The 13 Culprits

Before he created Inspector Maigret, Simenon wrote a series of stories, Les 13 Coupables (1932), which, despite extravagant praise from Alexander Woolcott, Ellery Queen (who chose it for Queen's Quorum), and other experts, has never previously been published in English. The detections of Monsieur Froget are set among the people of a city the young Simenon knew well.

The translator, Peter Schulman, says, "It is a marginal Paris, populated by society's losers who, for one reason or another, are brought down by a petty vice, or a greedy aspiration, that invariably leads to a bitter sense of failure in their lives ... and, of course, a crime they hubristically think they can get away with. It is the lonely city within all levels of the Parisian mosaic; a Paris made up of eccentric individuals who all, in some manner or another, feel as though they have been hung out to dry on the fringes of society." It is a Paris of prostitutes, adventurers, circus artistes, and the flotsam thrown up by the First World War. It is a world captured by a great writer.