Maigret and the Wine Merchant

The wine merchant is a bit of a monster. He thinks nothing of driving competitors out of business. He distrusts and underpays his employees. He sleeps with his wife's friends, his friends' wives and the whole secretarial pool. And when he makes love to his private secretary on the edge of his desk, he doesn't even lock the door. If anyone deserves to be shot dead in the street, Oscar Chabut is the man. The difficulty will be finding the killer among so many people who had reason to hate Chabut. Maigret pities the murderer, and even has some pity to spare for the insecure rich man who invited his own death by humiliating one person too many. Nonetheless the Chief Superintendent does his job in a workmanlike fashion, as always. The unprincipled character of Chabut is especially interested in the light of Simenon's own amorous misbehavior. Simenon might have used aspects of himself to create Chabut. And yet his sympathies are all with Maigret, the devoted husband and upholder of justice. This is a first-rate Maigret.

For any reader of Georges Simenon, Maigret and the Wine Merchant is a must. As always, the daily humdrum of Maigret's life is played out against a very sympathetic murderer - not a criminal - but someone whose desperation led him to his own catharsis. Great reading!

You can tell this is a later Maigret, with references to TV, and certain flu rememdies, though Mrs. Maigret does prefer the old fashioned cures. Simenon rarely describes a crime in all its bloody detail, rather making the reader feel the circumstances behind the deed. Here the victim, a self- made wine merchant, elicits virtually no sympathy from anyone, and the cause turns out to be financial resentment and bullying, among the author's more common reasons for the crime. As usually, we get a fine sense of Paris with all its seedy and hi-class neighborhoods, and terrific short descriptions and comments by and about the very realistic personages, not least the detective, his wife, the other polices, as well as the culprit, who we meet at the very end. A Maigret book is always a fine way to spend a few hours, visiting Paris, its people and neighborhoods, and its fine detective.

As Inspector Maigret says himself, "I have never come across a more unsavory crowd than have turned up in this case!" And so it is in the tale of "Maigret and the Wine Merchant," the 70th of 75 full-length books in the detective series. And despicable the characters are too, from the victim -- the wine merchant who made it a point of bragging about sleeping with the wives of his employees -- to the killer and everyone else in their circle. It's musical beds and thievery and blackmail and the devil take the hindmost. But Maigret, working in his usual low-key manner, sorts it all out and comes to the proper conclusion. There's a good bit of Maigret in Peter Falk's Columbo. Simenon doesn't waste the reader's time or slow down the pace of his stories with unnecessary detail and description. It took me under three hours to read this 187 page book. The most attention to detail we get is about Maigret's penchant for the pipe and his suffering due to a bad cold or the flu or maybe even quinsy. He's a bit of a hypochondriac. Otherwise, it's a straightforward yarn, and I believe one of the best of the series.

Oscar Chabut was a self-made man, a wealthy wine merchant, that had many enemies. He was arrogant, domineering, and a philanderer. His attractive, sophisticated wife provides a long list of possible liaisons to Maigret for investigation. His employees and competitors were likewise possible suspects. His murder outside of an elegant house where discreet couples rented rooms in private had come as no surprise. A primary suspect emerges about midway in the story. Hereafter, Maigret plays a cat and mouse game. This mouse proves unusually adept at avoiding capture, but as cats' instinctually know, the mouse need make only one mistake. The culprit's confession to Maigret is memorable. Maigret and the Wine Merchant is an entertaining story. It is among the last of the Maigret mysteries, first published in France in 1970. My copy of Maigret and the Wine Merchant is a 1980 Harvest Book edition, translated by Eileen Ellenbogen. It is larger than a standard paperback, about 8 inches by 5 inches.