La guinguette à deux sous - Georges Simenon

Following up an obscure lead left to him by a criminal about to be executed, Maigret discovers a hidden side to a group of Parisians of respectable professions, and becomes a witness to what they get up to in their leisure time. At the weekends, these respectable gentlemen - engineers, businessmen, shop owners, doctors - and their wives, all make their way to a tavern on an outlying location on the Seine known as the Guinguette à deux sous, where they indulge in dressing up, role-playing, heavy drinking, fine eating, and a little bit of fishing and canoeing. Extramarital affairs are also indulged during the partying, often with the tacit consent of all the couples involved.

Such matters are not of great concern to Maigret and not why he is at the Guinguette à deux sous when he should be on holiday in the country with his wife. He's been told by the criminal to be executed, Lenoir, that there is a murderer among the group who was seen six years ago dropping a body into the canal Saint-Martin. While he is there, looking around, getting to know the personalities involved and the complications of their affairs, Maigret is however witness to another murder.

Even for a Maigret novel, Guinguette à deux sous - an early novel from 1932 - moves along rather too smoothly, Maigret of course having plenty of opportunity to stop-off for drinks (Pernod the tipple of choice in this novel) at the bars around the Palais Royale by way of conducting his investigations, waiting for everything to fall into place. There is some fine humour to be found however in the figure of Lenoir's former colleague Victor Gaillard, who cuts a hilariously pathetic figure as a homeless crook with one lung. With its increasingly despairing tone and bitter outlook on decadent bourgeois lifestyles, touching on irregular financial affairs and alcoholism, the novel nevertheless has that characteristic dark Simenon tone.