Maigret s'amuse (fin)

Back at reference 1, I continued my notice of the Maigret story 'Maigret s'amuse', a story of Maigret doing a case while on holiday, from the benches, as it were.

A feature of this story, as of so many other Maigret stories, is a protracted interrogation of the suspect by the police, ending in confession and the suspect being carted off to the cells (the Dépôt).

Now the French have the system of the examining magistrate. This seems to mean, in Simenon's time at least, that when there was a serious crime, a court examining magistrate and a police investigating officer were assigned to the case at the same time, with the magistrate nominally in charge. Once a suspect had been charged, he could only be interrogated by the magistrate in the presence of his solicitor. But up to then, the police had a fairly free hand, subject only to the oversight of the magistrate. And generally speaking, the magistrate stayed in his office while the police charged around investigating. In the background, as here, important people caught up in all this could phone important friends and pull strings. All in all, not so very different to what we do with our distinction between the police and the prosecution service, there is a division of powers, although I believe that in Simenon's time our prosecution service was very much in the pocket of the police, rather than being the independent service it is now.

Against this background, it struck me this morning that one of these protracted interrogations never results in a confession which is completely untrue, completely made up. Simenon often talks of a suspect being worn down, often by relays of policemen, sometimes for as long as a whole day and night, to the point where all the suspect wants to do is to get some sleep and will sign anything to get the interrogation stopped. But Simenon never talks of a suspect, to this end, confessing to something that he did not do, something which I believe used to be common enough here, in the bad old days.

Maigret sometimes makes a mistake, of a procedural or technical sort. He sometimes fail to crack a case, at least in a timely way. He rarely hits a suspect. Be he never seems to be involved in a miscarriage of justice.

Simenon can hardly have been unware that such things happen, even in France or Belgium, so he must have taken the view that the fans would not like it.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/maigret-samuse-suite.html.