Georges Simenon is one of France's busiest and most important living writers. His portraits of stony-broke loners on the run from themselves generate a psychological force that has riveted readers everywhere.

Yet you find yourself opening Maigret and the Toy Village with skeptical fingers. If this 1944 work were one of the better Maigret adventures, why did his publisher wait 35 years to translate it into English? Alas, you needn't read far into Toy Village to have your skepticism confirmed. The motivation is smudged and the scene-shifting clumsy. If you read through to the end, you'll find the resolution scamped; no contending force, the culprit comes in in the last chapter to provide a finale.

Still, some of the old Simenon magic shines through. For one thing, the novel starts crisply. The first chapter introduces a death, a murderous motive, a reluctant witness and a mysterious disappearance by the most...