Some people climb mountains. Some people run marathons. I’ve just finished reading all 75 Maigret novels by Georges Simenon — and honestly, I feel like I’ve done a bit of both.
It’s a strange kind of achievement, reading your way through a series of books that, by a lot of measures, are more or less the same. Same protagonist, most of tthe hem in the same streets of postwar Paris, same grimy cafés and sullen suspects (having said that, the weather changes; it may be possible to group the novels into
Spring and Autumn novels more effectively than by decade). The motive may be singular, but the tune is familiar. And this of course is the point. There’s a real pleasure to be found in stories that return you to the same world over and over again — not despite their similarities, but because of them.
It’s not a series you rush through. I read them slowly, over years, helped by the fact that Singapore's public library had most of them available either as hard copies or e-books. Sometimes months passed between books. Other times, I’d read two or three in a week. But every time I returned, it felt like I was visiting someone I knew.
Some of the books stand out more than others. The Yellow Dog is pure atmosphere — a seaside town, a mysterious animal, and a fog that never quite lifts. Maigret and the Minister dips into politics and the anxiety of power. Night at the Crossroads is one of the strangest, most noirish entries — full of fog, confusion, and a wonderfully murky sense of place. Maigret and the Good People of Montparnasse finds the Inspector moving through bourgeois respectability with his usual quiet skepticism. And Maigret in Vichy, another one of the later novels, is a beautiful change of pace — Maigret on medical leave, watching the world instead of pursuing it, a man slowly becoming aware of his own mortality. At the same time, I'd be lying if I could remember all of them: the titles Maigret is Afraid and Maigret's Failure don't ring too many bells.
But part of the enjoyment is that even the “minor” entries are enjoyable. They don’t need to be materpieces. They just need to be Maigret.
Reading all 75 books isn’t about chasing a plot or unlocking a twist. It’s about spending time in a world where human frailty is treated with sympathy, where justice is important but never theatrical, and where smoking a pipe while thinking things through still feels like a legitimate investigative strategy.
There’s a kind of artistic tradition in this sort of repetition. P.G. Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle stories are essentially variations on a theme — imposters, pig thefts, romantic mix-ups, and Lord Emsworth in a fog. Yasujiro Ozu’s later films all tell the same gentle story: aging parents, dutiful children, life’s quiet disappointments and dignities. We return to them not because we’re surprised, but because they offer a sense of rhythm, of familiarity, and of quiet beauty in the expected.
Simenon understood that. He once said he didn’t care for plot, really — he was interested in people. That’s what the Maigret novels are: 75 variations on human weakness and quiet understanding, all wrapped in a fog of tobacco and red wine.
And when you turn the last page of the last book, it’s not a grand finale. It’s more like a quiet goodbye at the end of another long walk in the rain.
