A Crime in Holland: Inspector Maigret #7
Georges Simenon
'The father of contemporary European detective fiction' Ann Cleeves
'Just take a look,' Duclos said in an undertone, pointing to the scene all round them, the picture-book town, with everything in its place, like ornaments on the mantlepiece of a careful housewife . . . 'Everyone here earns his living. Everyone's more or less content. And above all, everyone keeps his instincts under control, because that's the rule here, and a necessity if people want to live in society.'
When a French professor visiting the quiet, Dutch coastal town of Delfzjil is accused of murder, Maigret is sent to investigate. The community seem happy to blame an unknown outsider, but there are people much closer to home who seem to know much more than they're letting on: Beetje, the dissatisfied daughter of a local farmer, Amy van Elst, sister-in-law of the deceased and a notorious local crook.
This novel has been published in a previous translation as Maigret in Holland.
'Compelling, remorseless, brilliant' John Gray
'One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century' Guardian
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About Georges Simenon
Reviews for A Crime in Holland: Inspector Maigret #7
John Banville
Financial Times
Gem-hard soul-probes . . . not just the world's bestselling detective series, but an imperishable literary legend . . . he exposes secrets and crimes not by forensic wizardry, but by the melded powers of therapist, philosopher and confessor
Boyd Tonkin
The Times
Terrific...the 75 Inspector Maigret books are almost uniformly wonderful. They are not crime or even detective fiction as ordinarily understood...they are about human foibles, moral failings and compromises, set in an evocatively atmospheric Paris
David Mills
Sunday Times
A great writer of detail, of atmosphere
Leïla Slimani
Financial Times
A genius … Simenon broke all the rules
Jake Kerridge
Daily Telegraph
The novels brim with atmosphere, insight and intelligence . . . quite unlike anything else written before or since
India Knight
The Times
Exceptional… Simenon’s writing still seems fresh…one of the great pleasures is the summoning of France’s many landscapes and accompanying social milieux . . . There is also, and it’s a chief glory of the books, a whole range of different Parises, from the shiny rich to the hypocritical bourgeois middle to the struggling, furious world of the poor, desperate and professionally criminal
John Lanchester
Times Literary Supplement
I never read contemporary fiction–with one exception: the works of Simenon
T.S. Eliot One of the most important writers of our century
Gabriel García Márquez An astute observer of human nature, writing in a spare and vivid style
Amor Towles