I have been waiting for these adaptations since Atkinson mentioned he was making them in the course of an interview three years ago. ("Mr. Bean" was having a 25th anniversary.) The creation of super-prolific French novelist Georges Simenon, Maigret may be my favorite fictional sleuth, after Jim Rockford and Elliott Gould's Philip Marlowe. That he is based in Paris and that my French is just good enough to manage reading them in the original without running to a dictionary every five seconds may have something to do with this preference; but I like the chief inspector's reflective ordinariness, his curiosity about people, his lack of melodrama; he is a soft-boiled detective.

Source: Los Angeles Times March 03, 2018 00:11 UTC