And it's been cleaned up a bit for TV.
In the 60s, there was a radio discussion programme with an all-woman panel. (How about reviving this idea?) Renee Houston was a permanent panellist, who could be relied on to come out with a rather aggressive, and conservative, point of view in a strong Scottish accent - and get the Radio 4 audience applauding.
So I was bowled over by her performance as "Fat Jaja", owner of sleazy dive the Liberty Bar. An ageing beauty gone to seed, who sits downing whiskey in her kitchen while waifs and strays gather round her: William Brown, the corpse in the case. Sylvie the younger prostitute. A Swedish steward from a nearby yacht (we're in Cannes) - though surely he'd get the sack for wearing such a dirty vest? Giovanni, Sylvie's pimp.
William lives a strange double, or triple, life. He has left his wife and sons, and vast ranch, in Australia. To start with, he just blued his money on yachts, girls and champagne. But then his uptight son (Paul Eddington, excellent, what would you expect?), puts him on a strict allowance.
However, he manages to keep two similar menages - a bourgeois villa on the coast road, with a luscious, 50-ish mistress and her ever so genteel mother. But once a month he goes to collect the allowance, and to spend several days with Fat Jaja - who, with the younger Sylvie, echoes his "respectable" home life. The actress playing Sylvie is striking-looking, but appears to be about 40.
Maigret is a psycho-social detective - he slowly lays bare a life and a milieu. (A bit like Agatha Christie's Parker Pyne and Mr Satterthwaite.)
So which of them knifed William, leaving him to stagger home and die on his own doorstep?
This series is brilliant, and Rupert Davies is the best Maigret - better even than Michael Gambon. Rowan Atkinson missed out the character's humour and twinkle, and his scriptwriters insisted on dragging the dialogue into the present and giving Madame Maigret plonking feminist speeches.
This series /sticks closely to the books/, which, when they are as good as Simenon's, is the best plan.
(Some series based on books improve on them vastly - Lovejoy, for instance. But with Christie and Simenon what we want are the stories themselves.)
In the 60s, there was a radio discussion programme with an all-woman panel. (How about reviving this idea?) Renee Houston was a permanent panellist, who could be relied on to come out with a rather aggressive, and conservative, point of view in a strong Scottish accent - and get the Radio 4 audience applauding.
So I was bowled over by her performance as "Fat Jaja", owner of sleazy dive the Liberty Bar. An ageing beauty gone to seed, who sits downing whiskey in her kitchen while waifs and strays gather round her: William Brown, the corpse in the case. Sylvie the younger prostitute. A Swedish steward from a nearby yacht (we're in Cannes) - though surely he'd get the sack for wearing such a dirty vest? Giovanni, Sylvie's pimp.
William lives a strange double, or triple, life. He has left his wife and sons, and vast ranch, in Australia. To start with, he just blued his money on yachts, girls and champagne. But then his uptight son (Paul Eddington, excellent, what would you expect?), puts him on a strict allowance.
However, he manages to keep two similar menages - a bourgeois villa on the coast road, with a luscious, 50-ish mistress and her ever so genteel mother. But once a month he goes to collect the allowance, and to spend several days with Fat Jaja - who, with the younger Sylvie, echoes his "respectable" home life. The actress playing Sylvie is striking-looking, but appears to be about 40.
Maigret is a psycho-social detective - he slowly lays bare a life and a milieu. (A bit like Agatha Christie's Parker Pyne and Mr Satterthwaite.)
So which of them knifed William, leaving him to stagger home and die on his own doorstep?
This series is brilliant, and Rupert Davies is the best Maigret - better even than Michael Gambon. Rowan Atkinson missed out the character's humour and twinkle, and his scriptwriters insisted on dragging the dialogue into the present and giving Madame Maigret plonking feminist speeches.
This series /sticks closely to the books/, which, when they are as good as Simenon's, is the best plan.
(Some series based on books improve on them vastly - Lovejoy, for instance. But with Christie and Simenon what we want are the stories themselves.)