Maigret and the Informer

Maigret and the Informer
Author: Georges Simenon
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 144
Release: 2020-08-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0525504265

“A writer as comfortable with reality as with fiction, with passion as with reason.” —John Le Carré When a prominent figure from the Paris restaurant world turns up dead, Inspector Maigret is on the case The body of a well-known Parisian restaurateur turns up on Avenue Junot in Montmartre, having seemingly been killed elsewhere. Inspector Maigret dives into the investigation and soon discovers that the murder may be gang-related after a colleague working in the red-light district receives a tip from an anonymous informer. Deeply engrossing, and revealing insights about the class-conscious world of the Paris elite, Maigret and the Informer draws the reader into a complicated case that could hinge on one man's word.

Maigret's World

Maigret's World
Author: Murielle Wenger
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2017-09-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1476669775

Georges Simenon's 75 novels and 28 short stories that feature Chief Inspector Jules Maigret provide us with a great deal of information about the French police detective--but only in small, episodic doses. As readers become acquainted with Maigret one detail at a time, he slowly takes on a flesh-and-bone realism--not merely a character in a story, but someone we would like to meet in real life. This book presents all the canonical facts and details about the detective and his world in one place, presented with tabulations and analyses that enable a better understanding of the works and of Maigret himself.

Literary Afterlife

Literary Afterlife
Author: Bernard A. Drew
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 421
Release: 2010-03-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 078645721X

This is an encyclopedic work, arranged by broad categories and then by original authors, of literary pastiches in which fictional characters have reappeared in new works after the deaths of the authors that created them. It includes book series that have continued under a deceased writer's real or pen name, undisguised offshoots issued under the new writer's name, posthumous collaborations in which a deceased author's unfinished manuscript is completed by another writer, unauthorized pastiches, and "biographies" of literary characters. The authors and works are entered under the following categories: Action and Adventure, Classics (18th Century and Earlier), Classics (19th Century), Classics (20th Century), Crime and Mystery, Espionage, Fantasy and Horror, Humor, Juveniles (19th Century), Juveniles (20th Century), Poets, Pulps, Romances, Science Fiction and Westerns. Each original author entry includes a short biography, a list of original works, and information on the pastiches based on the author's characters.

The Silver Shooter

The Silver Shooter
Author: Erin Lindsey
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2020-11-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1250623456

Erin Lindsey's third historical mystery The Silver Shooter follows Rose Gallagher as she tracks a monster and searches for treasure in the wilds of the Dakota Territory. It's the spring of 1887, and Rose Gallagher is finally coming into her own. She's the proud owner of a lovely little home near Washington Square, where she lives with her mother and friend Pietro, and she's making a name for herself as a Pinkerton agent with a specialty in things . . . otherworldly. She and her partner Thomas are working together better than ever, and mostly managing to push aside romantic feelings for one another. Mostly. Things are almost too good to be true—so Rose is hardly surprised when Theodore Roosevelt descends on them like a storm cloud, hiring them for a mysterious job out west. A series of strange occurrences in the Badlands surrounding his ranch has Roosevelt convinced something supernatural is afoot. It began with livestock disappearing from the range, their bodies later discovered torn apart by something monstrously powerful. Now people are dying, too. Meanwhile, a successful prospector has gone missing, and rumors about his lost stash of gold have attracted treasure hunters from far and wide – but they keep disappearing, too. To top it all off, this past winter, a mysterious weather phenomenon devastated the land, leaving the locals hungry, broke, and looking for someone to blame. With tensions mounting and the body count rising, Roosevelt fears a single spark will be all it takes to set the Badlands aflame. It’s up to Rose and Thomas to get to the bottom of it, but they’re against the clock and an unknown enemy, and the west will prove wilder than they could possibly imagine...

The Talented Miss Highsmith

The Talented Miss Highsmith
Author: Joan Schenkar
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 733
Release: 2010-01-18
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1429961015

A biography of the novelist who created Tom Ripley that is “both dazzling and definitive . . . as original as its contemptible, miserable, irresistible subject” (Los Angeles Times). A New York Times Notable Book * A Lambda Literary Award Winner * An Edgar Award Nominee * An Agatha Award Nominee * A Publishers Weekly Pick of the Week Patricia Highsmith, one of the great writers of twentieth-century American fiction, had a life as darkly compelling as that of her famed “hero-criminal,” the talented Tom Ripley. Joan Schenkar maps out this richly bizarre life from her birth in Texas to Hitchcock’s filming of her first novel, Strangers on a Train, to her long, strange self-exile in Europe. We see her as a secret writer for the comics, a brilliant creator of disturbing fictions, and an erotic predator with dozens of women (and a few good men) on her love list. The Talented Miss Highsmith is the first literary biography with access to Highsmith’s whole story: her closest friends, her oeuvre, her archives. It’s a compulsive page-turner unlike any other, a book worthy of Highsmith herself. “Schenkar’s writing is witty, sharp and light-handed, a considerable achievement given the immense detail.” —Jeanette Winterson, The New York Times Book Review “This is no ordinary biography . . . The Talented Miss Highsmith breaks much ground in connecting Highsmith’s diabolical tales with the real women who prompted her strongest passions.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times “Captures the writer in all her sullen, sinister, ambivalent glory.” —Tina Jordan, Entertainment Weekly

Investigating Simenon

Investigating Simenon
Author: Russell Campbell
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2022-09-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1476689997

For nearly a century, the work of Belgian crime writer and psychological novelist Georges Simenon, creator of Chief Inspector Maigret, has captivated readers worldwide. This investigation situates Simenon's work in its historical context and interprets it as a reaction to shifting gender relations in Western society. Simenon's compelling narratives capture the anxieties of men whose patriarchal position was under threat in an era of insurgent feminist movements. These concerns are also evident in Simenon's pervasive preoccupation with sexuality, as well as his political stance that stems from his petit-bourgeois upbringing. This groundbreaking study includes interwoven commentary on all 191 novels Simenon published under his own name, including several that have never been translated into English, as well as a number of short stories and several pseudonymous works.

Paris Vagabond

Paris Vagabond
Author: Jean-Paul Clebert
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2016-04-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1590179579

An NYRB Classics Original Jean-Paul Clébert was a boy from a respectable middle-class family who ran away from school, joined the French Resistance, and never looked back. Making his way to Paris at the end of World War II, Clébert took to living on the streets, and in Paris Vagabond, a so-called “aleatory novel” assembled out of sketches he jotted down at the time, he tells what it was like. His “gallery of faces and cityscapes on the road to extinction” is an astonishing depiction of a world apart—a Paris, long since vanished, of the poor, the criminal, and the outcast—and a no less astonishing feat of literary improvisation: Its long looping breathless sentences, streetwise, profane, lyrical, incantatory, are an adventure in their own right. Praised on publication by the great novelist and poet Blaise Cendrars and embraced by the young Situationists as a kind of manual for living off the grid, Paris Vagabond—here published with the starkly striking photographs of Clébert’s friend Patrice Molinard—is a raw and celebratory evocation of the life of a city and the underside of life.

Red Gold

Red Gold
Author: Alan Furst
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2007-12-18
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307432912

“Nothing can be like watching Casablanca for the first time, but Furst comes closer than anyone has in years.”—Time Autumn 1941: In a shabby hotel off the place Clichy, the course of the war is about to change. German tanks are rolling toward Moscow. Stalin has issued a decree: All partisan operatives are to strike behind enemy lines—from Kiev to Brittany. Set in the back streets of Paris and deep in occupied France, Red Gold moves with quiet menace as predators from the dark edge of war—arms dealers, lawyers, spies, and assassins—emerge from the shadows of the Parisian underworld. In their midst is Jean Casson, once a well-to-do film producer, now a target of the Gestapo living on a few francs a day. As the occupation tightens, Casson is drawn into an ill-fated mission: running guns to combat units of the French Communist Party. Reprisals are brutal. At last the real resistance has begun. Red Gold masterfully re-creates the shadow world of French resistance in the darkest days of World War II.