Murder and class conflict in a provincial town
Returning from a policeman’s convention in Bordeaux, Maigret feels obligated to stop in the Vendée region and visit his old school chum Chabot, who is now Examining Magistrate for the town of Fontenay-le-Comte. Unbeknownst to Maigret when he gets off the train, a series of murders has recently occurred in the town. When it becomes public knowledge that the Superintendant of Paris’s Police Judiciare is in town, Maigret is reluctantly roped into participating in the investigation. The murdered persons include the black sheep of Fontenay’s wealthiest family, an old widow, and the town drunk. Given the random assortment of victims, it is feared that a serial-killing madman may be on the loose.
Integral to the story is Maigret’s relationship to Chabot. Maigret looked up to his classmate when they were in school together, but now in their old age the tables have turned. Maigret is clearly the more competent law enforcement professional of the two. Though he has his own ideas of how the investigation should be handled, he doesn’t want to step on Chabot’s toes, even when the latter practically begs him to take over. Maigret perceptively recognizes a tense divide between the haves and have-nots in Fontenay. He can see that Chabot’s judgment is not impartial but rather biased by his friendships with some of the wealthier families in town.
The biggest problem with this mystery is that it’s not really much of a mystery. There are really only two viable suspects for the murder, and the motives and methods behind the three killings are not very difficult to unravel. Like many a Simenon crime novel, this is really more of a psychological study of a crime than an actual whodunit mystery. Though the Maigret novels reside firmly within the mystery genre, in many ways they comprise something like a mid-twentieth-century version of Balzac’s Comédie Humaine—a reflection of French society during the author’s lifetime. In Maigret Afraid, Simenon shows us life in a provincial town and its class conflicts between the nobility and the common folk, and between the working class and the nouveau riche aristocracy. The resentment of Fontenay’s lower and middle classes towards their self-proclaimed “betters” is palpable and threatens to explode at any moment into a hang-the-rich lynch mob. As he often does in these books, Simenon reveals aspects of French society that lie behind the rosy facade presented to tourists.
Maigret Afraid is thoroughly engaging for most of its length, though it may leave the reader wishing for a more thrilling ending. From a detective fiction standpoint, this may not be one of Maigret’s most fascinating cases, but the lives of the characters are compelling and poignant. This novel is a good solid entry in the mystery genre, and any book by Simenon is better than the vast majority of crime thrillers out there.
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