been true to my resolve.’ villages in the Home
Where Conan Doyle is happy to believe all
Counties, or beyond;
sorts of things, as long as he has the evidence,
Watson makes all
the ostensibly Catholic Simenon describes
sorts of references
himself as having the undeveloped religion of
to cases that have
a choir boy. He was born in Liege in 1903, and
happened abroad,
for a short time attended a Jesuit school, but
such as the business
tumbled out of education, and at the age of
of ‘the Netherland-
seventeen found himself working as a reporter
Sumatra company in
for La Gazette de Liege. It was in fact a catholic
‘87’.
newspaper, but this was by chance and not by Maigret’s world is
choice. Simenon makes few claims for having much smaller, with
any kind of philosophy; rather like his detective, barely a reference to world events, real or
in fact. While Maigret circles his cases in a state otherwise. We get to know his quartier, the bars
of Cartesian doubt, Holmes demonstrates his he frequents, the shops where Mme Maigret
lineage of Humean materialism. The mist that buys her groceries. He is a policeman, and so
settles over Maigret’s Seine, with the muted has to pound the streets of Paris as part of his
sounding of horns from barges passing in the job, whereas Holmes is an ‘amateur detective’;
night, is an epistemological metaphor; the fog of although always proving less amateur than the
Holmes’s London, or drifting across Dartmoor in poor coppers alongside whom he finds himself
the Hound of the Baskervilles, is no more than working. And, Holmes has a method. More
a special effect. They may both brood over than a method: a whole system of thought.
their pipes, but for Holmes the brooding is a ‘You know my method,’ he says to Watson. ‘It
time of piecing together the evidence towards is founded upon the observance of trifles.’ We
a necessary conclusion; for Maigret, the point hear about his ‘little monograph’ on the ashes
is to stay silent and motionless, like Descartes of 140 different varieties of pipe, cigar and
in his room, and wait for the truth to descend. cigarette tobacco. We learn how he deduces
They both share a very committed sense of
the truth about a case from footprints, from the
place, but even then they differ in the way in
dustiness of a hat, from the observed similarities
which they inhabit their respective cities. Both
between a severed ear found in a box and the
of them are quite happy to rub shoulders with
ear on the very woman who has brought the box
the criminal classes, and are from time to
to him.
time helped in a case through their amicable But, Maigret has no method. As he explains to
relationships with Leroy in The Yellow Dog, ‘I ran this investigation
assorted burglars, from the end, backwards - which doesn’t mean
pick-pockets or I won’t go the other way in the next one. It’s a
prostitutes. But question of atmosphere, a question of faces.
Holmes’s sweep When I first got here, I came across one face
is a great deal that appealed to me, and I never let go of it.’
broader, often
Mostly, he claims to know nothing at all. In
involving jumping on
the same story, when nagged by the Mayor
trains and fetching
of Concarneau to come up with something to
up in picturesque
counter the panic in the town, he faces the pack
Crime time 54 www.crimetime.co.uk 17
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