My calendar is a bit wonky at the moment, thanks to my end-of-year vacation a couple of weeks back. And since I really hate to skip over a good mystery, I'm going ahead and posting what would have been an end-of-year review of a lovely series of three shorter French mysteries by Georges Simenon, called A Maigret Christmas And Other Stories because it's Maigret (and associates) and it's Simenon and worth reading at any time of the year. So there.
So, naturally, I find myself trapped by a question about which edition I'm reviewing. The version which I am talking about today is the Penguin edition called A Maigret Christmas And Other Stories. Back in the early 1990s, Harvest Books issued a different – and larger – collection called simply Maigret’s Christmas. I’m not sure if that version is still available. The Table of Contents for that edition shows that it contains the first two stories from the book I’m discussing plus seven other stories. I haven’t read all of those, so this review covers only the ones contained in the Penguin book called A Maigret Christmas And Other Stories, which has just three stories.
Let's look very briefly at those stories. "A Maigret Christmas" is the only one which features Maigret. A young girl who lives with her mother across the street from Maigret and his wife insists that Father Christmas visited her room last night and left her a doll as proof of his visit. Nobody had any idea who that man dressed as Father Christmas might be. From that starting point, Maigret will find himself piecing together a story that he will find has a greater and more pressing urgency than he might have expected.
Associates of Maigret within the Parisian police feature in the other two stories in this collection. In both "Seven Small Crosses in a Notebook" and “The Little Restaurant near Place des Ternes," it appears that young people may be in some danger - perhaps moral rather than or in addition to physical danger.
If you'd like to hear more about any or all of the three stories in A Maigret Christmas And Other Stories, I hope you'll listen to my complete audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, which you can reach by simply clicking here. The stories make a relaxing way to welcome in the New Year - and that reminds me to take this opportunity to thank you all for your visits to this blog and podcast over the years. And may this new year 2021 be a much better year than the last one - for all of us.
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