Following his decision, Maigret spends much of the rest of the book beset with doubts and uncertainties, questioning whether his approach is correct. The novel itself suggests it was not a commonplace, and Maigret views his approach as a gamble, using the advice from Tissot to organise an elaborate police surveillance operation. Simenon wrote the book while he was living in the United States was this where he picked up on a similar approach to a case? I’d be interested to know where the original inspiration came from, and whether Simenon had read of a similar experiment taking place elsewhere.

I’d always thought profiling was a more recent innovation, but clearly not – here we have an example from close to 60 years ago. In a nice device, Simenon refers back to this conversation through the novel to illustrate a particular point, and show the way in which Maigret’s memory of it guides his thinking. Maigret and Tissot meet at the dinner-party of a mutual friend (the story suggests that the host has done this deliberately), where they discuss the case in some detail. Here, Maigret engages the help of a psychiatrist, Professor Tissot, to track down a serial murderer, and uses what amounts to a ‘psychological profile’ to guide the investigation. I was encouraged to buy it by the description on the book jacket, which struck me as surprisingly modern. Luckily, it’s a short book or I’d still be there now. I spent half my time thinking I’d turned over two at once, and pawing at the pages like a cat with a mouse.

I picked it up from a sale in my local library (cost: 10p), and as it’s the original 1965 English translation, it has lovely, heavy, slightly yellowed pages. This is my second Simenon novel (the first being Maigret and the Lazy Burglar, which I read last year).

Maigret sets a trap georges simenon