Maigret's pipe

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Maigret's pipe (French: La pipe de Maigret ) is a crime story by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . After Christmas at the Maigrets it is the second longest story in a series of 75 novels and 28 stories about the detective Maigret . Simenon wrote the story in Paris in June 1945 . The book edition appeared in July 1947 together with the novel Maigret is excited by the Presses de la Cité publishing house . The first German translation by Leni Sobez was published by Heyne in 1977 under the title Inspector Maigret smokes his pipe in Ellery Queen's Kriminal-Magazin 62 . In 1980 Diogenes Verlag published a new translation by Lislott Pfaff under the title Maigret's Pipe , which has since been published in various anthologies with Maigret stories as well as independently. Another translation by Karl-Heinz Ott was published by Kampa Verlag in 2018 .

Maigret's pipe has disappeared. The avid smoker is certain that the thief must be found among the visitors to the police station. When a young man who was in Maigret's office the day before disappears, the inspector takes over the investigation. The main reason he is looking for the missing person is that Maigret wants his pipe back.

content

Tobacco pipe from briar

It's July in Paris. At the end of his working day on the Quai des Orfèvres , Inspector Maigret misses his favorite pipe. He looks back on the past day and remembers the visit of Madame Leroy and her 17-year-old son Joseph. Maigret was as little interested in the widow as in her story, according to which a stranger had been gaining access to her apartment in her absence for weeks without ever stealing anything. But Maigret is soon certain that her son must have put his pipe in an unobserved moment.

Despite his extensive pipe collection, the inspector was depressed by the lack of the briar pipe , a birthday present from Madame Maigret, throughout the evening. The next day, a desperate Madame Leroy shows up again in his office and complains that her son disappeared in the middle of the night - with his house slippers. Maigret hates such "investigations in family matters", but the way to his pipe seems to lead only through Joseph. His friend Mathilde does not know the whereabouts of her lover, but confides in the inspector that the boy is just as ashamed of his training as a hairdresser as he is of his petty-bourgeois background and family. He hopes to escape from both by the prospect of a larger sum of money in the near future.

The investigation of Madame Leroy's former lodgers leads Maigret on the trail of a suspicious traveling salesman named Stéphane Bleustein, who was shot in Nice a few years ago . Maigret's intuition leads him to an inn in Chelles , the place where Joseph and Mathilde, who were newly in love, spent their happiest times. There he meets an old friend: the newly released gangster Nicolas, whom he overpowers in a scuffle. And in the inn he also finds Joseph, who has barricaded himself in his room out of fear.

The case is resolved: Madame Leroy's lodger Bleustein was a diamond robber who hid the booty of a theft in her apartment. Nicolas killed him before spending three years in prison for another crime. After his release from prison, he looked for the diamonds in the Leroy's apartment. While Madame Leroy informed Maigret, her son played the detective. He understood that there must be something valuable in the apartment that he tried to get hold of before the stranger. The very night he discovered the diamonds hidden in a lamp, he was surprised by the intruder Nicolas. Joseph fled, and his escape involuntarily led him to the familiar inn in Chelles, where he barricaded himself while his pursuer Nicolas besieged the building until he was overpowered by Maigret. In the end, the inspector can not only secure the diamonds, but also get his pipe back, which the young detective took with him as a souvenir of his idol.

interpretation

According to Murielle Wenger, the story of Maigret's pipe contains many components of the Maigret series in condensed form: Maigret's workplace on the Quai des Orfèvres, his inspectors, Madame Maigret and her relatives and, last but not least, very different aspects of the inspector's personality: from the slow, his surroundings like a sponge absorbing observer to the active fighter who kills the crook with his weight. The focus, however, is Maigret's relationship with his pipe. For the inspector, the pipe is not just an object, but an indispensable part of his work, comparable to a writer's pen. Only with the pipe between his lips is the commissioner able to put himself in the shoes of a problem until he finds the solution. Because the young Joseph Leroy understood this function of Maigret's pipe, he tried to get it to himself.

According to Johanna Borek, the young Joseph, trapped in a mediocre world and dominated by his mother, would like to play the great commissioner himself. Maigret's pipe serves as a symbol of the potency of the "greatest investigator of all time". After it is stolen from him, Maigret has to fight his way through a "mediocre case" to take it from the boy again. This ultimately remains an impotent "wannabe Maigret". Stanley G. Eskin describes the theft of the boy who wants to imitate Maigret as "gross nonsense". However, he gives the commissioner the opportunity to “show all his qualities as a father figure”.

reception

The double volume La pipe de Maigret , which in addition to the title story also contained the novel Maigret se fâche , was Simenon's first Maigret book edition after the Second World War and after moving to the Presses de la Cité . It proved to be very successful and sold over 500,000 copies in French alone. Fenton Bresler judged that Simenon "had not forgotten anything of his storytelling" during the Second World War. Stanley G. Eskin describes La pipe de Maigret as "a beautiful and funny story". For Thomas Narcejac , the story is part of a “series of small masterpieces”.

The novel was filmed in 1988 as part of the Maigret TV series with Jean Richard . In 1953, DRS produced the radio play Die Pfeife des Kommissars Maigret , directed by Felix Klee . Georg Mark-Czimeg spoke to Commissioner Maigret . In 1990 Schumm speaking books published a reading by Jörg Kaehler , which Diogenes Verlag reissued in 2007. Another reading by Walter Kreye was published by Audio Verlag in 2018 .

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: La pipe de Maigret . Presses de la Cité, Paris 1947 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Inspector Maigret smokes his pipe . Translation: Leni Sobez. In: Ellery Queen's Kriminal-Magazin 62. Heyne, Munich 1977, ISBN 3-453-10364-5 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret's pipe . Translation: Lislott Pfaff. In: Maigret stories . Diogenes, Zurich 1980, ISBN 3-257-00993-3 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret's pipe . Translation: Lislott Pfaff. Diogenes, Zurich 1983, ISBN 3-257-79521-1 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret's pipe . Translation: Lislott Pfaff. In: The Complete Maigret Stories . Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-06682-1 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret's pipe . Translation: Karl-Heinz Ott . Kampa, Zurich 2018, ISBN 978-3-311-13101-4 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ La pipe de Maigret on Yves Martina's website.
  2. ↑ Oliver Hahn: Bibliography of German-language editions . Georges-Simenon-Gesellschaft (Ed.): Simenon-Jahrbuch 2003 . Wehrhahn, Laatzen 2004, ISBN 3-86525-101-3 , pp. 70-71.
  3. ↑ Maigret of the Month: La pipe de Maigret (Maigret's Pipe) on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  4. ^ Johanna Borek: Traces, clues, trademarks. Functions of smoking in Simenon and Fruttero & Lucentini . In Hubert Pöppel: crime fiction . Stauffenberg, Tübingen 1998, ISBN 3-86057-525-2 , p. 101.
  5. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , pp. 283, 410.
  6. ^ Fenton Bresler: Georges Simenon. In search of the "naked" person . Ernst Kabel, Hamburg 1985, ISBN 3-921909-93-7 , p. 241.
  7. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography , p. 283.
  8. ^ "Succession of minor masterpieces" In: Thomas Narcejac : The Art of Simenon . Routledge & Kegan, London 1952, p. 124.
  9. ↑ Maigret's pipe on maigret.de.
  10. ^ The whistle of Commissioner Maigret in the HörDat audio game database .