The Carter of 'La Providence' (Inspector Maigret)

It was the first Georges Simenon book I have read. French friends of mine had been telling me that I had to try some of his mysteries, so I randomly picked this one. It was a great read. Very engaging, a good story that was not predictable, and the detective, Maigret, was a very believable detective, with good old fashion sleuthing skills. It is a short book, and a really nice one to curl up with a snowy or rainy afternoon.

In this atmospheric novel, Simenon immerses us in canal life, a curiously fluid realm where it's almost always raining, and the inhabitants soak themselves besides in wine, beer and hot toddies at all hours of the day and night. Maigret is adrift in a world he knows nothing about. He knocks down few beers himself to get acclimatized. Corpses appear in unlikely places, and there are never any witnesses. Clues abound, but are they fishy? A yacht full of dissipated foreigners holds out the promise of some suspects, yet the vacillating Chief Inspector feels obliged to look longer and deeper. This is an excellent Maigret, with an ultimately likeable cast of sots and sinners.

Georges Simenon is the author of over 100 Inspect Maigret mystery stories. They were immensely popular in the 1930s through the 1960s but seem to have fallen out of view in the last few decades. Penguin Books has begun to reissue some of those mysteries. They are all fun books to read and Simenon's "Lock 14" is no exception. Originally published in 1931, Lock 14 is set in a canal in France at a time when commercial barge traffic was a primary means of transporting cargo. The canals were filled with a mix of commercial and tourist traffic which effectively created a mix of upper and working class personalities. Lock 14 begins, as most such mysteries do, with a dead body. A young woman is found dead in a pile of muck, murdered in a stable near Lock 14. She was from a party of seemingly wealthy tourists leading a `debauched' life on the river. Inspector Maigret is called to the scene. He must sort through the muck and find the killer. There are many suspects and more murders soon follow. The rest of the book is devoted to Maigret's attempt to sort out the facts from fiction and find the killer. To reveal any more would spoil the plot. Simenon's Inspector Maigret mysteries are often compared to Christie's Hercule Poirot mysteries. There are many resemblances to be sure. Both follow typical `plot guidelines' for detective stories; they involve numerous suspects and a conflict between the intelligent observations of the hero and the less astute detective work of the local constabulary. There are some major differences however worth noting. The chief differences seem to me to be Simenon's darker touch and his more diverse selection of `characters'. Whereas Christie's stories most often involved an upper crusty cast of characters, Simenon's characters often come from more inauspicious backgrounds. I also think that Simenon is earthier than Christie (and others). The passengers on the tourist barge were decadent and living a pretty wild existence. The working men and women on the canal and in the towns along the canal are well drawn, rough edges and all. This was a nice change from the parlor room type mystery where everyone speaks with a sophisticated accent of some sort. Finally, for me, the centerpiece of any detective story of this type is the character of the detective. In the case of Maigret, the more I read of him (three Maigret stories to date) the more I enjoy his character. All in all I found Simenon's Lock 14 to be an enjoyable detective/mystery story. It was a fast-paced well written story with believable characters. Recommended. L. Fleisig

Read this book is a like a journey in the past (the firties) in the sailor's world and in the passion.The atmosphere is splendid, the characters are interesting. The story is superb.Read it you will not waste your time.

This title is an English invention, unhappily signalling a facetiousness absent from a sombre Simenon story about double murder, decdence, broken lives and betrayal. A literal translation from the French is 'The Carter Of The 'Providence'', but perhaps that was seen as too leading, even if it was Simenon's choice; another alternative, 'The Crime At Lock 14' is the most satisfying, centring on the important aspect of the novel: place. 'Milord' is set in that strange, marginal, now obsolete inter-war world of canal barges, perhaps most familiar from contemporary films of the period, such as 'Boudu Saved From Drowning' or 'L'Atalante'. Indeed, the star of those films, Michel Simon, would have been an obvious choice to play the main non-Migret character in any film of this book, the carter Jean, a taciturn giant whose face and tattooed body are buried in a mass of hirsute overgrowth, a man who sleeps in dumb animal warmth with his horses in the barge stable, and into whose eyes Maigret can't decide whether to read imbecility or the keenest intelligence.A beautiful, rich, well-dressed woman is found strangled between two sleeping carters in the tavern stable at Dizy, Lock 14. She is the wife of an elderly English aristocrat, disgraced Colonel Lampson, who is sailing along the canal tribuatry of the Marne on his luxury yacht The Southern Cross with his sleazy but charming companion Willy Marco, and his fat Chilean mistress. Despite his bearing and stiff-upper-lip, the Colonel conducts regular drunken orgies on board his yacht, and tolerated his wife's affair with Marco. The other principal boat in the story is the huge barge The Providence, run by a small, timid skipper, his garrulous, kindly wife and the carter Jean.Simenon characterises barge-life as a kind of shadow-world adjacent to, but unknown to, normal life around it, with its own codes, customs and language. Although these are floating homes, not tied to any one place and potentially unstable, their slow, regular movements up and down the river, and the rules they must abide by are as rigid, claustrophobic and monotonous as any settler's. But Simenon brilliantly captures the sense of a shifting communal life, competitive (the dense traffic on a small stretch of water means much jostling for pole position), but full of cameraderie and good humour, helping out friends in trouble, carrying messages from relatives, tipping canal-side officials. For a rooted outsider like Maigret, this world seems enchanted, his inability to crack the case matched by a terrible sense of suspension hanging over the twilit realm - it is only by breaking out of it, asserting his mobility by bicycle, that he can regain his detective prowess. Before that, he learns many fascinating facts about the mechanics of barge life, as well as its drabness and colour, its hierarchies of boats and petty bendings of the law, the land men, women and buildings who service it (lock-keepers, tavern- and shop-owners); a group w