DOLORES HITCHENS – Fools’ Gold. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1958. Included in Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1950s. Pocket #1239, paperback, 1959. Library of America, hardcover, 2015.

BANDE À PART. Anouchka, France, 1964. Released in the US as Band of Outsiders. Anna Karina, Danièle Girard, Louisa Colpeyn, Chantal Darget, Sami Frey, Claude Brasseur. Based on the book Fools’ Gold, by Dolores Hitchens. Director: Jean-Luc Godard.

   A nasty piece of work about a nasty piece of work named Skip, barely graduated from juvenile delinquency, who has enthralled a cute blonde named Karen and a dim ne’er-do-well named Eddie with whom he hopes to pull a major caper. But this thing has wheels within wheels, and when a big-time professional crook gets wind of the deal and decides to hijack it, that’s only the beginning of the complications that ensue.

   I never read any Hitchens before, but I found this quite well done. She has a good feel for letting the characters shape the plot, and she isn’t bothered by a bit of clutter and untidiness as things play out in a nicely cluttered and untidy finale.

   Fools’ Gold was turned into a rather unlikely film called Bande à part (Band of Outsiders) in 1964 by the legendary and quite mad Jean-Luc Godard, who threw out half the plot but stayed surprisingly faithful to the rest. Bande stars Sami Frey, Claude Brasseur and the lovely Anna Karina as the aspiring felons, played out on actual locations rather than sets, giving the thing that rough, seat-of-the-pants look typical of Godard and perfect for a gritty crime movie.

   There’s also a bit more attention to the characters here. Hitchens’ cast was well-drawn and believable, but – how shall I put this?

   You know how in pornography, the characters just think about sex all the time? Of course you do. Well in crime novels the characters are pretty well preoccupied with crime. So it is in Hitchens’ novel, but not so in Godard’s film.

   Here, they have their secret thoughts, playful moments and private ambitions. And sometimes they break out of the story just to be young. The result is a film worth coming back to: mysterious, exciting, and highly satisfying.

SPECIAL AGENT K-7. C.C.Burr Productions / Puritan Pictures, 1936. Walter McGrail, Queenie Smith, Irving Pichel, Donald Reed, Willy Castello, Duncan Renaldo, Joy Hodges. Based on the radio series character created (or played) by George Zimmer. Director: Bernard B. Ray (as Raymond K. Johnson).

   The espionage adventure radio series referred to appeared on the NBC network between 1932 and 1934, as I understand it. This is a long time ago, and information is hard to come by when it comes to radio this old. No copies of any of the episodes are known to exist. This movie was made in 1936 or 1937, and another radio series came along in 1939, one called Secret Agent K-7 Returns.

   This second series was carried by CBS and starred Jay Jostyn, an actor best known by OTR fans for his long-running lead role in the program Mr. District Attorney. The second series of K-& adventures lasted for 78 episodes, many of which are generally available and in circulation. See The Digital Deli website for more details.

   Any resemblance between the movie and the second radio series is next to none. In the movie, agent K-7, by name “Lanny” Landers and played by Walter McGrail, is not a spy of any kind, but an undercover agent for the FBI. Home from abroad, he’s asked to help crack down on organized crime in a city filled with hoodlums, gamblers and gangsters of all sorts.

   Most of the activity in the film takes place in and around a nightclub owned by Eddie Geller, who has just been the beneficiary of a hung jury. When he is killed in his office, it is the fiancé of reporter Olive O’Day (Queenie Smith) who is the primary suspect. She, of course, asks Landers for help.

   The detective story that follows is a complicated one, with lots of suspects and false trails, as many as can be squeezed into a cramped 70 minutes worth of running time, which also includes a song by one Joy Hodges, later known for helping Ronald Reagan launch his acting career. The killer is obvious, though, from the very first moment he appears on the screen, taking the sheen off most of what follows. There are glimpses of what otherwise could have been, but “could have been” never counts for very much.

JOHN CREASEY – Hunt the Toff. Richard Rollison (The Toff) #26. Walker, US, hardcover, 1969. Lancer 74658, US, paperback, no date stated [1970?]. Originally published in the UK by Evans, hardcover, 1952.

   There were 59 books about The Toff, 50 with Patrick Dawlish, 47 about The Baron, 43 with Inspector West. and a paltry 34 featuring Dr Palfrey. Even so, this totaled up comes to less than half of John Creasey’s prodigious output of over 600 detective novels. (You can do the math.)

   This one begins in fine fashion, and once begun, the action never seems to flag. While taking a much-needed vacation at a seaside resort, Rollinson rescues a young woman from a swim that becomes far too dangerous for her, thanks to a missing buoy.

   Not only has an obvious attempt been made on her life, but when that fails, she’s framed for the murder of her previous companion in crime. (She’s that kind of young woman, as it turns out.) Worse, Rollinson’s alibi for her does not hold up when she’s positively identified as the killer, putting The Toff at direct odds with the police for lying to them, and soon he’s even accused of being an accomplice.

   Hence the title of the book. Luckily Rollinson has a lot of friends to help keep him undercover long enough to clear his name. It’s a simple tale, one told without a lot of glitz and glamor, with just enough twist in the ending to make the 173 page journey, and a couple of hours on a flight from L.A. to CT, all the more worthwhile.

MICHELLE SPRING – Every Breath You Take. Laura Principal #1. Pocket, US, hardcover, 1994; paperback, 1995. Ballantine, US, paperback, 1999. First published by Orion, UK, hardcover, 1994.

   Spring is a Professor of Sociology at a British university and has published several non-fiction works. This is her first novel in a series featuring Private Investigator Laura Principal.

   Laura and her male partner-in-all-senses operate a private detective agency in London. She and her best ladyfriend co-own a cottage on the Norfolk coast, and for financial reasons decide to share the cottage with a third lady. She is an artist and Cambridge art instructor who occasionally seems to be nervous and fearful without apparent reason.

   That there were reasons becomes apparent when she is discovered brutally murdered in her flat. Laura is consumed by guilt because she didn’t pay attention to the dead woman’s fears, and begins probing her past to find answers. She finds she may not have known the woman at all.

   I didn’t dislike this, but I didn’t like it as much as I wanted to. I think my primary problem was with the prose. While the characters had the potential to be likable, the first-person narration seemed to lack immediacy and involvement, and to be almost didactic. There was a bit too much HIBK.

   A more concrete flaw was the depiction of the police, and Principal’s relations with them; it’s obvious that Spring didn’t concern herself overly with realism in this regard. The plot was eventually resolved by a device all too common, but nonetheless annoying and unsatisfying.

   After detailing all the things wrong with the book, I’m not really sure why I liked it even as much as I did while I was reading it. I guess because of the characters — but I wish she had done more with them.

      The Laura Principal series —

1. Every Breath You Take (1994)
2. Running For Shelter (1995)
3. Standing in the Shadows (1998)
4. Nights in White Satin (1999)
5. In the Midnight Hour (2001)

JAMES R. BENN – The Devouring. Lt. Billy Boyle #12. Soho Crime, hardcover, September 2017. Setting: France/Switzerland, World War II.

First Sentence:   Light is faster than sound.

   Captain Billy Boyle and Lt. Piotr “Kaz” Kazimierz are headed to Switzerland but crash-land in France, meeting up with Anton Lasho, a Sinti (Gypsy) determined to kill every German he meets. The three do make it across the border and connect with members of the OSS. Their task? Investigate Swiss banks that are laundering looted Nazi gold.

   Benn throws one into high drama and action from the very start and it’s great. One feels the anxiety of the characters as we are immediately introduced to Billy, “Kaz” and Anton Lasko, who is new to us but who proves to be such a good character, one wouldn’t mind seeing him in the future. Billy and Kaz are truly wonderful characters. One can very much appreciate the way in which Benn sprinkles information on their backgrounds throughout the story. It is through the trio that Benn creates such painful, yet honest scenes that they touch one’s emotions. That’s the mark of a truly fine writer.

   Benn has an excellent voice. He includes the vernacular of the 1940’s— “You’re all packing, I assume” … “Can you get us shoulder holsters?” I asked. “It’s clumsy carrying these six-shooters around in a coat pocket.” —without overdoing it. He includes just the right touch of wry humor— “All we had to do was avoid imprisonment and long-range rifle fire. All in a day’s work.”

   This may be Benn’s most complex book so far. It is filled with historical information. One may find it makes them quite angry. Not toward the author, but because of the information which one may not have previously known, yet is important to learn. And that’s what makes this a particularly good book.

   The Devouring is a really well-done tale of duplicity, stolen gold, and a not-so-neutral country.

      The Billy Boyle World War II series —

1. Billy Boyle (2006)

2. The First Wave (2007)
3. Blood Alone (2008)
4. Evil for Evil (2009)
5. Rag and Bone (2010)

6. A Mortal Terror (2011)
7. Death’s Door (2012)
8. A Blind Goddess (2013)
9. The Rest is Silence (2014)
10. The White Ghost (2015)
11. Blue Madonna (2016)
12. The Devouring (2017)

DASHIELL HAMMETT – The Big Book of the Continental Op. RICHARD LAYMAN & JULIE RIVETT, Editors. Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, softcover, 28 November 2017. 752 pages.

    “Now for the first time ever in one volume, all twenty-eight stories and two serialized novels starring the Continental Op — one of the greatest characters in storied history of detective fiction.”

    What else do you need to know? I’ve been waiting for this book for almost 60 years. And now here it is, at last, all but three stories appearing first in Black Mask magazine, and all reprinted as they first appeared.

                    

THE ADVENTURES OF JANE. Eros Films, UK, 1949. Christobel Leighton-Porter, Michael Hogsworth, Peter Butterworth, Sonya O’Shea, Ian Colin, Stanelli, Sebastian Cabot. Screenplay by Alf Goulding, E. J. Whiting and Con West, based on the comic strip “Jane” created by Norman Pett. Directed by E. J. Whiting and (uncredited) by Alfred Goulding and Norman Pett. TV series: BBC, UK, 1982-84 (reviewed by Michael Shonk here ).

   Jane, that grown up Little Orphan Annie in and out of lingerie, wasn’t the first glamor girl to strip down in the comic strips on either side of the Atlantic, but her predecessors like Fritzi Ritz, Dixie Dugan, Blondie (before marrying Dagwood), and Frank Godwin’s Connie were modest in comparison to the British Gypsy Rose Lee of the news kiosk.

   Jane lost more clothes, showed more skin, and outlasted the best of them. She has hardly been out of the papers since her creation and even managed two movie outings over forty years apart.

   That’s not bad for a lass and her pet dachshund Fritz, especially since Jane’s chief talent was a gift for getting caught out after spectacular costume failures.

   Jane put the strip in comic strip.

   She was created by artist Norman Pett as a morale booster, a bit along the lines of Milton Caniff’s “Male Call,” but Jane ran in the daily papers and fairly soon, unsatisfied with simply finding ways for Jane to lose her clothes, Pett decided there should be a bit of plot to go with all that skin, so Jane got involved with smugglers, spies, saboteurs (certainly a fifth column was involved in sabotaging her costumes), and kidnappers. Across her career she would veer into a soap opera for a while and even acquire a daughter just as prone to losing her clothes as Maman.

   There is a whole school of British comic strip inspired by Jane and Pett, including Romeo Brown by Peter O’Donnell and Jim Holdway, who soon got more serious with Modesty Blaise.

   Here we have the original Jane, Christobel Leighton-Parker, in the flesh, the model whose photos often accompanied Pett’s annuals and collections of Jane’s adventures, cast as Jane, a show girl who gets involved with smugglers when a seeming nice old man, Sneyd (the name should have been a clue) gives her a fake diamond bracelet.

   It’s all part of a dastardly plot to get past British customs with the stolen Bulawayo Diamond by the handsome criminal Cap, but bound to be foiled by Fritz and Jane’s less than bright policeman boyfriend Tom, and Jane herself, because Jane is never just a victim to be rescued by a man.

   That’s it folks. There is a swimsuit contest Jane judges, Jane shuts doors, and other things, on her clothes and loses her skirt while only wearing scanties, Jane changes her clothes, Jayne wears lingerie, a comic drunk climbs in bed with Fritz in her room, Jane goes to sea, gets wet and changes out of her wet clothes… It pretty much is the same formula as the comic strip in action.

   A young Sebastian Cabot even shows up in a comic bit about a Frenchman going through British customs.

   If you haven’t guessed how The End flashes on screen you aren’t trying.

   But it is fun in the same way as the strip was, plus under the titles we get to see Pett drawing his most famous Jane picture as Leighton-Porter and Fritz pose. You can catch it in two parts on YouTube if you want, and it is currently on Amazon Prime.

   It’s all fun and tease, and Jane, for all her innocence of her various states of undress, is a surprisingly smart and capable heroine who as often as not rescues herself. It’s no wonder she has survived the ravages of time and changes of custom.

   Jane is a force to reckon with.

   A naked force at that.

   

THE MONSTER AND THE GIRL. Paramount, 1941. Ellen Drew, Philip Terry, George Zucco and Rod Cameron. Written by Stuart Anthony. Directed by Stuart Heisler.

   A unique mix of True Confession, Gangster Film and Monster Movie, done with a patina of Paramount gloss — perhaps too much so.

   Ellen Drew starts off the story telling us how she was lured into a life of shame, and how her brother (Philip Terry) got framed for murder trying to redeem her honor. There’s a bit too much of this, including a lengthy flashback to wholesome brother-and-sister life back in Grover’s Corners or wherever, where he’s the Church Organist and she’s eager to go out and make it in the Big City.

   Eventually Ellen heads for the bright lights, and we get a bit more romantic drama as she meets a nice young man (Robert Paige), falls in love, and marries him. And about the time an astute viewer starts asking “Where the hell’s the monster?” there’s a nice bit where the kindly old man who marries them shows a shoulder holster.

   At which point we segue into Gangster Film territory. It seems this romance has all been part of elaborate and somewhat unlikely scheme to lure our Ellen into prostitution –only hinted at here, but very broadly hinted.

   Well we’ve all; had relationships like that, haven’t we? Anyhow, her brother Phillip Terry (remember him?) gets wind of the whole shameful thing, quits pounding the organ and comes after the rat who done her wrong.

   But he’s up against a cold deck because the gang here includes Paul Lukas, Joseph Calleia, Marc Lawrence and Gerald Mohr, and the astute viewer (remember him?) won’t be surprised to see them quickly rub out a gangland rival, callously pin the crime on Phil, and swiftly get him railroaded to the Chair by DA-for-hire Onslow Stevens.

   That’s when George Zucco comes on — and high time, too — as a benign (for him) Mad Doctor who wants to advance Science by transplanting a human brain into a gorilla. Okay, if that’s what the kids are doing these days, that’s fine. There’s a nice brain-transplant scene, and finally we get to the Monster Movie as the gorilla-with-Phil’s-brain escapes to wreak vengeance on the bad guys.

   Any Monster-Lover who has lasted this long should enjoy a last twenty minutes or so of creepy menace and building tension as the bad guys get their brutal comeuppance. To his credit, director Stuart Heisler gets a lot of visual interest out of the ape prowling about the city rooftops and fire escapes, and it never looks as silly as it should. Then too, George Barrows’ gorilla mask seems unusually expressive here, evincing sorrow, alarm and rage from appropriate camera angles.

   But basically what you get here is about a third of a monster movie, and a long wait for it. The Monster parts make satisfying viewing, but what it takes to get there…. Well maybe that’s why God gave us Fast-Forward.

   The first series of Georges Simenon’s Maigret novels ended with a book titled simply MAIGRET (original U.S. title MAIGRET RETURNS), which was written in 1933 and first published in France a year later. In the English-speaking world it was long believed that Simenon then took a sabbatical of a dozen years or so before resurrecting the titan of the Quai des Orfèvres shortly after World War II.

   Thanks to some meticulously detailed French websites we now know that Maigret’s vacation, if we want to call it that, lasted only two years. The final months of 1936 saw his reappearance in short stories published first in the French weekly magazine Paris-Soir-Dimanche, then in the obviously interconnected weeklies Police-Film, Police-Roman and Police-Film/Police-Roman. The last of them was published late in July 1939, shortly before Hitler launched World War II.

   These and a few more written during the war years, when much of France was under German occupation, were collected in LES NOUVELLES ENQUITES DE MAIGRET (Gallimard, 1944). A few Maigret shorts, translated by Anthony Boucher or Lawrence G. Blochman, appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine beginning in 1949 and were collected in THE SHORT CASES OF INSPECTOR MAIGRET (Doubleday, 1959), but most of them didn’t see print in EQMM until the late 1960s and ‘70s.

   For reasons we’ll explore below, a couple of them never appeared in the magazine at all, although they were included in the collections MAIGRET’S CHRISTMAS (Hamish Hamilton 1976, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1977) and MAIGRET’S PIPE (Hamish Hamilton 1977, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1977). Simenon wrote too many Maigret short stories to deal with in a single column but I’m sure there’s room for all the truly short ones.

   The first nine were written in a single month, October 1936, and began to appear late that same month in >Paris-Soir-Dimanche. The earliest to be published is “L’affaire du Boulevard Beaumarchais” (25 October 1936), first collected in LES NOUVELLES ENQU TES DE MAIGRET like all the others discussed here, and included in MAIGRET’S PIPE as “The Mysterious Affair in the Boulevard Beaumarchais.”

   The entire story takes place in and just outside Maigret’s office and most of it deals with his interrogation of the two suspects in the poisoning death of 26-year-old Louise Voivin: her 37-year-old husband Ferdinand and her 18-year-old sister Nicole, who was having an affair with her brother-in-law. The sexual sordidness, plus the fact that the wormy Ferdinand—how shall I put it?—soils his trousers under Maigret’s questioning, probably explain why Fred Dannay chose not to run this one in EQMM.

   The next five followed in Paris-Soir-Dimanche at the rate of one a week. “La Péniche aux Deux Pendus” (1 November 1936) appeared in EQMM, June 1967, as “Inspector Maigret Thinks” and was collected in MAIGRET’S PIPE as “Two Bodies on a Barge.” The story was republished in EQMM for June 1990. According to my web search a péniche is “a steel motorized inland waterway barge of up to 350 tonnes” but the vessel in the story, on which the bodies of the hanged couple (the “Deux Pendus” of the title) are found, is a much more primitive affair: “It was an old barge without a motor, a ‘stable-boat’ as they call those barges that travel along canals with their horses on board.”

    Like several other Maigret novels and stories, this tale takes place beside one of the locks along the Seine. Old Arthur Aerts, who was reputed to have hoarded away 100,000 francs, and his second and much younger wife Emma are found dead in their cabin while the boat is docked overnight at the lock, Arthur hanged with a dog’s chain and Emma with a sheet.

   Apparently the only suspect is a young tough named Emile Gradut, the stoker on “a small tug from the Upper Seine” that was docked beside the Aerts’ barge, who was sleeping with Emma and ran away into the nearby forest of Rougeau before the crimes were discovered. Maigret exposes the truth by reasoning of sorts but I doubt if any reader could beat him to the solution.

   We are back in Paris for “La Fenêtre Ouverte” (8 November 1936), which can be found in EQMM for June 1977 as “Inspector Maigret Smokes His Pipe” and was collected in MAIGRET’S PIPE under the correct title “The Open Window.”

   An arrest warrant in his pocket, Maigret goes to the office of shady financier Oscar Laget in the rue Montmartre only to find him shot, apparently a suicide. Since these stories run only about a dozen pages apiece, there are just two suspects besides Laget himself: his wife and his office manager. This murderer’s plot is actually a bit ingenious but of course no match for Maigret.

   There’s no need to discuss here the fourth story in the series, “Peine de Mort” (15 November 1936)—which appeared in EQMM, October 1968, as “Inspector Maigret’s War of Nerves” and in MAIGRET’S PIPE as “Death Penalty,” an accurate translation of the French title—because I talked about it at length more than two years ago. If you missed that column, or aren’t blessed with a photographic memory, you can access what I said by clicking here.

   Over the next tale’s French title, “Les Larmes de Bougie” (22 November 1936), I scratched my head for a while, and so must its translators have done. Larmes, from the Latin lacrimae, means tears, and bougieq means candle. The tears of the candle? Small wonder the title as it appeared in Lawrence G. Blochman’s translation for EQMM (June 1956) was “Journey into Time,” changed to “Journey Backward into Time” for its first hardcover appearance in THE SHORT CASES OF INSPECTOR MAIGRET. In MAIGRET’S PIPE it’s called “Death of a Woodlander.”

   This is one of the early short cases of Simenon’s protagonist that somewhat resembles a detective story, with Maigret traveling to a tiny village deep in the forest of Orléans to investigate the murder of 62-year-old Marguerite Potru, who had been found in the bedroom she shared with her older sister Amélie “with three stab wounds in her chest; her right cheek and her eye had been savagely slashed.”

   Amélie is alive but has suffered eleven stab wounds, almost all of them on her shoulder and her right side, and either can’t or won’t speak. The women were rumored to have hidden a lot of valuable securities in their grim and ancient house, although none were found when the police searched. The prime suspect is Marguerite’s illegitimate son Marcel, a young tough cut from the same cloth as Emile Gradut in “La Péniche aux Deux Pendus.”

   The French title refers to drips of candle wax found in the Potrus’ coach house, and these are the clues which lead Maigret to the truth and the missing securities.

   In “Rue Pigalle” (29 November 1936), which appeared in EQMM for June 1968 as “Inspector Maigret Investigates” and in MAIGRET’S PIPE as “In the Rue Pigalle,” we are back in Paris and, for the first time in these short stories, in the underworld milieu familiar from novels like MAIGRET/MAIGRET RETURNS.

   On a cold and gloomy morning Maigret visits a modest bistro in the titular street after receiving an anonymous tip that something violent happened in the place the previous night. He finds no sign of violence except two gangsters who have spent the night sleeping in the joint and a bar mirror damaged by a bullet but in due course he finds a third gangster, the body of a fourth, and the answer to his murder, which isn’t of much interest although Eleanor Sullivan, who succeeded as EQMM editor after Fred Dannay’s death, thought enough of the story to reprint it (May 1985).

   There seems to have been a three weeks’ pause before the next Maigret short appeared in Paris-Soir-Dimanche. The first U.S. appearance of “Monsieur Lundi” (20 December 1936) was in EQMM for May 1969 as “Inspector Maigret Hesitates,” which in MAIGRET’S PIPE is called “Mr. Monday.”

   The commissaire visits the house of Dr. Armand Barion, a prosperous physician whose ménage includes a wife, three kids, a man-of-all-work and, until recently, an 18-year-old girl of peasant origins named Olga Boulanger, who was found both dead and more than four months pregnant. An autopsy has revealed that she was killed by a gruesome method unknown in France but common in Malaya and the New Hebrides: she was “induced to swallow a certain number of those slender beards, as sharp as needles, that grow on ears of various cereals, including rye….These beards remain in the bowel, the lining of which they eventually pierce….”

   Both Barion and his factotum had had sex with the girl, “a gawky little thing with a freckled face,” and are therefore prime suspects, but the story is just beginning. It seems that a wandering beggar comes to the Barion house every Monday afternoon and receives a portion of the family lunch, in return for which he offers two cream cakes known as religieuses which he is given earlier every Monday at a neighborhood pâtisserie.

   Dr. Barion has forbidden his kids to eat the cakes, which he’s afraid are stale, and apparently the unlucky Olga gobbled them up. So who put those beards in the cream cakes, and who was the intended target? This tale, my favorite among the ones discussed here, is no longer than any other in the first series of Maigret shorts but somehow seems almost a novel in miniature. In addition to presenting a host of characters, many of them glimpsed or talked about rather than seen or interacted with, Simenon shows us Maigret moving around the neighborhood and absorbing the atmosphere almost as if he had a hundred pages or so to find the truth.

   After another short hiatus came “Une Erreur de Maigret” (3 January 1937), which is translated in MAIGRET’S PIPE as “Maigret’s Mistake.” Like “L’affaire du Boulevard Beaumarchais” this one never appeared in EQMM, for reasons which become clear after one reads the story.

   If nothing else, the tale boasts unity of time and place and only two onstage characters, Maigret himself and Eugène Labri, a fat unctuous toad who owns a pornographic bookshop in the rue Saint-Denis, “between a pork butcher’s and a hairdresser’s….” What brings Maigret to this place with its “revoltingly scented basement” is that Labri’s assistant, Mlle. Emilienne, has been found dead there, apparently from an overdose of sleeping tablets.

   The unremittingly sleazy atmosphere, plus the fact that Maigret socks the slimy Labri at the story’s end (which is no less than he deserves) and that the plot requires a mature woman—a Frenchwoman no less!—to be totally ignorant of the facts of life, seem to me quite enough to explain why Fred Dannay passed on this one for EQMM.

   The ninth and last story to be discussed here is “Jeumont, 51 minutes d’arrêt!,” a title which refers to the stop of almost an hour’s length at the French train station just across the border from Belgium. We know from the superlative website www.trussel.com that the tale was written in October 1936, the same month as the eight tales covered above. And since it’s also the same length as those eight, most likely it first appeared in Paris-Soir-Dimanche, perhaps during that mysterious three-week hiatus we saw a few paragraphs ago.

   Along with the other eight, it was first collected in France in LES NOUVELLES ENQUITES DE MAIGRET (Gallimard, 1944), but it wasn’t included in either MAIGRET’S CHRISTMAS or MAIGRET’S PIPE although it did appear in EQMM (November 1966) and in Bill Pronzini’s anthology MIDNIGHT SPECIALS (Bobbs-Merrill, 1977) as “Inspector Maigret Deduces.”

   The train referred to in the French title is bound from Warsaw to Berlin to Li ge in Belgium (Simenon’s birthplace) to Erquelinnes, which is in Belgium just across from the border, to Jeumont, which is the first stop in France after leaving Belgium. Its final destination is Paris but on this trip a wealthy German banker named Otto Bauer, one of the six passengers in a particular compartment, is found dead in his seat at Jeumont.

   Called in by his railroad-detective nephew, Maigret gets in touch with his Berlin counterparts and learns that Bauer was forced out of the banking business “after the National Socialist revolution, but gave an undertaking of loyalty to the Government, and has never been disturbed….” and also that he’s “[c]ontributed one million marks to party funds.” Despite his name, Bauer was obviously a Jew, and was desperately trying to escape Nazi Germany with whatever money he could salvage. That element is what makes this tale unique in the Maigret canon. At least in translation there’s not a word of sympathy for the victim, not a word of disgust for the regime he was fleeing.

   For Maigret, and for Simenon I fear, it’s just another factor in another case. Does this explain why the story wasn’t included in either of the major Maigret collections? It just might.