The Dancer at the Gai-Moulin by Georges Simenon

Guest-starring Maigret

Published in 1931, La Danseuse du Gai-Moulin is the tenth novel in George Simenon’s series of Inspector Maigret mystery novels. In English the novel has appeared as Maigret at the “Gai-Moulin” or The Dancer at the Gai-Moulin. The title references the name of a nightclub in Liège, Belgium, the city of Simenon’s birth, where this novel takes place. Even though Maigret works for the Paris police, his investigations sometimes lead him farther afield, jurisdiction be damned.

Two teenage boys are hanging out at the Gai-Moulin one evening. René Delfosse, 18 years of age, is the wealthy child of a factory owner and somewhat of a juvenile delinquent. Jean Chabot, 16, is a poor boy, generally well-intentioned, who has fallen in with the wrong kind of friend. Both of them are enamored with Adèle, a dancer at the Gai-Moulin. She is friendly towards them, but treats them like pets and doesn’t put out for them. On this particular evening, Adèle can’t spend too much time chatting with the boys because she has to pay attention to a real big spender. This stranger has a Turkish look about him, which results in him being frequently referred to as “the Turk,” whether accurate or not. Unbeknownst to Adèle, Delfosse and Chabot have not come to the Gai-Moulin merely to drink cocktails. Their intention is to rob the place. They hide in the basement until after closing, then enter the bar to empty the till. Before they can do so, however, they find the body of the Turk dead on the bar floor.

By now, you might be asking yourself, “What does all this have to do with Maigret?” The odd thing about this Maigret novel is that Maigret himself doesn’t even appear until halfway through the book. Even then, he largely confines himself to the sidelines while the Liège police do all of the leg work. The absence of the book’s star for much of the novel’s length seems an odd choice on the part of Simenon, but I guess when you write around 500 novels you can afford to experiment. This book kept calling to my mind Arthur Conan Doyle’s book The Valley of Fear, a Sherlock Holmes mystery in which Sherlock Holmes barely plays a supporting role. That Doyle book, in my opinion, was definitely a failed experiment, but this Maigret novel fares a little better with the absentee detective strategy. The final chapter of the novel, in which Maigret does his thing, is really very good as Simenon rolls out one of the more ingeniously intricate crime-solution plot webs in the series.

The notable absence of Maigret for much of the novel, while unexpected, does not ruin the book. I wouldn’t recommend this novel for Maigret newbies, because one learns almost nothing about the main character, but if you’re already a fan of the series then this mystery will not fail to satisfy. It’s not one of the best books in Simenon’s consistently high-quality series, but it’s better than many Maigret cases and far above average when compared to the novels of other 20th-century mystery writers.