I just finished reading a popular book on the new physics, The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli, which informed me that, thanks to quantum, we can now be confident that time is an illusion, that there is definitely no present, that past and future are almost as problematical, and that the world appears to us as it does solely thanks to our ignorance of most matters big and small. As Heraclitus wrote millenniums ago, change is the only reality.
I can get on board with that as fortunately the entertainment business is fond of producing unsurprising changes and gentle evolutions. Partly this must be due to another idea from quantum theory: the gradual disintegration of everything thanks to entropy, that is to the loss of heat in one form or another to cooler things and colder places.
So perhaps it is inevitable that a successful idea in the mystery business is gradually copied and sequeled (if that's not a word it should be) and sometimes even synthesized via new writers until it gradually fades away in a total loss of energy.
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| Benjamin wainwright/Stefani Martini |
Other times, it is the character alone who survives to be updated, modernized, made younger, older, more genial, more accessible, Sherlock Holmes being the classic example. Now another old and popular detective is once again enjoying the attentions of modernization: Chief Inspector Maigret.
He's already had a long run in print with Simenon's many procedurals.According to Wikipedia, he has been honored with no less than 75 audio books, some fifteen movies, and almost innumerable television programs (one series alone ran to 88 episodes!) in many languages.
Now comes the new Maigret of 2025. Gone is the slightly seedy Paris of the Michael Gabon ITV version of the early 1990s, the one I remember. This was the post war Paris and Maigret was likely in his 50s, old enough so that Madame Maigret is already dreaming of a cottage in the country and her husband's retirement. Maigret was robust in every way, a confident man at the peak of his abilities, blessed with a superb memory for the low life of Paris and their various specialities.
He had an old and trusted corps of detectives (all male naturally) and if his stiff-necked examining magistrate was not always satisfied, Maigret regarded official complaints with considerable insouciance. Unusually for a literary detective, he was happy with Madame Maigret who turned out long and delicious lunches while always looking tres chic.
Kindly but with a strong moral sense, this older Maigret was very much of his time and place and comfortable with both. He relied on the oldest of detective skills, precise observation, sensitive questioning, and careful listening, which together formed his usually sound intuition.
That was the Maigret of the 40s and 50s as captured in the 1990s. This new, young, contemporary Maigret (Benjamin Wainwright) is in a shiny modern Paris, and comes complete with the last word in forensics and surveillance. He has a rather droll young techie (James Northcote) who can examine dirt on a shoe, spot a rare fern spore, and point Maigret toward the locale of the next bank heist.
The rest of his team is an integrated mix of able, and often technically astute, young men and women, that is both nice and appropriate. But among them, Maigret's methods necessarily involve more reliance on CCTV footage, forensics, and phone surveillance, while his considerable knowledge of the city's underbelly seems implausibly complete for the length of his career.
As for the detective, himself, gravitas is out and eccentricity and personal angst is in. Gone is the older detective's handsome suit, topcoat, and fedora. Now our detective appears wedded to a topcoat made out of plaid pajama material, and burdens us with his recurring dreams.
The brave and charming Madame Maigret has also been updated. She is now a psychiatric nurse who often deserts the kitchen for take out. The Maigrets remain a happy couple but, with our modern taste for personal anxiety in our sleuths, they are dealing with infertility, burdened with nasty hormone treatments and uncertain hopes.
The results of this tinkering are not necessarily bad. The Simenon plots are well constructed, the characters good, and the acting is the usual Masterpiece high level. Someone coming to the new series without any prior acquaintance with the Parisian detective will find it diverting. This is a well done contemporary series, very like any number of other well made, well performed procedurals.
What it does not have is the individuality and flavor of earlier versions. It has been homogenized. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, I found the last of the series, Maigret Goes Home, the most effective, being the least reliant on up-dated techniques and the most reliant on Maigret's knowledge of human nature.
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| Shanigua Okwok |
The new Maigret series is entertaining, but while retaining the plots, it has lost much of the detective.
The Falling Men, a novel with strong mystery elements, has been issued as an ebook on Amazon Kindle. Also on kindle: The Complete Madame Selina Stories.
The Man Who Met the Elf Queen, with two other fanciful short stories and 4 illustrations, is available from Apple Books at:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-man-who-met-the-elf-queen/id1072859654
The Dictator's Double, 3 short mysteries and 4 illustrations is available at:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-dictators-double/id1607321864
Speaking as someone who is a huge fan of Simenon's Maigret, I will probably give this series a pass. I like Simenon's seedy Paris, the housewifely Mme. Maigret who had strong opinions, great cuisine, and a few cases of her own, the team (granted, all male, but that was the way things were back then), and Maigret's infinite knowledge of and pleasure in the "la spécialité de la maison" he found in each and every bar. My favorites, btw, are "Maigret in Vichy" and "L'Amie de madame Maigret" ("Madame Maigret's Own Case").
ReplyDeleteAlthough I could smell the cigarette smoke reeking from his clothes, I never quite bought Gambon's Maigret. Paris was beautiful if a bit overly clean. But as one commentator said, it was a Paris populated entirely with Englishmen.
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