The translators mentioned are also the impressive cadre currently being used by Penguin. Plot: The police are expecting the arrival in Paris of the crook known as Pietr the Latvian. The real Pietr has arrived but managed to escape police surveillance. Maigret tracks him down, but it soon becomes a very personal case, when one of his inspectors, Torrence, is killed while keeping watch on the Latvian. Then Maigret himself is wounded and a witness is killed.
But Maigret soldiers on, more concerned to find the murderer than for his own health, and there is an unexpected twist at the end. Comments: The plot is satisfyingly complex, and Simenon is at times more judgemental than in his later writings. Some of the characterisation verges on caricature, lacking the subtlety he was to develop subsequently.
It is likely that this was the first fully fledged Maigret novel to be written; Simenon himself always claimed this. This is why a whole batch of Maigrets appeared in the same year. Maigret is intrigued by the fact that he seems to have been leading a double life. It turns out that Gallet was not the sales representative that everyone took him to be, but a crook who had discovered ways in which he could blackmail certain wealthy individuals, and one rich lord in particular: Tiburce de Saint-Hilaire.
Gallet himself, however, became a victim of blackmail and devised an insurance scam to benefit his own wife. The final truth that Maigret uncovers involves a remarkable twist. There are numerous striking twists in the plot, which are reminiscent of the conventions of the popular novels he had previously been writing.
Plot: Maigret gets involved, almost by chance, in investigating a murder that happened ten years previously. Maigret follows him to Bremen, Germany, and is present when he commits suicide. The man pursued by Maigret had started to blackmail his former comrades to gain revenge, and, when proof of his activities is uncovered by Maigret, he in turn decides to kill himself. The ending reveals Maigret at his most human and forgiving.
