Best Selling Books by Georges Simenon

Maigret must wade through a media frenzy when news of a body found in a stove spreads across Paris. Who is the corpse, and how is the case connected to Madame Maigret? A gruesome mystery has the whole of Paris agog: who is “the corpse in the stove”? The stove’s owner, a reclusive Belgian bookbinder detained in the Santé prison, isn’t saying. His ambitious young lawyer, meanwhile, keeps giving combative press interviews, stoking public fascination to a fever pitch. As Maigret and his team triage a flood of tip-offs, the case throws up a series of unexpected connections—even, bizarrely, to Madame Maigret. Plotted with a watchmaker’s intricacy, Madame Maigret’s Friend is a hypnotic journey through a city where everyone’s lives are enmeshed, whether they realize it or not.

Inspector Maigret makes his way from Paris''s luxury hotels through the seedy and squalid streets and alleys of Paris as he tracks a killer on the run. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

“A writer as comfortable with reality as with fiction, with passion as with reason.” —John Le Carré With a serial killer on the loose in Paris, Maigret must outsmart the culprit before he can strike again. The inspiration for ITV’s feature-length adaptation starring Rowan Atkinson. Detective Chief Inspector Maigret is known for his infallible instinct, for getting at the truth no matter how complex the case. But when someone starts killing women on the streets of Montmartre, leaving nary a clue and the city’s police force at a loss, he finds himself confounded. In the sweltering Paris summer heat, with the terrified city in a state of siege, Maigret hatches a plan to lure the murderer out.

An eerie mystery in which a local wine dealer is shot and a strange yellow dog starts to circle the town—Inspector Maigret must navigate small-town dynamics to find the elusive culprit. Late at night in a small seaside town, not a single light is on, and everyone is asleep. Or almost everyone: a man, drunk, departs for home after another evening at a hotel bar, where he and a few others regularly gather. Suddenly, he collapses—struck by a gunshot. The victim turns out to be the town’s most successful wine dealer, and the event soon leads to a series of other curiosities: poisoned drinks at the bar, another man found missing, and a dirty yellow dog haunting the neighborhood, accompanied by large, unfamiliar boot tracks. Detective Chief Inspector Maigret, who happens to be nearby heading up a mobile unit, arrives swiftly to resolve the growing confusion. Though a chill sets over town, with townspeople remaining tight-lipped, Maigret’s pursuit of the truth in Georges Simenon’s The Yellow Dog makes for a thrilling, breathless adventure.

“A writer as comfortable with reality as with fiction, with passion as with reason.” —John Le Carré An Inspector Maigret mystery and a gripping tale of lost identity “A man picked up for wandering in obvious distress among the cars and buses on the Grands Boulevards. Questioned in French, he remains mute . . . A madman? In Maigret''s office, he is searched. His suit is new, his underwear is new, his shoes are new. All identifying labels have been removed. No identification papers. No wallet. Five crisp thousand-franc bills have been slipped into one of his pockets.” A distressed man is found wandering the streets of Paris, with no memory of who he is or how he got there. The answers lead Maigret to a small harbour town, whose quiet citizens conceal a poisonous malice.

Restored to print for the first time in more than forty years, The President was hailed by the New York Times as a “tour de force” At 82, the former premier lives in alert and suspicious retirement—self exile—on the Normandy coast, writing his anxiously anticipated memoirs and receiving visits from statesman and biographers. In his library is the self-condemning, handwritten confession of the premier’s former attaché, Chalamont, hidden between the pages of a sumptuously produced work of privately printed pornography—a confession that the premier himself had dictated and forced Chalamont to sign. Now the long-thwarted Chalamont has been summoned to form a new coalition in the wake of the government’s collapse. The premier alone possesses the secret of Chalamont’s guilt, of his true character—and has publicly vowed: “He’ll never be Premier as long as I’m alive... Nor when I’m dead, either.” Inspired by French Premier Georges Clemenceau, The President is a masterpiece of psychological suspense and a probing account of the decline of power.

“A writer who, more than any other crime novelist, combined a high literary reputation with popular appeal.” —P. D. James Caught in a spiral of bitter seclusion and drinking since his wife abandoned him and their newborn child eighteen years ago, Hector Loursat, once a respected lawyer, now holes up, unwashed and drunk on Burgundy, in his once grand but increasingly decrepit mansion. He barely notices the goings-on under his roof or the strange, dangerous secret life his daughter and her friends are leading there. He is shaken from his complacency by a gunshot one night and walks into the scene of a murder. Overcoming the inertia of his long isolation and inexplicably drawn to his daughter’s group of young friends, he finds new engagement with the world as he seeks to clear the name of the young man accused of the killing. Simenon, master chronicler of the dark side of the human heart, gives us a detective story that is also a tale of an improbable redemption.

In this first installment in Georges Simenon’s legendary Inspector Maigret series, M. Maigret hunts down an elusive and notorious confidence man, but finds that identifying him is a game of doubles, intrigue, and hidden crimes. When Detective Chief Inspector Maigret receives notice from Interpol that Pietr the Latvian, an infamous con man, is on his way to Paris, he rushes to intercept him at the train station. But when he arrives he is confounded to find two men who fit the description of the wanted man. One is alive, the other dead. So who is Pietr? A businessman or a bootlegger? Is he Latvian, American, or Russian? In order to find out, Maigret must use his keen understanding of human nature, his gift for observation, and his famous instincts to track down the true suspect in Pietr the Latvian, the first mystery in Georges Simenon’s iconic series.

Brooding and propulsive, Georges Simenon’s indictment of American suburbia follows a Connecticut lawyer who, after years of jealousy and rage, finally tears down the facade of his perfect life. Donald Dodd has always envied Ray Sanders. A Madison Avenue adman with an actress wife and a gift for womanizing, Ray grabs anything he wants from life. Donald, his best friend from Yale, has chosen a safer, more circumspect path. Respected in his job as a small-town lawyer, he’s faithfully married to the serene Isabel, a Mayflower descendant, while their two daughters attend a prestigious Connecticut boarding school. It’s an irreproachable existence indeed. But everything changes one winter night at a party, when Donald catches Ray with the host’s beautiful young wife. Suddenly, Donald’s years of jealousy boil over into rage. But is he actually capable of murder? Under Georges Simenon’s unsparing gaze, the psychological fault lines of 1960s American suburbia are exposed as never before.

A panicked man turns to Maigret for help—and dies before the detective can learn his identity. Who was he, and what led to his brutal murder? One morning, Maigret receives several phone calls from an increasingly panicked man. He’s being followed, he says, and his pursuers want to kill him. Before Maigret can track down the caller, his lifeless body is thrown from a car. Yet his identity remains a mystery. Who was he, and what led to his brutal murder? As Maigret sorts through the bewildering evidence, he develops a surprising affinity for this anonymous victim, whose personality seems to resemble his own. His legendary intuition heightened, the inspector is poised to crack a case with, it turns out, far greater repercussions than one man’s death. Fiendishly plotted and humming with psychological tension, Maigret’s Dead Man is an unmissable installment in Georges Simenon’s famous detective series.

Three vintage Maigret novels by legendary mystery author Georges Simenon One of the world ''s most successful crime writers, Georges Simenon has thrilled mystery lovers since 1931 with his matchless creation Inspector Maigret. In My Friend Maigret, Inspector Maigret investigates the murder of a small- time crook on a Mediterranean island. Told in Simenon''s spare, unsentimental prose, Inspector Cadaver is a haunting exploration of provincial hypocrisy and snobbery, in which Maigret encounters a rival sleuth from his past. In Maigret and the Man on the Boulevard, Simenon''s tenacious detective pieces together the life of a man who for three years lived a secret life-until he is found stabbed to death in an alleyway.

When a woman is found strangled in a stable near Lock 14, Inspector Maigret investigates, but finds her husband both unmoved and unhelpful as he follows a dark trail of whiskey-fueled orgies and a nomadic lifestyle to find the killer. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

"In 1960, 1961, and 1962, for personal reasons, or for reasons I don''t know myself, I began feeling old, and I began keeping notebooks. I was nearing the age of sixty. Soon I shall be sixty-seven and I have not felt old for a long time. I no longer feel the need to write in notebooks, and those that I did not use I''ve given to my children." -- Preface.

The extraordinarily patient Maigret cracks a most perplexing case, comme ca. For more than two decades, daring daylight jewelry store heists has plagued the Parisian inspector. When a Corsican immigrant, ex-pimp and sometime police informer, is found shot in the head in his wheelchair with his own gun, an entire generation of conspiracy begins to unravel.

“A writer as comfortable with reality as with fiction, with passion as with reason.” —John Le Carré When a familiar face from Maigret''s past brings him word of a mysterious killing, the Inspector jumps on the case When a long lost friend pays a visit to Maigret''s office, he is shocked to learn that the man''s roommate has been murdered. With the help of his old friend, Maigret delves into the life of the victim and finds a complex web of relationships that leads him to the culprit. Absorbing and impossible to predict, Maigret''s Childhood Friend is a riveting mystery that reveals a new shade to the iconic detective.

“A writer as comfortable with reality as with fiction, with passion as with reason.” —John Le Carré A chilling Inspector Maigret mystery set on the Belgian border “She wasn''t an ordinary supplicant. She didn''t lower her eyes. There was nothing humble about her bearing. She spoke frankly, looking straight ahead, as if to claim what was rightfully hers. ‘If you don''t agree to look at our case, my parents and I will be lost, and it will be the most hateful legal error...’” Maigret is asked to the windswept, rainy border town of Givet by a young woman desperate to clear her family of murder. But their well-kept shop, the sleepy community and its raging river all hide their own mysteries.

It''s closing time at the Gai Moulin, and Jean Chabot and Rene Delfrosse are planning to rob the till to pay of their debts. To their surprise, they stumble upon a dead body. What at first seems to the police an open and shut case proves more complicated when the body turns up next at the zoo, stuffed into a wicker basket. Into the puzzlement steps Maigret, who makes one of the most dramatic and colorful entrances of his career as he sorts out the tangled web of deceit. Maigret is a registered trademark of the Estate of Georges Simenon.