Not exactly waterboarding

Reference 1 being one of the rare stories where Maigret does not get his man. The marathon interrogation, involving several rounds of beer and sandwiches from the neighbouring brasserie, did not, on this occasion, deliver the results, deliver a confession. This being the format in many of the stories: Maigret and his team pad around the crime for a bit, lifting all the stones to see what lurks underneath, perhaps 'quelque chose pas très Catholique' - then intuition kicks in: he pulls his man in (very rarely, if ever, a woman) and interrogates him until he breaks. With Maigret and his team taking it in turns. A process which takes place in a smoke filled room and sometimes lasts all night. A process which often accounts for the last quarter of the story.

Then in the morning, when the investigating magistrate gets in after a leisurely breakfast, a magistrate who is often from a family with money and having been to some fancy school, he can take over and polish things off.

Leaving aside the last two points, which I think were important for Simenon as a not very well educated, self made man, a thread running through a lot of the later Maigret stories is the way that old fashioned policemen like Maigret, from relatively humble backgrounds, who spent their apprentice years tramping the streets of Paris and who, in the jargon of today, knew their customers in a way that the chaps from fancy schools don't, are getting tied up in all kinds of rules about the rights of criminals (also known as suspects) and are getting turned into errand boys for the chaps from the fancy schools. The chaps who don't have a clue about the real world that most of us live in. Smart tailors, bridge clubs and yacht clubs yes; a few hands of belote with the boys down at the local, no. No doubt if management consultants had been around in Simenon's day, he would have had a regular pop at them too.

Simenon seems to not see that this sort of interrogation is all too likely to produce false confessions. Not exactly beating a confession out of someone, perhaps someone with all kinds of life problems, but the psychological and moral equivalent. Does not seem to see that intuition is terribly unreliable: it helps, but is no substitute for proper evidence.

All of which makes me suspect that Simenon, in so far as he thought about politics at all, was probably very right wing, of the populist variety.

PS: I should add that Simenon does occasionally allow Maigret a mistake. I think once, even a miscarriage of justice.

References

Reference 1: Maigret et le Clochard - Simenon - 1962.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belote. Seemingly a popular game when Simenon knew Paris. It crops up, in one way or another, in most of the Maigret stories.