose life, according to that latter article, encompassed a number of eyebrow-raising episodes).

It's my first Maigret since those memorable "shadow journeys" of covid times, when I read Pietre the Latvian, the first official Maigret story.

Why Maigret again now? Well, sometimes book choices are very prosaic. I had a book to swap at the book exchange that is one of the many useful feautures of Indah, and this -- the Italian version of the pipe-smoking detective's 15th outing -- was the one that caught my eye first...



First published in 1932, the book's original French title is Maigret et le port des brumes (Maigret and the Port of Fog). The first Italian translation, by Guido Cantini, goes back to 1933, but my version, translated by Rosalba Buccianti, came out in 1989. The Italian title (Maigret e il porto delle nebbie) pretty much mirrors the French original. The book has also been published in English, in a couple of different translations, and with a couple of different titles, neither of which I like. The Death of a Harbourmaster bypasses the emphasis on the all-important atmospheric element, and The Misty Harbour not only sounds like something out of Tolkien, but misrepresents the phenomenon that Maigret so ably describes, which is very definitely -- take it from someone who grew up on an island -- FOG. So I've stuck with a literal translation of the Italian/French.

Anyway, the story:

We meet our detective on the train from Paris to Ouistreham, on the Normandy coast. He is accompanying two people: An amnesiac who had turned up in Paris, bewildered and unable to communicate, and Julie Legrand, this man's young housekeeper, who eventually recognized her employer from a picture in the papers, and came to Paris to confirm his identity.

Before his six-week absence, our man, now known to be Captain Yves Joris, served as harbourmaster at Ouistreham. At some point while he was missing, he took a shot to the head. The clearly excellent medical care he received at that point hadn't, however, been able to restore his speech or memory. Puzzled by the whole business, Maigret decides to stick around for a bit in the harbour town. Then, on the very night of his arrival, poor Captain Joris is killed by poison. Things start to look bad for Julie. She was ostensibly the only one in the house with him on the night his bedside water was laced with strichnine, and she is also named in his will as a major beneficiary. She claims Captain Joris had little money, but investigations reveal a large sum that has recently arrived in his bank account. It doesn't help that Julie has a sailor brother, Louis, who happens to be an ex-convict, and the boat Louis now crews on, the Saint-Michel, was in port the night Captain Joris disappeared...

So Maigret now has a murder to solve, as well as a disappearance to explain. I won't give the plot away (there's a summary here for anyone keen to know the denouement), but it's an enjoyable enough read. I suppose we're now all a bit over-familiar with the amnesiac topos (although, as Alessandro Bullo points out, it has an honorable pedigree going back to Plato and Virgil, and we've seen it used very effectively by Patrick Modiano). But there's a fair amount of action: Not only does Maigret suffer the indignity of being tied up and left on the quayside for the night, but we witness a beating whose victim inexplicably refuses to press charges, a sailing boat that gets stranded on a sandbank along with its suspicious crew, and a suicide. But

And, in any case, the book is worth reading for its atmosphere.


Granville, 1994. The other side of the Normandy peninsula

Little Ouistreham comes alive. As Bullo puts it: "The author depicts, with the care of a Flemish painter, the life of the small township, whose existence is marked by the cycles of the tide, and the opening and closing of the lock that connects the small port with the canal leading to the city of Caen."

Early in the book we're told about the lock, the lighthouse, the bar where off-duty mariners gather, and the harbourmaster's house; about the rhythm of the harbour; about the fishermen, and the other men whose jobs are concerned solely with the comings and goings of the boats.

The description rings true, because Simenon knew the place pretty well. He spent two and a bit months there in the autumn of 1931 (the culmination of a 2.5-year journey on board his boat, called L'Ostrogoth). While he was in Ouistreham, he wrote two Maigret novels (what!??), and then wrote this one three months later, in February 1932. The above source, by the way, has some interesting maps of Caen and Ouistreham (which is effectively the port of Caen, and marked the beginning of many of our French trips in the 1980s and 1990s). It also comments on later changes to that coast: "Writing this novel in early 1932, Simenon describes the area around Ouistreham, the canal with its functions, and the beach, as it must have been, probably with little change, since the canal was constructed. But scarcely thirteen years after Simenon stayed there, the events of the Second World War were to change the area. The huge stretch of coast from Ouistreham (Calvados) westwards to Les Dunes de Varreville (Manche) on the Cotentin Peninsula was the location chosen for the D-Day landings made by the Allied Forces on the 6th of June 1944. Many maps since indicate the wartime code names given to the Beaches -- Sword (Ouistreham), Juno, Gold, Omaha and Utah."



There's a poignancy to many of the details. I found very resonant, for example, the description of the little prayers posted at Our Lady of the Dunes, a ruined chapel by the beach.

And that titular fog is everywhere... For Bullo, it almost takes on the dimensions of a character: "By enveloping people, ships, and houses, and muffling sounds, it creates a sense of mystery and uneasiness. The word fog is repeated more than thirty times; the sensation is more than visual, it is oppressive."

Then there's the silence in which the good citizens of Ouistreham seem to be wrapped. They're people of the sea. Everyone is connected somehow to the activity of the port, and they don't like landlubbers. So nobody wants to talk to the outsider. Maigret increasingly feels there's a missing link. But no-one is going to help him find it... The reticence and the fog contribute to a sense of foreboding that's very well done.

Contrasting with the chilly, light-starved exterior, as so often in the Maigret books, are the warmth and light of the cafe, la Buvette de la Marine, where various people connected with the port gather in their downtime (not always amicably). Bullo points out that Simenon's Maigret prefers downmarket locales to stuffy receptions like that given by Mayor Grandmaison. He attributes this to Simenon's own experience at the wrong end of class consciousness.

Despite the plethora of quite technical sailing vocabulary (most of which I don't really know in English either), it's a pretty easy Italian read.

I'm always interested in comparing translations with originals (the French text can be found at Internet Archive). The Italian version seemed quite faithful to the French, with none of the missing passages and changes of emphasis that I've turned up on similar comparative expeditions (though perhaps the Italian text is slightly less peppered with exclamation marks...)



Nothing deep, then, but a good book to relax with. I'll swap it back to Indah again, so that someone else can enjoy it.