Maigret et son Mort (suite)

I learn this morning that there is nothing special about us Brits not liking foreigners.

Something gleaned from towards the end of this Maigret yarn, which I have noticed a couple of times already, most recently at reference 1. A yarn published in 1947 and written while Simenon was in Tucson, having retired to North America after a not very glorious war in occupied France.

It turns out that the engine of the whole plot is a gang of southern Slovaks, living in some squalor in what was then the very grubby area in the region of the Rue du Roi de Sicile in Paris, who mainly made a living by slaughtering the inhabitants of remote farms in Picardy, usually torturing them for good measure, and then making off with whatever money they could lay their hands on. The impression is given that there were lots of men from Poland and Czechoslovakia working on the big farms thereabouts, perhaps part of the dislocations & displacements of persons in the aftermath of the second world war. In between times, putting in a bit of time in the Citroën factory, then on the eastern outskirts of Paris. Simenon is able to spin a yarn involving a good dollop of sex and violence, while dumping the blame on the other, presumably playing to the same fears among the French then as Brexit played among us last year.

We also learn that Czechs from Prague were a bit snooty about southern Slovaks, a bit like an Irishman long domiciled in Willesden might be a bit snooty about a compatriot just off the boat from the wilds of Galway.

PS: a not very glorious war which included going to some lengths at some point to prove to the local Gestapo that he had no Jewish blood in his immediate family, a job made more tricky by both the war and the fact that the necessary records were to the north, in Belgium. A more glorious end would have been to tell the Gestapo to get stuffed and to take the consequences, but I suppose few of us are going to do that. But I do think that I would feel indelibly tainted by getting and providing such proof. Did Simenon?

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/maigret-et-son-mort.html.