Maigret et la jeune morte

Written in January 1954 at Shadow Rock Farm, in the Connecticut countryside where Simenon had settled, this forty-fifth title in the series offers an almost introspective variation on the Commissioner’s method: nothing spectacular happens, yet everything is intimate. There is little action, but a gaze, an atmosphere. The slow and patient reconstruction of the dead woman’s life becomes the true investigation, far more than the hunt for the culprit. As often in Simenon, the plot is a pretext, a means of bringing out what he himself called “the naked man.”