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Jules Maigret

Fictional French police detective

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Between 1930 and 1972, 75 novels and 28 short stories about Maigret were published, starting with Pietr the Latvian and concluding with Maigret and Monsieur Charles.The novels and stories have been translated into more than 50 languages, and have been adapted for film, television and other media over 300 times worldwide.

Penguin Books published new translations of 75 novels in the series over as many months from November 2013. In 2025 Picador began a three-year publishing run of the novels in the United States, mostly using the translations commissioned by Penguin.

Character

Creation

In the spring of 1929, Simenon set off for a tour of northern France, Belgium and Holland in his boat, the Ostrogoth. He had begun contributing detective stories to a new magazine called Détective and also published popular novels, mainly with the publisher Fayard.

During his northern tour, Simenon wrote three popular novels which featured a police inspector named Maigret: Train de nuit (Night Train), La femme rousse (The Red-Headed Woman) and La maison de l'inquiétude (The House of Anxiety). He began working on Train de nuit, or possibly Pietr-le-Letton (Pietr the Latvian), in September 1929 when the Ostrogoth was undergoing repairs in the Dutch city of Delfzijl.

On his return to Paris in April 1930, Simenon completed Pietr-le-Letton, the first novel in which inspector Maigret of the Paris mobile crime brigade was a fully developed character. The novel was serialised in Fayard's magazine Ric et Rac later that year. Simenon considered this the first "true" Maigret novel, and it was the first fictional work to appear under Simenon's real name.

Simenon stated that he invented Maigret while drinking in a cafe and imagining a Parisian policeman: "a large powerfully built gentleman...a pipe, a bowler hat, a thick overcoat." Maigret was reputed to be based on Marcel Guillaume, an actual French detective, although Simenon variously claimed not to remember the inspiration or that Maigret was influenced by his father.

Biographers Thomas Narcejac and Fenton Bresler both see Simenon himself in his creation.

Description and biography

Maigret is tall and heavy, with broad shoulders, large hands, a thick face, thick hair, thick eyebrows and bright eyes of a "greenish gray" colour. He has strongly growing facial hair and therefore shaves every morning. Outdoors, he usually wears a thick black overcoat. In the 1930s, he wears a bowler hat, but from the 1940s he wears a fedora. He frequently smokes a tobacco pipe.

He is happily married to his wife Louise (usually referred to as Madame Maigret). He doesn't like his first name being used and prefers to be called "Maigret". Even his wife usually calls him "Maigret", only using his first name a handful of times.

He is Divisional Chief Inspector of the criminal brigade of the judicial police, based at 36, Quai des Orfèvres, Paris. At work, he is aided by "The Faithful Four": detectives Lucas, Janvier, Lapointe, and Torrence. Other prominent characters include police surgeon Dr. Paul; Judge Coméliau, the Examining Magistrate who alternates between being a help and a hindrance to Maigret; Joseph Moers, a forensic specialist; and Dr. Pardon, Maigret's close friend and physician.

In most novels, Maigret is aged around 45 to 55 years. There are contradictory clues to his year of birth. In Monsieur Gallet, décédé, which takes place in 1930, Maigret is described as 45, indicating 1885 as his year of birth. In another novel, La première enquete de Maigret, where the investigation takes place in 1913, the author states that Maigret is 26, which establish his year of birth as 1887. In the 1932 novel L'affaire Saint-Fiacre, Maigret is 42, which would mean he was born in 1890, assuming he is contemporary to the year the novel was written.

Maigret is from the fictional village of Saint-Fiacre in the Allier department, where his father, Evariste Maigret, was the bailiff for the local landowner. Maigret's mother died in childbirth when he was eight. He studied medicine at Nantes, but dropped out when his father died. He began working as a police officer in Paris in his twenties. At the age of 30, he entered the Homicide Squad and became chief inspector of the squad in his late thirties. He probably retired at the age of 55, giving him over 30 years of police experience.

Personality and work method

Maigret can be gruff, but is otherwise patient and unflappable. He has an appreciation of food, especially traditional French dishes and his wife's cooking. His most frequently consumed drinks are beer, white wine and cognac.

He is relentless in his pursuit of criminals. He often follows them himself and isn't averse to breaking into properties without a warrant if necessary. He is famous for his long interrogations of suspects, sustaining himself with beer and sandwiches until the suspect reveals the truth. He is humane and often sympathetic towards the criminals he investigates, seeking to understand them rather than judge them. He fires his gun only four times in his career, twice wounding a criminal in self-defence.

His method is to immerse himself in the life and milieu of the victim in order to discover why the crime was committed and, eventually, who committed it. He relies more on intuition than logical deduction and sometimes tells his colleagues, "I never think." He aspires to be a "mender of destinies". After learning a criminal's story, he sometimes lets them go or reduces the charges against them.

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