The Shadow Puppet: Inspector Maigret - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Georges Simenon (Author)
Georges Simenon was born in Liège, Belgium in 1903. An intrepid traveller with a profound interest in people, Simenon strove on and off the page to understand, rather than to judge, the human condition in all its shades. His novels include the Inspector Maigret series and a richly varied body of wider work united by its evocative power, its economy of means, and its penetrating psychological insight. He is among the most widely read writers in the global canon. He died in 1989 in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he had lived for the latter part of his life.

Ros Schwartz (Translator)
Ros Schwartz is an award-winning translator from French. Acclaimed for her new version of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, published in 2010, she has over 100 fiction and non-fiction titles to her name.

The French government made Ros a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2009, and in 2017 she was awarded the Institute of Translation and Interpreting's John Sykes Memorial Prize for Excellence.

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Georges Simenon

THE SHADOW PUPPET

Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

www.penguin.com

First published in French as L'ombre chinoise by Fayard 1932
This translation first published 2014

Copyright 1932 by Georges Simenon Limited
Translation copyright © Ros Schwartz, 2014
GEORGES SIMENON ® Simenon.tm
MAIGRET ® Georges Simenon Limited
All rights reserved

© Harry Gruyaert /Magnum Photos
Front cover design by Alceu Chiesorin Nunes

The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted

Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire

ISBN: 978-0-698-18388-9

Title Page

Copyright

About the Author

1. The Shadow Puppet

2. A Good Man

3. The Couple at Hôtel Pigalle

4. The Second-Floor Window

5. The Madwoman

6. A Raging Fever

7. The Three Women

8. The Home Nurse

9. The Man with the Pension

10. Identity Cards

11. The Drawing on the Wall

EXTRA: Chapter 1 from The Saint-Fiacre Affair

PENGUIN CLASSICS

"I love reading Simenon. He makes me think of Chekhov"

' William Faulkner

"A truly wonderful writer ' marvellously readable ' lucid, simple, absolutely in tune with the world he creates'

' Muriel Spark

"Few writers have ever conveyed with such a sure touch, the bleakness of human life"

' A. N. Wilson

"One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century ' Simenon was unequalled at making us look inside, though the ability was masked by his brilliance at absorbing us obsessively in his stories'

' Guardian

"A novelist who entered his fictional world as if he were part of it"

' Peter Ackroyd

'the greatest of all, the most genuine novelist we have had in literature"

' André Gide

'superb ' The most addictive of writers ' A unique teller of tales'

' Observer

'the mysteries of the human personality are revealed in all their disconcerting complexity"

' Anita Brookner

"A writer who, more than any other crime novelist, combined a high literary reputation with popular appeal"

' P. D. James

"A supreme writer ' Unforgettable vividness'

' Independent

"Compelling, remorseless, brilliant"

' John Gray

"Extraordinary masterpieces of the twentieth century"

' John Banville

Georges Simenon was born on 12 February 1903 in Liège, Belgium, and died in 1989 in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he had lived for the latter part of his life. Between 1931 and 1972 he published seventy-five novels and twenty-eight short stories featuring Inspector Maigret.

Simenon always resisted identifying himself with his famous literary character, but acknowledged that they shared an important characteristic:

My motto, to the extent that I have one, has been noted often enough, and I've always conformed to it. It's the one I've given to old Maigret, who resembles me in certain points ' 'understand and judge not'.

Penguin is publishing the entire series of Maigret novels.

1. The Shadow Puppet

It was ten p.m. The iron gates of the public garden were locked and Place des Vosges was empty. Glistening tyre tracks on the asphalt, the continuous play of the fountains, leafless trees and the regular shapes of identical rooftops silhouetted against the sky.

There were few lights under the splendid arcades encircling the square. Only three or four shops. Inspector Maigret could see a family eating inside one of them, cluttered with beaded funeral wreaths.

He was trying to read the numbers above the doors, but he had barely passed the wreath shop when a diminutive form stepped out of the shadows.

"Is it you I just telephoned?"

She must have been watching out for a long time. Despite the November cold, she had not slipped on a coat over her apron. Her nose was red, her eyes anxious.

Less than 400 metres away, on the corner of Rue de Béarn, a uniformed police officer stood...