Lock No. 1: Inspector Maigret #18
Georges Simenon
'The father of contemporary European detective fiction' Ann Cleeves
Cars drove past along with the trucks and trams, but by now Maigret had realised that they were not important. Whatever roared by like this along the road was not part of the landscape. ... What really counted was the lock, the hooting of the tugs, the stone crusher, the barges and the cranes, the two pilots' bars and especially the tall house where he could make out Ducrau's red chair framed by a window.
Penguin is publishing the entire series of Maigret novels in new translations. This novel has been published in a previous translation as The Lock at Charenton.
'Compelling, remorseless, brilliant' John Gray
'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 supreme writer . . . unforgettable vividness' Independent
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About Georges Simenon
Reviews for Lock No. 1: Inspector Maigret #18
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