The Shadow Puppet by Georges Simenon

Only murder in the building

First published in 1912, The Shadow Puppet is the twelfth novel in Belgian author Georges Simenon’s series of mystery novels starring Parisian police detective Jules Maigret. The original French title of this novel is L’Ombre chinoise, meaning literally “the Chinese shadow,” which refers to a certain type of shadow puppet. This novel has also been published in English under the titles of Maigret Mystified and The Shadow in the Courtyard, the latter title being the most accurate. If this were a Hardy Boys mystery, the story would actually involve a shadow puppet, but here the title is strictly metaphorical, referring to a human silhouette viewed through a window shade.

A concierge at an apartment building on the Place des Vosges calls the police to report a murder, and Maigret reports to the scene of the crime. Passing through an arched entryway, he enters the large courtyard of this apartment complex. On one side of this courtyard resides the laboratory of a serum manufacturer (medical elixirs, I presume). The owner of the company, Monsieur Couchet, has been found seated at his desk, shot to death, and his safe emptied of its contents, estimated to be 360,000 francs. Couchet, a very wealthy man, doesn’t actually reside in this building, but through an unfortunate coincidence, his ex-wife does. Both have remarried since their divorce. Couchet also had a mistress, not much of a secret, for whom Maigret develops a sympathy. Although on the surface this crime appears to be a typical armed robbery killing, Maigret comes to suspect that the murder may have been committed by one of the building’s residents. As he delves into the case, he uncovers the secret lives of these tenants and their tangled web of relationships.

The fact that an industrial pharmaceutical laboratory would exist on the ground floor of an apartment building is one of those little historical details that makes Maigret novels interesting. From reading these mysteries, you learn a lot about what life was like in Paris, and France at large, in the early twentieth century. The reader gets to see aspects of Parisian life they’d never find in a tourism brochure. One facet of French society that Simenon often addresses in these novels is class consciousness and social status. In The Shadow Puppet, differences in financial status—between the rich Couchets in their mansion on Boulevard Haussmann, the middle-class tenants of the apartment block at the Place des Vosges, and the hard-up mistress and her peers living in Montmarte—play an important part in the story. As usual, Simenon goes beyond mere stereotypes and caricatures to create complex characters with realistic psychological motives.

I became very involved with the lives of these characters; that aspect of the novel is expertly done. The mystery story itself, however, is not one of the most artfully constructed puzzles in Maigret’s casebook. To set up this unusual web of relationships between the characters, Simenon had to rely on maybe one too many coincidences. It is a little hard to believe that some of these people just happened to end up as next-door neighbors to each other. This murder also suffers from a shortage of viable suspects, leading to a conclusion that’s not unforeseen, though there are some creative revelations in the details of the crime. As always, this Maigret novel is a compelling read, thoroughly entertaining, but would it make a top-ten list of Maigret books? Probably not.