Most Popular Books by Georges Simenon

A glamorous woman suddenly turns up dead in the middle of nowhere in a tragic, mysterious puzzle that only Georges Simenon’s legendary detective can solve. It’s just another slow, rainy day on a French canal, until the discovery of a woman’s body disrupts the placid scene. Inspector Maigret is baffled by the facts of the case: an expensively dressed woman, Mary Lampson, has been strangled in a nearby stable, with no road nearby wide enough for automobile traffic. Only by chance was her body found, without a noise, witness, or trace of mud to aid in explaining the scene. How did this glamorous, pearl-laden woman meet her end? It seems that those on board the barge La Providence—Mary’s proud husband, Sir Walter; a friend named Willy Marco; and a Chilean parliament member’s widow—might hold the key to the puzzle. In The Carter of La Providence, once again, Georges Simenon orchestrates a harrowing plot of secrets and dramas that disturb, and reveal the underbelly of, the everyday.

''You''ll get used to things, you''ll see. But you have to watch very carefully what you say and what you do.'' Adil Bey is an outsider. Newly arrived as Turkish consul at a run-down Soviet port on the Black Sea, he receives only suspicion and hostility from the locals. His one intimacy is a growing, wary relationship with his Russian secretary Sonia, who he watches silently in her room opposite his apartment. But this is Stalin''s world before the war, and nothing is as it seems. Georges Simenon''s most starkly political work, The People Opposite is a tour de force of slow-burn tension. ''Irresistible... read him at your peril, avoid him at your loss'' Sunday Times

A shattering study of restlessness and midlife crisis on the ocean, from an icon of bleak fiction. François Mahé took his family on vacation to Porquerolles, a sun-drenched Côte d’Azur island, only because a friend suggested it. His everyday life as a small-town doctor was sedate and predictable, but contented—until he experienced the strange, hostile energy of Porquerolles, with its intense heat and deafening thrum of cicadas. Now François is consumed with a terrible restlessness, a mutinous longing that settles on an impoverished young girl. He doesn’t love her, he tells himself, or even desire her. Yet for what she represents—danger, newness, a renunciation of passivity—he may just set a match to everything. A pitiless meditation on the irreconcilable lures of belonging and freedom, The Mahé Circle is Georges Simenon at the height of his disturbing powers.

Against all expectations Marcel Féron has made a “normal” life in a bucolic French suburb in the Ardennes. But on May 10, 1940, as Nazi tanks approach, this timid, happy man must abandon his home and confront the “Fate” that he has secretly awaited. Separated from his pregnant wife and young daughter in the chaos of flight, he joins a freight car of refugees hurtling southward ahead of the pursuing invaders. There, he meets Anna, a sad-looking, dark- haired girl, whose accent is “neither Belgian nor German,” and who “seemed foreign to everything around her.” As the mystery of Anna’s identity is gradually revealed, Marcel leaps from the heights of an exhilarating freedom to the depths of a terrifying responsibility—one that will lead him to a blood-chilling choice. When it first appeared in English in 1964, British novelist and critic Brigid Brophy declared The Train to be “the novel his admirers had been expecting all along from Simenon.” Until The Train, she wrote, the dazzlingly prolific novelist had been “a master without a masterpiece.”

“Simenon could produce endless variations, as similar and as different as Shakespeare’s sonnets or Monet’s haystacks.” —Adam Kirsch When the glamorous wife of an American industrialist is murdered at a luxury Paris hotel, her past life as a nightclub dancer is the key to finding the killer. As Maigret traces surprising connections between the dead woman and the hotel’s belowstairs staff, a story of unrequited love, self-reinvention, and blackmail emerges—with one tragic, luckless suspect at the center. Yet as Maigret knows, even the most compelling evidence isn’t infallible. Might a murkier, more disquieting truth lie behind the apparent facts of the matter? A riveting mystery and a startling journey into the darker corners of human nature, The Cellars of the Majestic showcases the full range of Georges Simenon’s uncanny psychological insight.

When Inspector Maigret arrives in Delfzijl to investigate the murder of Conrad Popinga, he finds a long list of suspects.

When a corpse turns up, shot by Maigret''s stolen gun, his search for the killer takes him to London to investigate one murder - and prevent another.

“The most extraordinary fictive shaper in our time.” —George Steiner Exiled to a sleepy town in western France, Maigret is relieved when he has to handle a challenging case. There’s been a murder in a mussel farming village and its most respected resident, the former judge Monsieur Forlacroix, has tried to dispose of the body in the river. But why will no one admit to knowing the dead man? And what connects him to Forlacroix’s pianist daughter, Lise, who is kept locked in her bedroom? With studied patience and an eye for subliminal clues, Maigret teases out the dark secrets that everyone in this insular community, it seems, has a motive to protect. A heady and atmospheric page-turner, The Judge’s House is Georges Simenon at his suspenseful best.

The tidal regularity of life in a quiet village is broken when the local harbor-master is murdered, and Inspector Maigret must force the killer into the open by using all of his famous instincts.

Un avion qui s''écrase au Congo sur le sol rouge d''une plantation de café et c''est une histoire d''amour qui commence, entourée de ses drames. De sa tension. De la chaleur des terres d''Afrique, des orages qui ne viennent pas, des voisins anglais ... L''attente ... Les tambours ... Des nouveaux venus qui deviennent fous ... [payot.ch]

“Dark, disturbing . . . Simenon discovered something fundamental about the soul.” —The Guardian A string of murders has the small French town of La Rochelle in its grip. The victims, all elderly women, have been found strangled with cello string—in cafés, over card games, near the canal. As the winter rain gives cover to the killer stalking the streets with impunity, we watch as he deliberates over and justifies his heinous acts to himself, unaware that the quiet, unassuming tailor, Kachoudas, has discovered his secret. In this chilling game of cat and mouse we follow along in the steps of the killer, unsure if his crimes will be brought to light by the one man who knows his secret, or if Kachoudas will end up being the next of his victims in this masterful tale of murder and intrigue.

In his own words, Maigret reflects on his legacy—and storytelling itself—in this metatextual meditation on narrative, policing, and truth. Is the real Inspector Maigret the mentally agile, physically ponderous detective of Georges Simenon’s famous novels? Or is this character a distorted facsimile of an actual person? In a startling turn of events, the original Jules Maigret of the Paris Police Judiciaire now takes the reins from Simenon and reveals, with self-effacing candor and some trepidation, where reality ends and skillful storytelling begins. As he well knows, his identity cannot be disentangled from his fictional alter ego’s. Indeed, over the decades, the gap between “Maigret” and Maigret has only narrowed. Yet his urge to assert his individuality is, he hopes, understandable—because aren’t we all discomfited when shown an image of ourselves that is almost, but not quite, true to life?

''Maigret moved slowly, edging his bulky frame through the throng in Rue Saint-Antoine, which burst into life every morning, the sunshine streaming down from a clear sky on to the little barrows piled high with fruit and vegetables'' In these three tales of deception, set in and around Paris, Simenon''s celebrated detective uncovers chilling truths about the depths of the human instinct for self-preservation.

“Simenon was fascinated by peculiarities of human personality, which he described in elegant, simple prose . . . as pure as running water.” —Roger Ebert It’s the height of spring, and Maigret is grappling with doubly unfamiliar circumstances. He’s in the surreal new village of Jeanneville, outside Paris, where an elderly bachelor has been shot dead in his home. Тhe prime witness, his twenty-four-year-old housekeeper, Félicie, may well be among Maigret’s most unnerving adversaries. Infuriatingly clever, singularly self-possessed, and overtly antagonistic, she is surely hiding something—but what? As their battle of wits pinballs the investigation between toy land–like Jeanneville and Paris’s seedy Place Pigalle, Maigret wonders what preoccupies him more: catching the perpetrator of a brutal murder, or solving the psychological puzzle box of Félicie? A diamond-sharp gem of crime fiction, Félicie is Georges Simenon at his mischievous best.

Inspector Maigret investigates the death of fortuneteller Mademoiselle Jeanne, a case remarkable for its wealth of unconnected suspects and fragmentary clues

When Sad Freddie, an ace safecracker, stumbles upon a murdered woman during a burglary, his wife, Lofty, turns to the inimitable Inspector Maigret for help

A quiet seaside village reveals dark secrets when Maigret investigates the murder of its former postmistress. Drawn by the lure of springtime in the countryside and a sentimental attachment to village life, Maigret agrees to investigate the shocking murder of a retired postmistress in a small seaside village. His hopes for a country idyll are soon frustrated, however, when he realizes that beneath the villagers’ calm routines lie grudges years in the making. Maigret Goes to School is one of Georges Simenon’s most lyrical and quietly disturbing novels. As he unravels a complicated web of sexual jealousy, casual cruelty, and financial fraud, Maigret is haunted by memories of his own rural childhood, reminding him how little village life has changed—and how well it conceals its darkest impulses.