Revelation

I have just finished a first run through 'Maigret se trompe', towards the end of which, in no more than a couple of sentences, we were told of a little quirk of Maigret, told for the very first time at the end of volume 17, that is to say after quite a lot of Maigret stories. A Maigret who smokes a great deal and drinks a fair bit, although rarely to the point of inebriation. A quirk whereby, quite often, if he took a certain drink at the start of a case, he would carry on with it until the end, in this case a drink called marc, a drink which I feel sure I have noticed before, but cannot now trace. A spirit made from the grape mush left over from making wine from the grapes.

So he had brandy cases, calvados cases, even the odd whisky case. And so on.

But the way we were told about this made me think that this might have been a quirk of Simenon himself, with one of these stories taking about the same time as a case, say about a fortnight. A fortnight of several hours actual writing first thing every morning.

PS: searching for 'marc' not helped by the fact that 'march' counts in Word search if not in Google search. Don't know yet about Windows search. Nor by the fact that a book about water by the late Marc Reisner picked up in a charity shop in Whitecross Street gets mentioned quite often.