As the relatively brief novel begins, it may be the reader who has the doubts. Maigret, the Paris police inspector, is so distracted when a man named Xavier Marton enters his office that he only half pays attention. He doesn't even remember the man's name after he leaves his office while Maigret is called away. Still he remembers enough to be troubled later. Marton believes his wife plans to poison him.
But then Marton's wife enters his office with another version of the story. What neither spouse tells him, but which Maigret discovers through a little investigation, is that both parties are involved in affairs, she with her boss and he with his wife's sister, who is living with them. On a second visit, Marton tells him that if his wife does poison him, he plans to kill her with his gun before he dies.
The case troubles Maigret greatly because he fears something terrible is about to happen, but to whom? How can he make an arrest before there is a crime? His doubts are about what he can do to stop it. The murder, when it finally does happen, turns out to be a bit more complicated than one might expect.
Early in the novel Simenon refers to his detective's "professional apathy," which seems an apt descriptive phrase for the man, who asks few questions, displays few emotions and often seems not to care about his cases or much of anything else. Distracted by his own marital concerns in that first chapter, he really didn't care. But later he does, and his mind is always at work even when his behavior suggests otherwise.
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