The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 18 May 2001
In another of his many hard boiled mysteries, Georges Simenon writes almost a horror story of two young boys getting mixed up in shady dealings they never expected in their late night debaucheries. The book opens in a seedy night club called the Gai-Moulin on a back street of Liége, Belgium. Our two nervous boys, a 16-year-old clerk and his wealthy 18-year-old friend, seem to be plotting something once the few customers and the proprieters leave for the night. Before they know it, there's a dead body on the scene and who knows who is their greatest threat. The book is spooky and entertaining for its first half, as the boys try to decipher the meaning of being followed after their scary night on the town. It isn't until beyond half way through the book that Simenon's hero, Inspector Maigret of Paris, arrives on the scene. He comes to dominate the story (a translation of Le Danseuse du Gai-Moulin), acting humble, but really harboring an amazing amount of detail about this crime. The tone of the book changes here, becomes a little comic as the crime is solved. I think we can be glad we don't live in a time when rules of evidence were so terribly lax that inspectors are moving around bits of evidence and destroying crime scenes even before they're discovered. The denoument is a little contrived, but by and large, this remains an entertaining mystery. The portrait of the shady streets of Liége is well presented and the rumpled room of the club's danseuse reeks of a run-down life.
Also by Simenon: [Maigret in Montmartre] [A Battle of Nerves] [The Blue Room]