The character was born from a moment of vivid imagination. In the spring of 1929, a young Georges Simenon was on a boating tour of northern Europe when he began envisioning a new kind of detective. As the story goes, he was sitting in a cafe, perhaps in the Dutch port of Delfzijl where his boat was being repaired, when he imagined a Parisian policeman. The image was a powerful one: "a large powerfully built gentleman... a pipe, a bowler hat, a thick overcoat". Simenon would later claim the character was partly inspired by a real-life French detective, Marcel Guillaume, and partly by his own father, but biographers have noted that Maigret bears a strong resemblance to Simenon himself, a man of great appetites and deep psychological insight.
For a long time, the English translations of Maigret were uneven and out of print. However, in 2013, Penguin Classics undertook a "positively heroic publishing adventure" to reissue all 75 novels in authentic new translations and publication order. This massive project, completed recently, has brought Maigret to a new generation with crisp, faithful translations that capture the grit and moral squalor of Simenon's Paris. Maigret