The 13 Culprits

SIMENON — BEFORE MAIGRET! Georges Simenon (1903-1989) not only created the finest series of French detective novels in the cases of Inspector Jules Maigret, but he was also, according to André Gide, “perhaps the greatest and most truly ‘novelistic’ novelist in France today.” But before he wrote about Maigret, he contributed series of short tales to the magazine Détective in 1929 and 1930, collected in 3 books. The first of those volumes, The 13 Culprits, has never previously been published in English, despite extravagant praise from Alexander Woolcott, Ellery Queen, and other experts. The detections of Monsieur Froget, the “Examining Magistrate,” are set among the people of a city the young Simenon knew well. As the translator, Peter Schulman, says in the introduction, “it is a marginal Paris, populated by society’s losers who, for one reason or another, are brought down by a petty vice, or a greedy aspiration, that invariably leads to a bitter sense of failure in their lives … and, of course, a crime they hubristically think they can get away with. It is the lonely city within all levels of the Parisian mosaic; a Paris made up of eccentric individuals who all, in some manner or another, feel as though they have been hung out to dry on the fringes of society.” It is a Paris of prostitutes, adventurers, circus artistes, and the flotsam thrown up by the First World War. It is a world captured by a great writer.