Inspector Maigret

What was the woman doing here?
In a stable, wearing pearl earrings, her stylish bracelet and white buckskin shoes!
She must have been alive when she got there because the crime had been committed after 10 in the evening.
But how? And why? And no one had heard a thing! She had not screamed. The two carters had not woken up.
If the whip had not been mislaid, it was likely the body might not have been discovered for a couple of weeks or a month, by chance when someone turned over the straw.
And other carters passing through would have snored the night away next to a woman's corpse!

These questions lead Maigret into an unfamiliar world of canals, with its run down cafés, shadowy towpaths and eccentric inhabitants.

A vast emptiness. The room, in the darkness, seemed big as a cathedral. Warm currents of air still drifted from the radiators.
Delfosse struck a match. They paused for a moment to take a breath and get their bearings. And suddenly the match dropped. A piercing shriek came from Delfosse . . . Chabot saw something too.

Maigret observes from a distance as two boys are accused of killing a rich foreigner in Liège. Their loyalty, which binds them together through their adventures in the seedier side of the city, is put to the test and seemingly irrelevant social differences threaten their friendship.

In his mind's eye he would see that slim figure in the striking clothes, those wide eyes the colour of forget-me-not, the pert nose and especially the hat, that giddy, crimson bonnet perched on the top of her head with a bronze-green feather shaped like a blade stuck in it . . . Félicie had given him more trouble than all the 'hard' men who had been put behind bars.

Maigret goes to the Belgian border to investigate the disappearance of a young woman.

Instead of the detail filling itself in and becoming clearer, it seemed to escape him. The face of the man in the ill-fitting coat just misted up so that it hardly looked human. In theory this mental portrait was good enough, but now it was replaced by fleeting images which should have added up to one and the same man but which refused to get themselves into focus.

The circumstances of Monsieur Gallet's death all seem fake: the name the deceased was travelling under and his presumed profession, and more worryingly, his family's grief. Their haughtiness seems to hide ambiguous feelings about the hapless man. In this haunting story, Maigret discovers the appalling truth and the real crime hidden behind the surface of lies.

Half an hour later, he was in Cannes ... White everywhere! Huge white hotels, white shops, white trousers and dresses, white sails out at sea.
It was as if life were no more than a pantomime fairy-tale, a white and blue fairy-tale.

Dazzled at first by the glamour of sunny Antibes, Maigret soon finds himself immersed in the less salubrious side of the Riviera when he traces the steps of a shabby former spy who is fond of pretty women and dive bars.

Cars drove past along with the trucks and trams, but by now Maigret had realised that they were not important. Whatever roared by like this along the road was not part of the landscape. ... What really counted was the lock, the hooting of the tugs, the stone crusher, the barges and the cranes, the two pilots' bars and especially the tall house where he could make out Ducrau's red chair framed by a window.

Maigret is drawn into the orbit of the self-made, mercurial Ducrau, as the latter's past catches up with him.

When a man's headless body is pulled from the Canal Saint Martin, Maigret and his colleagues are puzzled. In a chance encounter at a local cafe Maigret uncovers the truth behind this disturbing murder in an intriguing story of an estranged family, adulterous affairs and a secret inheritance

When a tape recorder is found on a murder victim, Inspector Maigret hopes this will be the clue he needs to track down the killer.

Set against a high-profile hunt for the latest criminal gang to hit Paris, Maigret is determined to track down the murderer of a quiet crook for whom he cannot help feeling affection and respect.

When a socially isolated vagrant is found dead in the condemned building where he had been sleeping in Les Halles, Paris, Maigret must delve into the victim's mysterious past to discover who could have killed him.

The most exasperating of all was the head clerk at reception, in his elegant morning coat and stiff collar, which was not wilting with a drop of perspiration. He was treating Maigret in a cordial way, or possibly feeling sorry for him, as from time to time he flashed him a smile, intended to be both complicit and encouraging.