The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien by Georges Simenon

A suicide, but why?

Originally published in 1931 under the French title of Le Pendu du Saint-Pholien, this is the fourth book in George Simenon’s series of Inspector Maigret mystery novels. In English translation, this book has been published as The Crime of Inspector Maigret, Maigret and the Hundred Gibbets, and The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien. The title of the novel is a bit of a spoiler, so it’s best not explained.

Maigret has been in Brussels, conferring with the police there about a case. While patronizing a café in that city, Maigret spots a shabby, destitute-looking man handling a sizeable wad of cash. Maigret estimates the stack of bills to be at least 30,000 Belgian francs, which the suspicious character stuffs into an envelope that he addresses to a Paris address. Assuming this man is engaged in some form of thievery, Maigret decides to follow the guy, eventually tailing him to the train station. With apparently nothing else to do, Maigret follows his suspect on board a train traveling through Amsterdam to Bremen, Germany. There, the sleazy-looking fellow engages a hotel room, and Maigret takes the adjoining room. Spying on his suspect through the keyhole, Maigret watches as the man takes out a gun and, before Maigret can intervene, commits suicide.

After an examination of this mystery man’s belongings, Maigret determines that there is more to this story than meets the eye. Wondering where the money came from and why this man would so suddenly decide to blow his brains out, Maigret decides to investigate the suicide victim’s past. He immediately encounters an obstacle, however, when he discovers that this man, supposedly named Louis Jeunet, is traveling with a fake passport under an assumed name. The ensuing investigation into the dead man’s identity leads Maigret on a search stretching from Bremen to Paris, Rheims, and Liège.

This mystery makes for an intriguing puzzle that grips the reader’s curiosity and keeps one engaged throughout, but the story does have its problems. As happens in quite a few of these Maigret novels, the resolution doesn’t rely so much on Maigret’s detective work but rather on the suspects’ arbitrary decision to just spill their guts to him, as they do for roughly the final four chapters of this book. Simenon was an expert at constructing his crime novels around realistic and moving human stories, but the result is that sometimes the criminals’ and victims’ back stories take precedence over the actual mystery itself, as is the case here. The opening premise of the novel, with Maigret just following some guy on a whim, feels like a rather lazy, contrived means of setting up the revelations of alias Louis Jeunet’s past, which is really where Simenon directs most of his effort. Another element in this novel that I found a bit disturbing is that Maigret is actually responsible for the death of an innocent person, and he knows it, but it doesn’t seem to bother him too much.

Like most Maigret novels, once I picked this book up I didn’t want to put it down. Simenon’s prose is brisk and riveting. On the other hand, this is one where I felt like I had to suspend disbelief at times, and when I got to the end, I was left with a feeling of hmmm . . . that was odd. It defies expectations, and not always in a good way.