There is a fabulous TV Series with Michael Gambon as Maigret which has an wonderful atmosphere. Given that they're not actually speaking French the whole thing creates a very appealing and world to imagine them in and I get the feeling of foreigners speaking English rather than English-speaking people pretending to be foreign as in most of the English repeats of the Scandinavian dramas. It's a great thing to see before reading the books because it feeds your imagination.
From around the same time, in French there is the TV series with Bruno Cremer, which is also very good. Quite a few episodes are available on that popular videos website as well...
As a schoolboy in the UK in the 60s/70s we had to (try) to read Simenon novels as a way of learning French. The experience tainted the stories ever since.
Through reading the article I came across David Peace. The Red Riding Quartet is going to have to be investigated.
I read the first few novels. They are told in a matter-of-fact style, nothing very spectacular happens and Maigret is anything but charismatic. It sounds dry but the realism is very refreshing and must have been even more so at the time.
I'm reading them just now - I find detective novels and sports papers to be good ways to learn languages, since there's some common structure to the stories. Also, the kindle store has a _very_ limited selection of foreign language texts[1], but they do have the complete Maigret, in 6-novel volumes, so you can get em cheap. (Others I've been reading are Vargas, Leblanc, Montalbán - Paco Ignacio Taibo II is next on the list)
Another striking thing about Maigret is how much he relies on the police force around him. Today we expect the detective to be a loose cannon, at odds with the department, but Maigret is constantly asking others to surveil and report, the spider in the web. There's only a couple of early stories with hints of a difference - where he notices something odd and ends up following someone on instinct. (Le Pendu de Saint Pholien, La Guinguette a deux sous)
Also - mentioned in the article - but there's a lot of boats! Simenon wrote quite a few of these early novels on board boats and it shows, trawlers and narrowboats abound.
[1] 10 years ago I was able to buy novels on amazon.fr while in France, but this stopped working? It wanted a delivery address and credit card in the country as well. I was cycling round the country back then and ended up buying paperbacks at flea markets instead.
> Another striking thing about Maigret is how much he relies on the police force around him.
That's because he is a "commissaire", a superintendant, for most of the books.
Maigret is in a lot of way the reverse of a hard boiled detective. He is if not happy at least content in his career as a civil servant and bureaucrat. He is perfectly adept at navigating his hierarchy and knowns his place. Maigret serves a system he respects and values, fully aware of his prejudices which he sees a necessary wall between the honest people and the miscreants. He is very much upper middle class, what the French would call petit bourgeois, a happily married catholic who likes order and long meals.
The article rightfully points that these novels have a reactionary surface but try to find a redeeming feature in how they describe society in its totality. I would be less generous.
I read quite a few in my early teens, and it did evoke an image of Paris back in the day. So much, that at first it was a bit inconsistent, confusing, until it turned out that I was reading them in random order, and some were decades apart. One detail that has stuck was the presence of a stove in Maigret's office: in some books, he pokes the thing continuously (or so I remember), in others there's central heating. Because the books set in all seasons, many of them don't even mention heating, which makes it even more mystifying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maigret_(1992_TV_series)
You can even find episodes on certain popular internet sites (though I don't know how they survive there).