Les témoins - Georges Simenon

It's not unusual for characters in Simenon's novels to be deeply flawed individuals, suffering from alcoholism, conducting illicit affairs, and emotionally estranged from their partners, but although many such cases end up before Lhomond, the Presiding Judge at a Paris Law Court, the judge himself would until recently have considered himself beyond any such reproach. He works assiduously late into the evening and looks after his ailing wife, but one night when leaving a disreputable local bar that he has entered in order to make a phone-call to the doctor for his wife, he is seen by the prosecution lawyer on a murder case he is working on, and feels that the innocent act may have given the wrong impression.

That impression is not helped by Lhomond coming down with the flu, looking under the weather the next morning and smelling of alcohol from a quick shot of brandy taken to ease the symptoms. The judge realises the figure he must present, but knows he is helpless to correct the impression and, reflecting on the man before him being tried for the premeditated murder of his wife - a crime that is likely to see him face a death sentence - Lhomond considers that should anything happen to his own wife and it were himself on trial, no-one would believe his all too convenient story. It leads him to identify with the man on trial and push further to explore and find out the truth.

The Witnesses is a masterful Simenon novel, brilliantly combining here all the characteristics of his best work, being a superb procedural, detailing and dissecting the elements that lead to a crime being committed, while exploring the psychology not of a typical criminal, but of an ordinary man with ordinary failings, considering notions of innocence, guilt and self-guilt, not only in relation to the justice system, but in regard also to basic human behaviour.