It's a Crime
Maigret's First Case and Inquest on Bouvet. B Simenon. (Hamish Hamilton, 1 Is. 6d. each.) On' of this pair of novels seems to have been trans lated by an Englishman, and one by an American but each retains the astringent Simenon flavour The first is full of the atmosphere of 1913—a nea little murder case solved, but not officially, by gawky and rather self-conscious young Maigret We know more about Maigret now than any ot he detective of fiction—more than' we knbw o Holmes, even. The other, in which there 'is n Maigret, is a mystery of identity, with the solutio arrived' at as though it were the heart of an onion 'skin after skin of deceit and dubiety being peele away to reach the pungent secret in the middle. Both short novels offer the quintessentia Simenon, and are all too quickly readable.
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