: Jules Maigret is a "heavyset" Commissaire of the Paris Brigade Criminelle [14, 26]. He is defined by his , his pipe, and his bourgeois origins [14, 40]. : Unlike Sherlock Holmes, Maigret relies on

Maigret had been summoned to the café by a cryptic phone call from an unknown source. The message had been brief: "Meet me here. I have information about the Dumont affair." The name Dumont meant nothing to Maigret, but the tone of the voice had been urgent, almost desperate.

"You heard about the rich businessman who was found dead at the Café de la Paix?" Lucien asked, his voice low and conspiratorial.

Georges Simenon wrote his first Maigret novel, Pietr the Latvian , in 1930. Simenon, a prolific writer who would eventually pen 75 Maigret novels and 28 short stories, was seeking an antidote to the intellectual puzzle-box mysteries of the era. He wanted a detective who solved crimes not through magnifying glasses and esoteric knowledge, but by immersing himself in the atmosphere of a crime—the “atmosphere” of a cheap hotel, the weight of a secret in a working-class bar, or the quiet desperation of a bourgeois marriage.