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 1990's, the one I remember. This was the post war Paris and Maigret was likely in his 50's, 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 40's and 50's as captured in the 1990's. 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.

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?ls=1&mt=11

The Dictator's Double, 3 short mysteries and 4 illustrations is available at: 

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-dictators-double/id1607321864?ls=1&mt=11

 

DAHAAD ("Roar")

In my continuing quest for something consistently watchable (and knowing full well that Season Two of Bosch: Legacy is coming back in October), I happened across the web-based series Dahaad, and it’s a keeper.  The title translates as “Roar,” in Hindi, and the show itself might be described as Bollywood noir.  This is not to damn it with faint praise.

For openers, the Indian film industry is the biggest in the world; “Bollywood” refers more particularly to the subset of Hindi cinema, and as a pejorative, to the happy-sappy musical features and romances (masala movies) that have historically been tentpole successes for the major studios.  There’s more diversity than these labels suggest.

Dahaad begins with the customary product awareness warning, but instead of assuring us no animals were hurt, it tells us we might get hurt feelings.  There is, for example, Hindu-Muslim violence; there’s caste discrimination; the police and body politic are corrupt; brutality against women is a commonplace.  There’s even sex – discreet, by American standards, but the fact that it’s there at all is probably grounds for pearl-clutching.  In fact, my guess is that Dahaad has something to offend everybody.

The basics.  It’s a police procedural.  They’re trying to chase down a guy who preys on women.  A serial.  So far, so good.  You’re thinking you’ve seen it before.  But not exactly.  The thing that drew me in is that the crimes – the opportunity, the M.O., and the baseline, what makes the victims victims – is generated by the culture.  It’s in no way separate, or free-floating.  The brutalization of these women, as we might say of all women, is socialized.

This is of course not peculiar to Indian society, or to Hindu social practices specifically, but in this case, the women have been led to believe they’re of no value, if they haven’t married by a certain age.  The bait is a love match, an escape from convention, deceit masquerading as rescue.  They elope, and abandon their families – the families return the favor, their daughters having shamed them – and when the women later turn up dead, suicides, who will claim them?  They’re nobodies twice over.

So the first hurdle in the story is even realizing there’s been a crime, then the realization that there have been dozens of murders, over a period of years, and lastly to understand that it’s a pattern, that they’re dealing with a hidden, methodical psychopath. 

Other pressures and prejudices interfere with an effective pursuit.  Predictably, the chain of command is influenced by politics and religion, not to mention nepotism, bribery, class, and clan.  The investigating officer is a woman, still single in her early 30’s, and of a lower caste, so she’s unclean.  All the minor aggravations and humiliations obtain.  But she keeps plugging away.

You know early on who the guy is, and so do they, about halfway through.  But they can’t pin it on him.  One of the sidelights is that the series is really procedural.  The storyline doesn’t get wrapped up all that neatly; it plods, a bit.  The cops get frustrated.

You have to give it two episodes, at least (out of eight, total), to get used to the rhythm.  It’s in Hindi, or a choice of language soundtracks, subtitled in English.  The subject matter is definitely creepy.  These things mitigate against.  I, on the other hand, think the positives reward attention.  The two lead cops, and the bad guy, held me all the way.  The heroine, Sonakshi Sinha, is well-known as an actress – if not to me – and exceedingly glam, from her stills in previous parts.  She definitely mutes it, in this show.

There’s one scene I thought was gratuitous, or even cruel.  The cop’s mom keeps bugging her to settle into marriage, and tries to set her up with potential suitables.  Finally, the daughter blows up at her, and deals out crime scene photographs of the dead women.  This is what happens, the cop tells her mother, to desperate people, because they’ve been led to believe they have no value, and they grasp at straws.  This is what happens.  They’re found dead.  Do you understand how a mother like you made them victims?

Of course I’m not a Hindu woman of marriageable age, and I felt the scene was preachy and hurtful.  But when I thought it through, it occurred to me that there might be quite a few young Hindu women who’d watch that scene and pump their fists, and shout out loud, You go, girl!

Dahaad is about being heard.