‘Five o’clock.They’re starting to milk the cows.’”) A lantern moved round a wall and disappeared, and then it was the turn of the cow-shed windows to light up. (“A light appeared in an isolated farm in the midst of the fields. What matters are the fields and busy highway leading to Paris along which trucks transport early vegetables, “especially watercress” (and, it turns out, much more), to city markets.

The baker’s motor went by along the road, an old Ford whose front-wheels wobbled on the asphalt.”) There was still the same grey mist floating about at ground-level but not shedding any light. Ellipses serve as a guide: don’t bother me.

As Simenon is said to have remarked when someone pointed out a flaw in his plot ( Where was the diamond merchant murdered? And by the way, how did the body get transferred from one motor car to another?), the details don’t really matter. I knew it was near a provincial town on a much-traveled two-lane highway (“.the shining, even ribbon of the road embanked like a river by tall trees”), and that during the few hours it takes to read a Simenon mystery, I would become familiar with everything I needed to know: one petrol station, one ancient villa, and one run-down country home known as the house of the Three Widows. I’m tempted to say he chose the device to show passage of time and the unimportance of details, but the writing is so organic, without apparent premeditation, that the ellipses seem to belong to Maigret himself as he floats from one pertinent, inconclusive insight to another.īut as I was saying, spatially handicapped as I am, I didn’t thoroughly understand the geography of the intersection, nor did I care. I use these ellipses quite consciously in imitation of Simenon’s stylistic device. Before he left me a widow, he bought the paperback from a shabby dealer operating out of a van on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, an appropriate venue since Georges Simenon’s Chief-Inspector Maigret lives his life in literature on the streets of Paris.īut unlike many of the Maigret stories that unfold on the streets, At the Crossroads takes place in a country intersection described as a triangle, a confusing geometry. Falling apart, shedding age-browned bits of paper on my clothes, blankets, and desk, it was given to me by my loving companion of twenty years. My copy of Maigret at the Crossroads looks almost as old as the novella itself (1931).

The widow simenon