[Simenon's] novels are taken seriously, I think, because, as they repeatedly demonstrate, Simenon takes human beings seriously. As Julian Symons has pointed out, Simenon may place his characters in sometimes outrageously sensational situations, but those characters are always believable in those situations because they are so fully realized. They are recognizably human, and so their claims upon us are immediate and great. And the character whom we watch with greatest fascination, because he is most fully realized for us again and again, is the character of Inspector Maigret. (p. 310)

Maigret and the Apparition contains none of the exquisite evocation of place found in the fine Death of a Harbor-Master. Nor does it contain a descent into the murky depths of criminal psychology, as in Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett. But what it does do, like the best of the Maigret novels before it, is show us Maigret the...