A bit formulaic by Maigret standards
As the title indicates, Maigret ventures to the Netherlands for this case. A French professor on a lecture tour is detained in Holland as a murder suspect. The professor’s university contacts Maigret to request his assistance in investigating the crime, in hopes of exonerating their faculty member. Maigret travels to Delfzijl, a small coastal town in the far northeast of the Netherlands (a real town near Groningen). Following his lecture, the professor attended a party at a private home in Delfzijl, along with nine or ten other people, servants included. That night the host was shot and killed, and the professor was found with the gun in his hand. Though Maigret has no jurisdiction in the Netherlands, the small-town cops of Delfzijl allow Maigret some leeway to investigate, given his reputation and experience. Maigret interviews the party attendees and uncovers a web of secrets, animosities, and infidelities.
I’ve read about twenty of these Maigret novels and know I can count on them for a good read. Some of the books in the series are excellent, and they’re all consistently at least pretty good. This is one of the pretty-good ones. What sets the Maigret novels apart from most detective fiction is that Simenon usually delivers an unconventional mystery that has more to do with Freudian psychology and existential philosophy than with clue-and-deduction puzzles. Compared to most Maigret mysteries, Maigret in Holland is pretty formulaic. Within the first two pages, the crime has been committed, Maigret is on the case, and he has a list of suspects in hand (literally a list, written on a piece of paper). It ends with a re-enactment of the crime that feels more like it belongs in a Hercule Poirot novel instead of one of Maigret’s. Throughout the novel, there are really only two, maybe three people who would have been in the right place at the right time to commit the crime, so it’s not much of a surprise when the killer is revealed.
It seems almost as if in these early novels Simenon were still trying to figure out the direction he wanted to take this character. In the previous novel, The Night at the Crossroads (#7), Maigret is such a macho tough guy he’s almost an action hero. In Maigret in Holland, he’s more of a stereotypical sleuth looking for that one Encyclopedia Brown red herring that will convict the murderer. I don’t believe Maigret’s wife is even mentioned in this novel, which is quite unusual. The reader learns very little about his personal life in this book. I also felt like Maigret in Holland was too similar to other troubled-marriage murder mysteries in Maigret’s oeuvre (Maigret Has Scruples in particular). I’m not reading these books in order, however, so rather than this book repeating familiar plot elements, it’s the later novels that are derivative of this one. Like all Maigret books, this is a quick and entertaining read, but it’s not one of the French detective’s most compelling cases.
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