Georges Simenon was inter-war France’s most famous writer of detective fiction, and Inspector Maigret is his most famous creation: built like a rugby player, sucking on his pipe, with the collar of his coat turned up against the Paris drizzle. A few years back, Penguin announced it would be reissuing one Simenon per month – a larger undertaking than it sounds, given the sheer volume of his output, not to mention the need for translation. This week, after years of good intentions, I finally read one of them.