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Three seasonal stories set in Paris at Christmas, from the celebrated creator of Inspector Maigret. It is Christmas in Paris, but beneath the sparkling lights and glittering decorations lie sinister deeds and dark secrets... This collection brings together three of Simenon's most enjoyable Christmas tales, newly translated, featuring Inspector Maigret and other characters from the Maigret novels. In 'A Maigret Christmas', the Inspector receives two unexpected visitors on Christmas Day, who lead him on the trail of a mysterious intruder dressed in red and white. In 'Seven Small Crosses in a Notebook', the sound of alarms over Paris send the police on a cat and mouse chase across the city. And 'The Little Restaurant in Les Ternes (A Christmas Story for Grown-Ups)' tells of a cynical woman who is moved to an unexpected act of festive charity in a nightclub - one that surprises even her...… (more)
User reviews
(Yes I like the title too.)
Georges Simenon's pipe-smoking sleuth gets a cosey little mystery for Christmas - one he can solve almost without leaving the comfort of his own apartment.
For it is a time for
I rarely find Simenon's writing as compulsive in the moment ofreading as I might, say, Arthur Conan Doyle's or even Victor L Whitechurch's, but his imagery and his characters return to me far more often afterwards. It's a deeply problematic way of phrasing it and deeply unfair to so many other genre writers, but it's hard to escape the feeling that Simenon is a 'proper' writer. Your intellect gets something back from reading him.
A rich and sophisticated Christmas liqeur.
Three short stories set in Paris at Christmas, but with lots of crime amidst the snow and festive cheer.
From the central switchboard in Paris, Christmas Eve:
"But there had been no emergencies. The small crosses in Lecœur’s log were eloquent. He did not bother to count them. He
The protagonist of the second story – Seven Crosses in a Notebook – is a humble policeman who has spent his career away from the limelight, manning a police station’s switchboard and keeping a list of the crimes carried out in the French capital. One Christmas, he finds himself thrust into the midst of an investigation, one which concerns his closest family. A boy is chasing a murderer across the streets of Paris – or perhaps it’s the other way round – and by the time the Police find them, someone might be dead. This story is actually better than the Maigret title piece – it is, in effect, a finely-crafted and well-paced mini-thriller. It also has almost Dickensian undertones as it brings us face-to-face with the “other” Christmas: that of the lonely and the downtrodden, that of the workers who need to spend Christmas night awake and away from their families, that of the poor who can barely afford to buy presents for their children.
This “social” subtext is also an important element in 'The Little Restaurant in Les Ternes (A Christmas Story for Grown-Ups)'. On Christmas night, two women witness a suicide in a little bar. One is Long Tall Jeanne, a prostitute and cynical woman of the world. The other is Martine, a young girl who happens to come from a town close to Jeanne’s birthplace and who is alone in Paris for reasons we do not learn. The women, shaken by the evening’s events, go out into the night. Jeanne, almost on an impulse, follows Martine, determined to save her from the clutches of dubious men who might take advantage of her. Nothing much happens in this story, but it’s an interesting psychological study. We are never sure what fuels Jeanne’s actions – is it a sense of sisterly affection, is it nostalgia for an innocence which she has lost, or a sense of jealousy towards a girl who is younger, fresher, more attractive?
I greatly enjoyed this anthology even though I read it two months after Christmas. Part of the pleasure is derived from the atmosphere of a retro Paris, where people still write letters, and even telephones are a luxury. A word of warning though – some of the attitudes portrayed are out of date as well. For instance, in the age of #MeToo, the image of Maigret lounging about in a dressing gown whilst his wife frets about serving him Christmas breakfast in bed, might raise a few eyebrows. But this is part of the package – a package which is, on the whole, très jolie
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843.912 |