The Library of America has done some great collections of American Noir in the last several years, but I really had to sit up and take notice when they released the two-volume set of Women Crime Writers of the 1940’s and 1950’s. The second book from the collection of four novels from the 1940’s was The Horizontal Man by Helen Eustis (winner of the Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 1947) and boy was it a doozy. Set in small women’s college in New […]
A muted, tragic symphony
It was such a beautiful day that Maigret caught an open-air bus to the precinct and “he had gorged himself on images of a Paris colored like a children’s book.” That lovely mood is soon dashed when Maigret is called to investigate the death of an invalid, but it wasn’t just any old man in a wheelchair. This Corsican had been a central figure in the Parisian underworld and was even a sometime CI to Maigret over the years. The Chief Inspector knows that this […]
Maigret goes home
The Saint-Fiacre Affair is an early installment in the Maigret series, published in 1932. When a letter is received at the precinct stating that someone will die at the First Mass on All Saint’s Day in Saint-Fiacre, nobody takes it seriously. And frankly they are puzzled when Maigret quietly takes it upon himself to go to the tiny village to investigate. It turns out that Saint-Fiacre is Maigret’s birthplace, which he hasn’t seen in 35 years. When the Countess of Saint-Fiacre dies, seemingly of a […]
magnificent and sordid
On his 48th birthday, Norbert Monde meticulously shaves and dresses for work as he does every day, plants a dry kiss on his second wife’s forehead and walks down to his study to have his breakfast. He is quite detached from his upper middle class life, thinking idly about this and that. As he goes about his day at the company he owns and operates, he becomes aware of a slight shift in his mind and bearing. By the end of the day, he has […]