Pietr the Latvian

Interpol alerts Maigret that master criminal Pietr the Lett, who has repeatedly eluded justice, is headed towards Paris. (Lett meaning someone from Latvia.) Ominously, a body is found in the compartment of his train as Pietr leaves Gare du Nord. Maigret, who is waiting for him, makes no arrests. All through the book he is careful not to pounce before securing evidence sufficient to convict. Pietr the Lett specializes in colossal financial swindles. In keeping with his wealth and personal elegance, he stays at the Majestic hotel, magnet for magnates, ministers and celebrities. His dinner companion is a multi-millionaire financier. Maigret slowly penetrates the life of Pietr the Lett by tailing him and his associates as doggedly as if he were a mere junior detective. The weather mocks his efforts with a relentless downpour that soaks his shoes and clothes and a vicious wind that buffets him like body blows. Poor Maigret can barely keep his pipe lit. An almost invisible clue leads Maigret to discover the human being beneath the criminal mind. And by sheer tenacity Maigret uncovers the family ties that helped shape the career of Pietr the Lett. Simenon considered The Enigmatic Lett the first Maigret, although the detective does appear earlier. But in this book Maigret is fully himself, and Simenon has broken away from hack writing to a style with true literary merit. In this period, around 1930, Simenon was finally ready to throw off his pseudonyms and write under his own name. So for the scholar or fan of Simenon, Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett is quite an interesting book.

This great novel is the first "official" Maigret.(Simenon wrote 5 novels before where Maigret appeared. But these novels didn't have the Simenon's signature.)This novel is excellent and a good introduction to the Simenon's world.

In 'Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett', Georges Simenon takes the hoary old Gothic trope of the double and duality, and turns it into poignant material for a story about failed lives, unrequited love, emotional dependence and brutalism. Pietr-le-Lett is a notorious and untouchable 'international gang' leader who is travelling from Cracow to Paris. When Maigret arrives at the Gare du Nord to check him out, he is diverted by a murder in a train lavatory, the corpse being identical to the criminal. Maigret follows the seemingly indifferent and suavely elegant Lett to an expensive hotel, where he surprisingly meets up with a famous multi-millionaire, friend of prime ministers. When Lett gives the detective the slip, a clue in a photograph leads Maigret to a Northern harbour town where he finds a drunken Russian sailor and a young girl, both the image of Lett. Simenon considered 'Lett' to be the first of the Maigrets, one of nearly a dozen produced in the annus mirabilis 1931. If the character of the detective (hulking yet gentle and perceptive; not dzzlingly intellectual but relentless and intuitive; bourgeois but sympathetic to criminals, his pursuit of them more for motive than mere retibution) and method (Maigret tries to think himself into his prey by soaking up their environment) seems surprisingly fully-formed, this is because Simenon had some practice in a handful of try-out novels written under the pseudonym Georges Sim.If every detective has an angle, than Maigret's is his insight into the difference between the 'material' (the criminal as a criminal) and 'moral' (the criminal as a human being) universes of criminality, Simenon initiates the reader into this recognition by making Maigret's humanitarian understanding a process rather than a given. For instance, especially given the current political crisis in France, the book might seem initially racist, with its negative emphasis on foreigners, especially Jews; at one point, the narrator suggests: 'Every race has its own smell, loathed by others'. The Jewish quarter, and in particular the apartment of anti-heroine Anna Gorskin, is described in the ideology-infected terms of darkness, formlessness, dirt, decay, animality, contrasted with the normal 'French' view Maigret represents for the reader. But this is to accept the seductive conflation of author, narrator and hero Simenon subverts. As the story continues, Maigret and the reader learn the greater complexity of human nature and behaviour to humanise the Other: to do so Maigret must leave the police department and bourgeois home that defines him and chase a man (men?) of uncertain identity, nationality, even appearance; must learn that the cosy outlines and boundaries we impose on life must become 'hazy' if we are to truly understand it.It is a cliche to praise Simenon for his economical evocation of atmosphere, his ability in a few abbreviated sentences to give you the smell and look of a place, even its soul; and its dramatic tra