Maigret and the Headless Corpse

One of the greatest writers of the 20th century . . . no other writer can set up a scene as sharply and with such economy as Simenon does . . . the conjuring of a world, a place, a time, a set of characters - above all, an atmosphere

John Banville, Financial Times

One of Simenon's masterpieces ... Simenon's subject is how people who are pushed to the edge push themselves over it; the force of the sleuthing is that of psychoanalysis, not police interrogation.

Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

Terrific...the 75 Inspector Maigret books are almost uniformly wonderful. They are not crime or even detective fiction as ordinarily understood...they are about human foibles, moral failings and compromises, set in an evocatively atmospheric Paris

David Mills, Sunday Times

A great writer of detail, of atmosphere

Leïla Slimani, Financial Times

A genius … Simenon broke all the rules

Jake Kerridge, Daily Telegraph

The novels brim with atmosphere, insight and intelligence . . . quite unlike anything else written before or since

India Knight, The Times

Exceptional… Simenon’s writing still seems fresh…one of the great pleasures is the summoning of France’s many landscapes and accompanying social milieux . . . There is also, and it’s a chief glory of the books, a whole range of different Parises, from the shiny rich to the hypocritical bourgeois middle to the struggling, furious world of the poor, desperate and professionally criminal

John Lanchester, Times Literary Supplement

I never read contemporary fiction–with one exception: the works of Simenon

T.S. Eliot

One of the most important writers of our century

Gabriel García Márquez