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Finished Maigret et l'inspecteur Malgracieux by Georges Simenon, a collection of four short stories (actually, long stories that were probably at least novelette length) starring Inspector Maigret, which I've been reading on and off since I got it on sale last month (still just $1.99 CAD, which is dirt cheap for francophone books). These were written in the 1940s and apparently linked by having been written while Simenon, a frequent world traveler, was visiting Quebec and New Brunswick in Canada, which is probably a reasonable grouping for arranging the works of an author so apparently prolific.
The story plots were pretty standard: the uncouth but diligent colleague who gets a chance to shine, the earnest choirboy whose eyewitness testimony doesn't quite add up, etc. But the retro atmosphere was reasonably engaging*, and it was interesting to see the difference in style from more modern detective tales, with the limited available forensics and other evidence (just time of death and path of the bullet stuff) possibly resulting in a greater emphasis on taking statements and noticing discrepancies and connections and ruminating on deductions.
Even though he's a popular and long-established character worldwide, these were my first Maigrets, but likely won't be my last (if only because I also invested in the three other Simenon short story collections also on sale for $1.99, but the cases were actually done decently enough, if not outstandingly clever or even particularly twisty). In a nice touch, there were introductory prologues to each tale mentioning which episodes the assorted stories had been adapted to for international TV and film.
* One story pretty much amounted to a leisurely walking tour of Parisian eateries, which the narrative even lampshaded. And it was also interesting to see how much the “modern” world had changed in the past 70-odd years, what with still having telephone switchboards and guillotine executions and whatnot, even if the types of crimes and the motives for them generally hadn't.
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