If the river barge carrying too large a cargo of stones along a Parisian canal hadn't managed to get itself partly stuck in the sludge on the bottom of the canal, who knows how long it might have been before the Parisian police discovered the dismembered body which had been dumped there? Certainly it wasn't an everyday occurrence; neither was it all that unexpected. What really did surprise Chief Detective Inspector Maigret was that the parts of the body, recovered from a series of packages lodged in the mire at the bottom of the canal, were clearly those of a man, not a woman. We are assured that it is not that unusual for murder victims to be found in the canals (though not often in this condition). But everyone, again including Maigret, automatically assumed that the victim was a woman – in the violent world of Parisian crime, small-time female criminals, including lower-class prostitutes, all too often turned up as murder victims. But this corpse was clearly that of a man, unknown, to be sure, and it was the kind of a mystery that teased at Maigret. But this time, the body had no head - and Maigret felt sure that the head might never reappear, which could make identifying the victim quite a challenge. The story is found in Maigret and the Headless Corpse, written by Georges Simenon in 1955. It is the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the complete review by clicking here.
As Maigret began his search for a missing man who might be that headless corpse - and searches for the person who might have killed him - he found his attention drawn to one of the bars along the canal and to the woman who ran the bar. Her husband, the co-owner, had gone off on one of his regular expeditions to buy wine for his bar and hadn't returned. Curiously, the woman appeared quite indifferent to her husband's whereabouts. It wasn't unusual for him to go off on these expeditions. Or perhaps he was somewhere else. She didn’t know (and clearly didn’t care) when – or even if he would be coming home. Maigret found himself trying to understand the woman. Simenon writes:
"Maigret had seldom encountered the kind of inertia he had seen in that woman. It was hard to explain. When most people look at you, there is some sort of exchange, however small. A contact is established, even if that contact is a kind of defiance.
“With her, on the contrary, there was nothing. She had shown no surprise, no fear as she served them; her face was unreadable, displaying nothing but a weariness that probably never left her.
“Unless it was indifference?
“Two or three times, while drinking his wine, Maigret had looked into her eyes and had discovered nothing, had provoked no flicker, no reaction.”
Maigret found himself fascinated with the case - and before he can solve the case, and uncover the truth behind the murder, he will first have to understand the curious attitude of that woman. As usual with Simenon, we - and Maigret - will find ourselves sharing Maigret's fascination with the central characters of the drama.
Maigret and the Headless Corpse is another of the 75 novels written by Georges Simenon that feature Chief Detective Inspector Maigret. Penguin is in the process of publishing new translations of all the Maigret books. This one is quite dark, but the characters are memorable and the case has its share of surprises. I think you will enjoy it.
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