Book review: Maigret a New York

In French, no less. I read it for my mental health. My French comprehension is acceptable, but my vocabulary by no means includes all the words that Simenon uses, so I read this with a combination of blipping, guesswork and Google translate. Wiki isn't interested in it.

This feels to me more like mood-music than kewful: by which I mean it isn't a Poirot, where the Klews are laid out for you if you care to follow them; instead it is more of a novel that happens to be a detective story. Either that or my poor French missed the clues.

Side note: the book is of course in French, as is all the dialogue, except where rarely someone speaks to Maigret in very deliberate English. But it is understood that Maigret is actually speaking English to the New Yorkers. I think this would not in practice have worked: his English, as he notes himself, just isn't good enough.

Laying that aside, what of the story: the famous Commisionaire Maigret, despite being retired,  goes to New York at the behest of a Young Man, concerned that his loving father has had a strange change of tone - letters are shown - and perhaps fears for his life. Arriving by ocean liner, this being 1946, the young man disappears and Maigret meets the Father, and Strangely Undocile Secretary. They are uninterested in Maigret and his mission, and curiously uninterested in the disappearance of the young man.

After anough local colour has been applied to make an interesting book, and enough alcohol drunk to render and entire police department senseless, it turns out that the SUS is actually a lovechild of the F but only Recently Reunited after being given away at birth; that the F had - somewhat improbably, but roll with it, - killed the mother, who he loved, jealous of an affair, thirty years ago; and is being blackmailed by the archetypical and always available New York Gangsters including the notorious Sicilians. Anyway, the RR and the NYG explain the change of tone of the letters, since the YM, the second son of the second wife, was always a bit meh, and only loved when he was the only one available; some flim-flammery excuse is offered for his disappearance-at-disembarcation. Maigret decides not to trouble the NYPD about the stale murder, and sails off home. The End.