Here is another of my forays into a new-to-me mystery series, this series about French Police Superintendent Maigret. This particular book was written closer to the end of Simenon's writing career. The prolific Maigret series, containing 75 novels and 28 short stories, had its first book published in 1931 and the last in 1972. In this story, Maigret is age 63.
The story opens with Maigret and his wife dining at their friends' home, when someone fetches the friend, a doctor, because a man is dying on the sidewalk outside. Maigret and the doctor rush out, but the young man dies soon after reaching the hospital, a victim of multiple stab wounds. The young man, born into a wealthy family, was wearing a tape recorder around his neck. When the tape inside it is played, it becomes apparent that the man was taping snippets of conversations that were occurring around him in restaurants, bars, etc. We learn that the young man had been making such tapes for at least a year. The murder investigation begins with the premise that perhaps something he recorded put him at risk. In fact, one of the conversations on the tape, made the same night he was murdered, led police to foil an attempted robbery of famous paintings from a wealthy man's weekend home.Even as the police are elated to have found the likely suspects to twenty high-end robberies because of the dead man's tapes, Maigret is left with uneasiness about who actually could have committed the murder. As the Paris newspapers speculate about who the murderer can be, they start receiving letters from someone who purports to be the murderer. Then Maigret himself begins to receive telephone calls from someone who says he's the murderer. Maigret does not have the call tracked, but speaks honestly and carefully to the man on the phone, trying to learn everything he can about him. I embraced this fascinating turn in the novel and its follow-through. I recommend this book and definitely plan to read more of Simenon's work.
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