In Simenon's first novel featuring Maigret, the laconic detective is taken from grimy bars to luxury hotels as he follows a trail of bodies and traces the true identity of the elusive international criminal, Pietr the Latvian.
Georges Simenon (Author)
Georges Simenon was born in Li ge, Belgium in 1903. An intrepid
traveller with a profound interest in people, Simenon strove on and
off the page to understand, rather than to judge, the human
condition in all its shades. His novels include the Inspector
Maigret series and a richly varied body of wider work united by its
evocative power, its economy of means, and its penetrating
psychological insight. He is among the most widely read writers in
the global canon. He died in 1989 in Lausanne, Switzerland, where
he had lived for the latter part of his life.
David Bellos (Translator)
David Bellos is Meredith Howland Pyne Professor of French
Literature at Princeton University, where he also teaches
Comparative Literature. He is the author of many books and articles
on nineteenth-century fiction, alongside biographies of three icons
of French culture in the twentieth century- Georges Perec, Jacques
Tati and Romain Gary. He is also a well-known translator and the
author of Is That a Fish in Your Ear? The Amazing Adventure of
Translation. David Bellos was recently awarded the rank of officier
in the Ordre National des Arts et des Lettres for his services to
French culture.
Gem-hard soul-probes . . . not just the world's bestselling
detective series, but an imperishable literary legend . . . he
exposes secrets and crimes not by forensic wizardry, but by the
melded powers of therapist, philosopher and confessor
*Times*
Strangely comforting . . . so many lovely bistros from the Paris of
mid-20th C. The corpses are incidental, it's the food that
counts.
*Margaret Atwood*
One of the greatest writers of the 20th century . . . no other
writer can set up a scene as sharply and with such economy as
Simenon does . . . the conjuring of a world, a place, a time, a set
of characters - above all, an atmosphere.
*Financial Times*
Simenon's supreme virtue as a novelist, to burrow beneath the
surface of his characters' behaviour; to empathise . . . it is this
unfailing humanity that makes the Maigret books truly worth
reading.
*Guardian*
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