Maigret’s Pipe: Seventeen Stories

Prewar Paris – where buses still sported outside platforms and every neighborhood its own bistro, policemen took time for human problems, and car fumes hadn’t yet smothered the smell of chestnut blossoms!

Paris serves as the setting for these seventeen short stories, featuring Simenon’s legendary Jules Maigret. Here the Chief Inspector goes about his business in a variety of settings and circumstances, revealing much about his life and his career not found elsewhere. We are even given the chance to see Maigret in retirement from the Quai des Orfevres and to see him indulge in some freelance sleuthing. This volume, along with “Maigret’s Christmas,” completes the collection of Simenon’s short detective fiction and adds many fascinating titles to the Maigret mosaic.

The stories are: 1. Maigret’s Pipe, 2. Death Penalty, 3. Mr Monday, 4. The Open Window, 5. Madame Maigret’s Admirer, 6. The Mysterious Affair in the Boulevard Beaumarchais, 7. Two Bodies on a Barge, 8. Death of a Woodlander, 9. In the Rue Pigalle, 10. Maigret’s Mistake, 11. The Old Lady of Bayeux, 12. Stan the Killer, 13. The Drowned Men’s Inn, 14. At the Etoile du Nord, 15. Mademoiselle Berthe and her Lover, 16. The Three Daughters of the Lawyer, and 17. Storm in the Channel.

Librarian’s note: this entry is for the collection, “Maigret’s Pipe: Seventeen Stories.” Entries for each of the individual stories by the author, including the title story, can be found elsewhere on Goodreads. All Maigret short stories can be found by searching for “a Maigret Short Story.”