Top Notch

I wasn't all that sure about acquiring A Christmas Maigret and Other Stories back in December, from Waterstones on Deansgate in Manchester. If Fifi hadn't needed to make up the Buy One and Get One Half Price deal they were offering to save a bob or two on her book I wouldn't have bothered. Of course, any Simenon is worth getting hold of, but I knew I wouldn't read the stories until well after Christmas and thought they might fall more than a bit flat, out of season, as it were. But I needn't have worried: they made an excellent January read.

The Maigret story itself was typically solid stuff, a bit plodding but in a good way - very comfortable reading. But unexpectedly it was the two stories that didn't feature the great Inspector that really stood as a reminder of just how brilliant a writer Simenon can be. The second story, Seven Small Crosses in a Notebook, was very much in the Maigret vein, being based on the perspective of the Parisian Police, and was genuinely gripping in its evocation of the police switchboard and an unfolding mystery being played out on its lights on Christmas Eve. Very clever and, as always with Simenon, very human; indeed, very humane.

Then came The Little Restaurant near Place des Ternes - A Christmas Story for Grown-Ups. I thought this was going to be a bit of filler for the volume. It turned out to be one of the best short stories I've ever read. Possibly now my favourite 'Christmas story' ever. It took me two readings to really 'get it', but the second of these was just pure appreciation of its mastery. Simenon adopts the perspective of a down-at-heel, lonely, hard-faced prostitute and is so entirely convincing inhabiting her frame of reference that it's spooky. And the fact that she's the source of a kind of ultimate goodness in the tale is carried off without the slightest sense of sentimentality. Astonishing. If this isn't great writing I don't know what is.