Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * *

There is always a question that hangs over the artist’s head, the answer slipping in and out of conscious as they grapple with their vision and attempt to breathe life into it; a question that might scare them, can possibly be years in the making, how do I capture the intensity and drama of my first success as I sit here and contemplate my second offering to the public.

Regardless of whether you are a painter, a musician or an actor, you are only as good as the debut performance in which you burst onto the scene, your name now carrying hopes and dreams for those who took you to their heart and one that will always inspire the next generation to find a way of avoiding a mistake, of perhaps delivering with fresh ideas.

Whilst there is no doubting the sheer scale that Georges Simenon brought to the Detective novel across several decades with his immortal creation Inspector Maigret, there in lays the problem with how to reconcile success with future expectation as the French Detective becomes lost within the confines of solving a murder outside of his beloved Paris as he investigates a crime on the country’s canal system.

In the second of the Maigret novels published, translated in later English publications as The Carter of La Providence, the detective is sent to the Marne region of France in what may seem a routine case, one that arguably doesn’t initially capture the imagination of the reader, especially the modern day armchair detective to whom Paris may hold a greater significance of learning. Whether by design or by accidental prose, the feeling of slow inescapable depth is one that is highlighted throughout the book and whereas Maigret’s first story Pietr-le-Letton (Pietr – The Latvian) stormed at a pace that was exhilarating, passionate and full of characters that exemplified the pre-war Paris scene, The Carter of La Providence is more of a reminder that Paris and the rest of the country are often seen as two distinct ways of life and ideals, one that has been romanticised to the point of sainthood, the other perhaps a true reflection of life in the rural aspects of France’s interior.

In this respect the slow pace fits the narrative description of life on the river, but it is to the telling eye that the writer chooses to seek this out, famed as he was for locking himself away whilst he wrote his novels, it seems as if this book came quickly, desperate to keep the publishers and public happy with their new found French hero. By doing so he turns the urgency in the novel down, he allows it to become embedded in the reeds of routine and lack of character, the setting instead taking the turn to be more memorable than the crime committed or the way it was solved.

A difficult second book, one that still is worth a read but not one to get caught up savouring over the course of weeks.

Ian D. Hall