The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien

The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien

Inspector Maigret #3

Summary

'Compelling, remorseless, brilliant' John Gray

A first ink drawing showed a hanged man swinging from a gallows on which perched an enormous crow. And there were at least twenty other etchings and pen or pencil sketches that had the same leitmotif of hanging.

On the edge of a forest: a man hanging from every branch.

A church steeple: beneath the weathercock, a human body dangling from each arm of the cross. . . Below another sketch were written four lines from
François Villon's Ballade of the Hanged Men.

On a trip to Brussels, Maigret unwittingly causes a man's suicide, but his own remorse is overshadowed by the discovery of the sordid events that drove the desperate man to shoot himself.

This novel has been published in previous translations as Maigret and the Hundred Gibbets and The Crime of Inspector Maigret.

'One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century' Guardian

About the author

Georges Simenon

Georges Simenon was born in Liège, Belgium, in 1903. He is best known in Britain as the author of the Maigret novels and his prolific output of over 400 novels and short stories have made him a household name in continental Europe. He died in 1989 in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he had lived for the latter part of his life.
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