Maigret is wrong
Maigret is wrong (original title Une erhur de Maigret ) is a story by Georges Simenon , in which Commissioner Maigret has to admit a mistake while investigating a death. The work belonging to the series of Maigret novels and stories was written in October 1936 in Neuilly-sur-Seine . The story first appeared on January 3, 1937 in the Paris-Soir- Dimanche newspaper.
The story was published in book form in 1944 in the volume of stories Les Nouvelles Enquêtes de Maigret by Gallimard . In a German translation by Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau, the story was first published in 1976 under the title Maigret is mistaken by Kiepenheuer and Witsch , in 1980 in a new translation and title ( Here Maigret is wrong ) by Inge Giese in the volume Maigret and Stan the Killer and in 2009 under Maigret is wrong in the anthology Complete Maigret Stories , both published by Diogenes Verlag .
The story Maigret is wrong is not with a similarly titled novel Simenon, with this mistaken Maigret (original title Maigret se trompe confuse, 1944).
action
The young Emilienne, a saleswoman in the Librairie Spéciale in Paris' Rue Saint-Denis , is found dead in the basement of the shop, a room furnished like a boudoir . Your boss Eugène Labri, 45 years old, asserts that he left the shop early the night before and that he found his employee sleeping on the sofa, but he hadn't thought of anything. For Maigret the guilty party is quickly determined; it was the bookseller. He took advantage of the girl and it became a nuisance to him. Maigret believes Labri poisoned the girl; he does not believe in Emilienne's suicide. The decisive factor for the inspector is the girl's diary, in which she describes her crush on her boss.
Unfortunately Maigret has to realize that it couldn't have been exactly as he imagines it to be. A call from Lucas reaches him; he informs him that the autopsy showed that Emilienne was still a virgin. Maigret suddenly realized that he was wrong; Labri is not the murderer, even if he believes he is complicit in Emilienne's death. The naïve girl's job in Labri's bookstore was to give pleasure to his male customers, who mostly bought erotic literature from him . If she killed herself, it was probably because she had heard that Labri wanted to sell his bookstore and had assured the buyer that the young saleswoman would definitely be available to him. At that moment Emilienne felt rejected by her believed lover and was desperate. But Labri could not be convicted by the judiciary for this.
expenditure
After the first publication in Paris-Soir-Dimanche (1937), the story appeared in the anthology Les nouvelles enquêtes de Maigret (Paris, Gallimard, NRF., 1944). It was included in the Simenon works Œuvres complètes (Lausanne, Editions Rencontre, 1967–1973) in Volume IX, in Tout Simenon (Paris, Presses de la Cité, 1988–1993) in Volume 25 and in Tout Simenon (Paris, Omnibus, 2002–2004) included in volume 25. It is also available in German translation in the anthology Complete Maigret Stories ( ISBN 978-3-257-06682-1 ) published by Diogenes in 2009 .