French title: La guinguette à deux sous
Year: 1932
Englished: 2014, David Watson
The Two-Penny Bar
- Georges Simenon
On "a radiant end of the afternoon" in a Paris
June, Maigret, our favorite police inspector, visits convicted murderer Lenoir
on the last evening before the state chops the killer’s head off. Without
coughing up the name, Lenoir claims one also richly deserving of the guillotine
is a man who committed a murder six years before and is a regular at The
Two-Penny Bar, an obscure tavern on the Seine.
Maigret asks around but nobody has heard of the joint. A
surprising chance a few weeks later, however, puts Maigret on the trail. His
informal investigation joins the six-year-old murder to a recent tragedy; a junk
dealer and loan shark; a band of middle-class friends; a coal merchant and his a
femme fatale of a mistress; a pernod-loving Englishman in a loveless marriage; and
a Maigret suffering from the absence of his wife vacationing in Alsace.
The exact and terse phrasing of Simenon sketches in a few
words a character, an atmosphere. “He felt he had never experienced such dark
despair. Not even dark. It was a dull, grey despair. A despair with no words of
lament, no grimaces of pain.”
Like many of Simenon’s novels, this is long on
atmosphere, which buffs of the Thirties will like. Plus, it is not nearly as
sad as other Great Depression-era Maigret mysteries such as The
Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien, The Grand
Banks Café, Maigret
Goes Home, or Night at
the Crossroads.
No comments:
Post a Comment