The New Maigret

 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. 

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.

Shanigua Okwok

The new Maigret series is entertaining, but while retaining the plots, it has lost much of  the detective.

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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

 

Jalepeno Culture

So I was watching the morning news and there was a commercial where two guys walk into a fast food joint and see the sign for a Double Jalepeno burger.  With, of course, lots of cheese.  And they smile at each other, order one each, and life is bliss.  My husband, who has an Irish stomach, winced.  Myself, I was thinking, that's American cuisine today:  you want flavor with that?  Here's some cheese and hot peppers. What more do you want?

Not the burger, but
I don't want to get sued.

That's what we're known for.  Cheese and hot peppers.  Slathered all over everything.  The cheese runs thick on the tongue, smothering most of the taste buds.  The hot peppers add shock value.  Cheap, filling, and one hell of a lot less trouble than actually, say, making a mole sauce, or a bechamel.  Although nowadays what you'll be given for bechamel sauce is generally Alfredo sauce, thick and pasty with flour and, you guessed it, cheese.  In other words, tarting it up with cheese and hot peppers is easier than getting involved in the time-consuming artistic complexity of producing flavor.

It's the same in entertainment.  Sex and violence.  If things get slow, throw in a naked woman.  Or an explosion.  Or a riff of automatic weapons.  (Speaking of which, I'm sure you heard about the 9-year-old girl at a shooting range outside Las Vegas who accidentally killed the instructor with the Uzi he was showing her how to use.  9 year olds and Uzis, what could possibly go wrong? We don't even let 9 year olds drive, even here in South Dakota, where 14 years old get learner's permits, so what the hell was he thinking... Okay, enough rant on that...)

Back to sex and violence.  Much safer.  Now I understand that sex and violence are what titillates the masses, including you and me, but sometimes I want something more:  plot; wit; character; nuance. By the way, I watched an interesting review of "Outlander", the new series based on the Diana Gabaldon time-traveling fantasy series, in which the sole woman on the panel pointed out that, while this show was obviously being marketed to heterosexual women (hot men in kilts and all that), when it came down to it, there were a heck of a lot of naked women in it and no naked men. Now what's that about?  Couldn't it even occur to the producers (6 out of 8 male) that (most) women prefer naked men?  

Okay, back to character.  I've been binge-watching Michael Gambon's 1990's Maigret, and enjoying it heartily.  (I love reading Maigret, too - it's one of the main reasons and ways that I've learned to read French.) And I noticed something that hadn't really struck me before:  Jules Maigret is normal.  He's a good, decent, bourgeois man who drinks/eats/smokes a little more than he should but not too much, who loves his wife, and who really likes his co-workers (except for the examining magistrates).  He likes people generally, including most of the petty criminals he deals with.  And yet he's absolutely real, grounded in details and mannerisms and nuances that are very subtle.  In other words, he's an old-fashioned hero.  It's very refreshing.

But I think too many "heroes" have been run through our jalepeno culture.  I've seen too damned many lead characters who are damaged addicts (alcohol/drugs/gambling/sex), and/or whose significant other was brutally murdered by a mysterious serial killer, and/or who are promiscuous to hide their longing for love or their lack of ability to love, and/or who has significant PTSD and/or traumatic childhood experiences and/or mental illness and/or OCD/bi-polar/etc., and almost ALL of them are obnoxious to everyone around them (and yet are mysteriously loved despite of it)...  Folks, that isn't character, that's a laundry list.  What started out as an exception - with the ability to shock, startle, amaze, entertain - has become the norm, which means... well, cheese and jalapenos on everything.

Hollywood meth-makers

Real meth-maker

And it's often taken to the point where there's no one to root for. Everyone is lousy, including their kids.  Everyone is crooked. Everyone will do anything, anywhere, any time to get ahead.  Nobody even tries to be pleasant, much less good. And don't even get me started on "Breaking Bad":  I do not, repeat, DO NOT watch shows or read books where serial killers and/or drug manufacturer killers are the heroes. I'm an old-fashioned girl at heart.  Besides, the villains are even more alike than the defective detectives: always brilliant, always brutal, always cold, always with superhuman timing, and the only difference is how they do it and whether or not they eat their kill.  Boring...

At the same time, I can enjoy a good noir with the rest of them, and God knows in Dashiell Hammett's and Raymond Chandler's world, everyone is crooked as they come, and that's fine with me.  Because Spade and Marlowe longed for heroism and decency, like thirsty men for water, and tried to be knights errant, even if their armor was more tarnished than shining.  That's what I want in my hero, at the very minimum.  I want them to recognize honor when they see it, like Silver-Wig in "The Big Sleep", and to be able - at least some times - to resist treachery and temptation, like Brigid O'Shaughnessy in "The Maltese Falcon."  I want them to know the difference between good and evil, in the world and in themselves.  I want them to care about the difference between good and evil, in the world and in themselves.  I want them to want to be a hero, even when they fail.

Maigret.  D. C. Foyle.  Miss Marple. Guido Brunetti.  Nancy Drew. Columbo.  V. I. Warshawski. Archie Goodwin.  Perry Mason.  Endeavour Morse.  And many others, rich in variety, style, wit, character... Excuse me, I have some more reading to do.  And tonight - another Maigret!