Maigret and the Madwoman – Georges Simenon

When a little old lady turns up at the police headquarters at the Quai D’Orfevres demanding to see the famous Inspector Maigret (actually Chief Superintendent Maigret) she is fobbed off to a minion. She is sure that someone is searching her flat while she is out, and sometimes she feels she is being followed. Has she seen anyone? No. Is any property missing? Again, no.

Inspector Lapointe reports to Maigret that there is nothing to report; the woman is a bit eccentric, that’s all. But a day later, as he leaves the office, Maigret is accosted in person. He gives the lady five minutes and promises to call round to her apartment as soon as he has the time. Before he finds the time, the call comes in. The madwoman has been found dead in her home.

There are not many clues, but Maigret pieces together the old lady’s life and goes ferreting in the hope his nose for criminality will turn up something.

The Maigret stories are concise little gems. Characters are swiftly but comprehensively drawn, and the police procedure does the job. The motivations and behaviours of the perpetrators are key drivers of the story rather than plot intricacies. Unlike more contemporary sleuths, Maigret has no tortured past or current demons to deal with. He goes home for lunch with his wife, or pops into a bistro for a glass of wine and a smoke of his pipe while he ruminates on the case.

The Paris setting is persuasive, and the mid-century vibe is now period. Maigret has to use a shopkeeper’s phone to contact HQ, he browbeats reluctant witnesses, and happily harasses suspects. It all flows very well to a satisfactory conclusion, albeit with a moral dilemma for the Chief to resolve.

Snow – Orhan Pamuk

The book-packing journey makes its exit from Asia via this novel set in Turkey.

A poet, Ka, has made the two day journey from Istanbul to the far flung eastern city of Kars, close to the Armenian border. The final leg of the journey, by bus, is along roads made perilous by heavy snow. The bus gets through just before the roads are closed by drifts. The forecast is for more snow; Kars will be isolated for days.

Why has Ka made the journey? He tells everyone he is here to write about the rash of suicides by young girls in the city. Some say they are due to civil authorities banning the wearing of headscarves to college – a lightning conductor for the ever-present tensions between western liberal ideas and traditional religious orthodoxy. But there is another reason. Kars is the home of a couple of friends from university days in Istanbul – the beautiful Ipek and her husband who, Ka has learned, are now separated.

Once in Kars, things get complicated. As Ka moves around the snow filled streets, meeting the movers and shakers, it is clear that power struggles abound within and between the civil, security, religious, and political players. Thrown into the heady mix is a recently arrived theatre group whose lead actor/manager has his own agenda.

Ka ricochets from meeting to meeting, sometimes as a pawn, sometimes as agitator. He has deep thoughts and discussions on the true nature of religious faith, on what constitutes love, and of course on the headscarf issue. And the snow keeps falling.

Ka examines his faith, falls in love, gets involved in politics, and is stimulated to write a collection of poems based on a snowflake’s structure. A coup of sorts is staged, people get hurt, killed. It keeps snowing.

The prose is wordy, the setting is oppressing and atmospheric. Along with the Byzantine motivations and machinations of the characters, this makes for a Kafkaesque reading experience, for good or bad according to taste.

Notes from a Big Country – Bill Bryson

In 1996, American journalist Bill Bryson, after a couple of decades living in England, returned to live in the United States. His stay in the UK had culminated in the publication of his ‘Notes from a Small Island’ giving his pithy outsider’s view of how the British live their lives. Back in the USA he turned his attention, freshened by his absence, to his homeland and countrymen, reporting back to the UK in the form of a weekly column for the Mail on Sunday magazine.

The format dictates that the pieces are short; Bryson’s talent ensures the quality is top notch. The subjects range far and wide – air travel, commercials, rules and red tape, shopping, and holidays, to name but a few. Each provides a mixture of humour, indignation, and wonderment at the nonsense so often encountered.

Twenty-five years on, remarkably the pieces don’t seem dated. Many observations still apply and remain relevant. When they don’t, they merely provide interest as a slice of social history or nostalgia, and remain well worth the read.

Slow Horses – Mick Herron

Slow Horses is the disparaging and possibly unfair term that the favoured secret service operatives have given the less favoured agents located at Slough House. Not that that is the building’s real name, just another disparaging term applied to reflect the dead-end nature of the careers of those placed there, due to cockups, errors of judgement, personality defects, and malicious rivalry. The service hope that the misfits will resign saving the cost and embarrassment of sacking them.

River Cartwright is at Slough House following a monumental cockup during a training assessment, which he thinks, but cannot prove, was engineered by a rival. No doubt the other inhabitants have similar cases to plead, but only deaf ears to appeal to. They spend their days on routine, low priority, and seemingly meaningless tasks, sifting obscure data dumps or, in River’s case, sifting rubbish from a journalist’s bin.

Then an opportunity arises. Labyrinthine service politics means deputy head of service, ‘Lady Diana’ Taverner, needs some work doing off the record, and reckons Slough House can be relied on to do it to the required level of incompetence. However she has made a misjudgement; the Slow Horses shake off their torpor and rediscover a thirst for action.

The plot is the plot, too convoluted to precis here, but the strength of the book is in the half dozen or so Slow Horse characters and their back stories, and how they develop from a disparate, distrustful bunch of individuals (who each think the others deserve to be at Slough House) into a workable team.

It is the first of a series, so resolution is partial, leaving scope for further books to continue the ebb and flow of office politics and its effect on the fate of River Cartwright and his colleagues (who now are at least on speaking terms). And as the style is pleasing, if a little edgy, requiring the reader to pick up subtle hints, there is much to recommend delving into further episodes.