Maigret and the Headless Corpse 1955 detective book
Maigret and the Headless Corpse (1955, Belgium)
Original title: Maigret et le corps sans tête
When a human hand is fished out of the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris, the local police starts the routine activities - the movement of the boats is halted while the diver is brought down to the scene in order to find other parts of the body. Soon he finds every piece of the victim, apart from the head, which makes identifying the person really hard. Inspector Maigret is as surprised as other officers that the body must have belonged to a man, which is quite unusual. Finding of a woman’s body is a common occurrence in this part of the city, but the dismembered body of a man is something they can’t remember to have dealt with in the past.
While the victim is still unknown, Maigret starts the investigation practically blindfolded - the only details the technicians provided to him is that the victim was a rather stubby man, he had his appendix removed a few years back and, as a young man, was most likely shot during hunting. That is not much to begin with, so the policemen start to look around in the nearby cafés and bistros, hoping to find any clues to the identity of their victim.
Maigret and the Headless Corpse is an unusual book among the works of Georges Simenon - while the novels were usually following the same formula (the body is found, some details lead to first discoveries and step by step the whole story unfolds), here we have something different. Inspector Maigret is as baffled as the reader about what is going on and instead of following the leads he more or less has to count on his luck and instinct to find any clues that would push the investigation forward. Compared to other titles in the series, Maigret and the Headless Corpse is perhaps less gripping and involving the reader, but still a decent piece of literature.
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