I had the simple pleasure of reading several of these short mystery stories by renown French author Georges Simenon, and found them quite entertaining for their literary quality, while remaining overtly engaging with that classic form of the pure mystery.
In other words, a crime has occurred and a detective is called upon to search out clues, so as to discern the identity of the perpetrator. It is not a complex formula - adding to the reasons for its popularity - and done well, as Georges Simenon manages to carry out, it is indeed an engaging period of reading.
For his sleuth, Simenon offers the reader Inspector Jules Maigret, a rather unimposing figure who comes across as omnipresent. He never seems to conduct his investigations through the relentless inquiry of witnesses, as is the case with other well-known sleuths; but rather through a subtle placing of himself at the right place at the right time, blending into the environment, and just waiting for the clues to reveal themselves to him. All required of him afterwards was a plain putting of the pieces together in order to solve the crime.
The audiobook to which I listened to here, it loses all of that. It is an adaptation of Simenon's work into the form of radio plays where Maigret sits down with Georges Simenon and recounts some of his famous cases.
This concept, on its own, presents an intriguing premise in telling an author's story: the main character relaying it to the author himself; and yet, from my vantage point of experiencing both, it lost the uniqueness of Simenon's original work. The play itself was entertaining. The full-cast audio from BBC Audiobooks was professional as always. But taking the character of Maigret and moving him from the background into the foreground made its effort in reproducing Simenon's writings a less than stellar accomplishment. My judgment - read the books first. If you enjoy a good mystery, you will enjoy these.
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