Signed, Picpus (Inspector Maigret)

＂I want to know what goes on in people’s minds. I suppose that’s why I love Georges Simenon so much. He was such a master of the small domestic situation.＂ --Ruth Rendell

Tomorrow, at five in the afternoon, I will kill the clairvoyant. Signed, Picpus.

This chilling message is seen scratched into a café blotting pad, prompting Maigret to place eighty fortune tellers under police watch. If it’s a hoax, he frets, he’ll never hear the end of it. Then the call comes in: clairvoyant Mademoiselle Jeanne has been fatally stabbed. While she lies dying, a senile old man is locked in an adjacent room. Maigret feels acute sympathy for this disheveled, bewildered figure--but who is he really? And how did his fate get mixed up with an audacious enterprise of scammers and thieves?

The rest of Paris may be lazing under the bright August sun, but Maigret won’t rest until he solves this most labyrinthine of cases. With his deeply felt sense of the tragic, Georges Simenon composes a masterpiece of crime fiction in Signed, Picpus.

Georges Simenon (1903-1989) was born in Liège, Belgium. An intrepid traveler with a profound interest in people, Simenon strove on and off the page to understand--and not to judge--the human condition in all its shades. His books include the Inspector Maigret series and a richly varied body of wider work united by its evocative power, its economy of means, and its penetrating psychological insight. He is among the most widely read writers in the global canon.

David Coward is professor emeritus of French at the University of Leeds and a translator of many books from the French, including Albert Cohen’s Belle du Seigneur, for which he was awarded a Scott Moncrieff Prize.