Maigret Wins the Game (Inspector Maigret and the Killers, 1954)

Georges Simenon. Inspector Maigret and the Killers (1954) A typical Maigret, with

straightforward reporting of the action, and limited  narration of Maigret’s problem solving. We do get a lot of his reactions to his colleagues, and the suspects and witnesses. But it’s up to us to sift the clues from the red herrings and come up with the solution(s).

Here, a dead body is dumped almost at the feet of a cop who happens to suffer from what Freud labelled an inferiority complex. Simenon (that is Maigret’s) take is that it’s an aggrieved sense of unrewarded superiority. Anyhow, the corpse disappears, the cop is beaten up, and Maigret is told he’s dealing with Americans, who are professionals when comes to crime. This annoys Maigret, I mean who wouldn’t bristle at being told he’s out of his league? In the end Maigret wins, of course.

The British made Maigret TV series are better, more subtle and nuanced than these books, which are good for a train ride or plane flight, when one is not fully engaged with the book. This one is below Simenon’s usual standard. **½

Two More From The Vinyl Cafe (Vinyl Cafe Unplugged, Vinyl Cafe Diaries)

Stuart McLean. Vinyl Café Unplugged (2000) #3. It begins with a story about Arthur the dog, who figures out how to insinuate himself into Dave and Morley’s bedroom and onto the bed. It includes the story of Eugene and the fig tree, and how Sam helps Eugene bury the and later resurrect the tree.

McLean’s stories are classified as humour or light reading, differentiated from more serious fare. “More serious” usually means “more gloomy” when applied to literature and the other arts. When I see “realistic” in some blurb or review, I know that there will be blood, if not on the saddle (1) then elsewhere. I think there’s  a misclassification, aka “category error”, in these descriptions. Yes, McLean’s stories are humorous. They are also profoundly serious. Dave’s errors of judgement could lead to catastrophe. That they don’t comes down to kindness, love, forgiveness, extended to him by Morley, his children, and his neighbours. And Arthur the dog.

To affirm that these virtues exist, and that without them we would lead Hobbesian nasty, brutish, and short lives, is a serious matter. The cynic will raise his eyebrows, the pessimist will roll her eyes, the moralist will frown and prepare a sharp rebuke. But they’re all wrong. Life isn’t perfect, humans are flawed, and that will cause pain and sometimes worse. But life is a gift, family and friends are treasures, and joys large and small enrich our lives. That’s what McLean’s stories affirm.

Read any of the Vinyl Café collections. Read them all. ****

1) Blood on the saddle
blood on the ground,
great big gobs of blood all around.
Pity the cowboy
lying in the gore,
he ain’t gonna ride the range no more.

Stuart McLean.  Vinyl Café Diaries (2003)These stories fill in the back story of Dave and

Morley and their family. I’m still bingeing, haven’t yet tired of McLean’s bitter-sweet humour, more certain than ever that he’s a major writer.

Humour may be a matter of temperament, but writing humour takes great skill. Getting the timing right is essential, and that’s hard enough live, and  much more difficult in writing. McLean is a master of the momentarily distracting detail, the aside that pauses the narrative just long enough, the word that triggers the insight that makes us laugh. Merely as examples of skill, his stories are masterpieces. In their apparently artless evocations of everyday life, they raise deep questions about what makes life worth living. He occasionally suggests answers, but these at best merely hint at the meanings of his tales. ****

Vinyl Cafe, 1st collection (Stories from the Vinyl Cafe, 1995)

 Stuart McLean. Stories From The Vinyl Café. (1995) The first collection, and it sets the high standard that all the other collections met. Dave and Morley aren’t yet the focus of the history that McLean relates in the rest of his stories. But they are already what they will be: very much ordinary flawed people who try their best to do their best, and fail and succeed as we all do.

McLean’s gift is his ability to stir nostalgia, regret, joy, contentment, and grief without descending into sentimentality. His style is journalistic without being reportorial. We get a mostly neutral narrator who tells us what’s happening, and occasionally allows himself a comment on what he thinks it all means. And what does it all mean? That love makes life worth living.

I’m on a Vinyl Café binge, and I find it hard to stop reading. ****

P D James Short Stories (The Mistletoe Murder, 2016)

P. D. James. The Mistletoe Murder (2016) ... and other stories. Like other successful mystery writers, P D James was asked to contribute to Christmas mystery story collections. Here we have four examples, and a short essay on the short story. The stories are nicely constructed, with plausible crimes and well paced discoveries of the perpetrators. As in James’s novels, the denouements are psychologically nuanced. James understood that the reasons for crime are more interesting than the crimes themselves. The artistic problem in writing a short story is to sketch the characters well enough that they are believable criminals. James also knows that discovering the criminal does not bring what’s labelled “closure”. The effects of crime spread like a stain though the family and community, and will affect lives long after the case files are closed. In one story, a death caused in all innocence leads to blackmail that lasts a lifetime.

A very good read. A nicely designed and made book, too. ****

Scams (Lapham's Quarterly 8-02, Swindle & Fraud)

Lapham’s Quarterly 8-02: Swindle & Fraud (2015). An entertaining read, and for that reason

possibly a misleading one. It’s fun to read about how swindles and frauds work, about how greedy people fall for a con, how clever the swindlers have been. It may fool one into believing that these insights will make us immune. Which is of course not so.

Every successful swindle relies on our propensity to deceive ourselves. We want something for nothing, or as close as we can get to it. We want to be insiders, a member of that exclusive group that knows better than everybody else. We believe we are smarter than the average bear and can spot opportunities for profit that escape everyone else. We are sure that we can tell the truth from falsehood, that we know enough about the real world that we can tell when someone is blowing smoke in our ears. And we are wrong on all these counts.

I hope that reading this wonderful collection will continue to remind me that I’m as likely to fall for a scam as everyone else. It just takes someone to figure out what buttons to push.

Recommended. ****

Dave Cooks the turkey and other mishaps (Home From the Vinyl Café, 1998)

Stuart McLean. Home from the Vinyl Café. (1998) The second collection. It begins with Dave Cooks The Turkey, which has become a fixture on CBC's  As It Happens during the week leading up to Christmas Eve, when they play Alan Maitland reading The Shepherd. It’s as funny on the page as in the audio. The rest of the stories are the same quality. They have the ring of truth, no matter how bizarrely the situation develops. As in Laurel and Hardy movies each consequence follows logically from the previous one, driven by circumstances and character, and ends in bizarre catastrophe. The stories are also elegies for a way of life that’s past, a way of life that never existed, except in the rosy-dark memories of our childhoods and youth. Nostalgia is the common leavening of these tales. They evoke wry smiles and bitter-sweet memories.

Recommended. ****

Travels Across Canada: Stuart McLean's Welcome Home (1992)

Stuart McLean. Welcome Home. (1992) McLean took a few trips across the country, and stayed in several small towns. Then he wrote this elegy for what was already rapidly disappearing 30+ years ago. It’s pretty well gone.

Relevant anecdote: In 2023, we had a family reunion in Donalda, Alberta. The town no longer has a grocery store. It does have a hotel with a bar and a restaurant that serves meals on weekends. When I first went there in the 1950s, the town had a bank, a couple of service stations, a dairy, a grocery store, a school, a railroad line that served the grain elevators, and so on. Most of the businesses are gone or have been converted into homes. The town is now a suburb for Camrose, about 3/4 hour away, a typical commute these days. They have a community hall, where the local caterers served us several excellent meals. We had a good time.

McLean has the gift of the telling detail that concentrates the meanings of his story in one memorable moment. The people in these towns know that their way of life is ending, but they refuse to capitulate. Community is strong, and as long as you have family and friends, life is worth living. It's over thirty years since McLean's tour of Canada. It would be a gift for another one, but I don't know of anyone who could do it.

Highly recommended. ****