GEORGES SIMENON. Maigret at the Gai-Moulin (1931).

A dense, clever plot—ridiculous in parts but ultimately quite satisfying—somehow manages to unfurl its many strands in this very compact yarn about some bizarre goings-on within and around a nightclub in Liège, Belgium. Traveling far from his base on the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir in Paris, Inspector Maigret makes a late, dramatic appearance (detective ex machina!) in this case, which deals with the murder of a Greek playboy named Graphopoulos. A mysteriously migrating corpse, a pair of feckless juvenile delinquents, a woman of easy virtue whose heart may or may not be of pure gold, and an elusive “big-shouldered man” each move in and out of view, providing intimations of possibility rather than clues in the proper sense of that term. Which is exactly how Maigret likes it: Just as he does in most of his outings, he arrives at the truth of this matter not through deduction, but through his own special brand of Gallic divination.