Death of a butcher

A couple of days ago we failed to find anything to watch in the foothills of Freeview, that is to say up to about channel 50, and decided to push on. On this occasion we were lucky, turning up a Rupert Davies Maigret story somewhere around channel 82. Which we thought would do fine, having watched a couple of them before, back in August 2020.

Oddly, I can find no documentary trace of those watchings, beyond a something in an email about how the Gambon version seemed to have been built on the Davies version. Plus just the one mention of Rupert Davies in an annex to something not presently relevant. I would have thought that I would have made more of them. Perhaps I meant to and never got around to it.

Also oddly, although I have read the whole of the Maigret oeuvre at least twice, this watching failed to revive any memory of the story. Working through the titles on the spines on the shelf didn’t help either and I was reduced to asking Bing who turned up the IMDB page at reference 2, from where I got to reference 3. And then to reference 4 which demonstrated that in October 2017 I still remembered the original story.

Which, in sum, is about a very important and very unpleasant wholesale butcher based in Paris – say Dewhurst and the rest – who fears for his life, goes to the police but gets killed anyway, shot down in his own house. A chap Maigret had known as an unpleasant child from an unpleasant family, back in his native village, near Moulins. Maigret and his team run around for a bit, eventually he has the ‘aha’ moment and tracks the killer down to his hideout in the woods, that is to say, Maigret’s natal woods.

There is counterpoint in the form of a minor story line about an older lady from Kilburn Lane disappearing from a package holiday to Paris, a disappearance which attracts plenty of coverage in the French press. And comment from the UK press about the useless French police.

I puzzled about the original running time of 50 min, which seems a rather odd number for the BBC, which did not need to make space for advertisements. With the channel 82 version running, I think, to 65 minutes with advertisements. Perhaps, even all those years ago, BBC had the commercial market in mind?

Notwithstanding all of which, we rather liked it and I stick with my line that the Gambon version was built on the Davies version. Next stop, the original text, something under 140 pages of it, roughly three pages to the minute. I forget the sort of rates that one gets with Agatha adaptations. In any event, now read again.

The television version had certainly simplified things a bit. We got much less, for example, of all the tittle tattle from the half dozen servants – who sleep above what used to be the stables of the big butcher’s fancy house opposite the Parc Monceau. How the big butcher treats both his staff and employees very badly. He enjoys humiliating them. His private secretary, for instance, is brigaded with the domestic servants. While they, in return, are mostly stealing from him, in one way or another. How he treats his competitors even more badly. How he is a rapacious, self-made man of business, stealing, more or less, on a far grander scale. Morally responsible for at least two deaths, probably more.

In the written version also, we have a thinly veiled bit of anti-Semitism in the form of the butcher’s shady man of business, one Joseph Goldman, who lives at the top of house and who is able, inter alia, to draw a veil of legality over his less wholesome dealings. Being a post-war story, slightly more veiled than similar characters in pre-war stories.

But the television version has changed the shape of the thing. In the television version, we have just another crime that Maigret solves in his usual inimitable way. In the written version, the point is that Maigret doesn’t stop the killing and doesn’t even solve the murder in time to stop the killer fleeing the country. Maigret worries that he has let his dislike of the man get in the way of doing the job. And the killer only turns up by chance, years later, dying of some tropical disease in the prison hospital before he can be brought to trial. While the lady also turns up, again quite by chance, alive and well in Australia. Two of Maigret’s few recorded failures.

Some odds and ends

On more or less the first page, we have a dreary mid morning in March being described as being like that of an execution at first light: ‘une aube d’execution capitale’. Not sure about this, but none of my usual sources are helping on this one.

Simenon has done some of his homework. Kilburn Lane is entirely plausible in the context, a stretch of the B413 running just south of the railway line running between Queen's Park and Kensal Green. West Kilburn in North London. 

While the butcher’s address given near the Parc Monceau, that is to 58bis, Boulevard de Courcelles, is plausible enough, the details given do not compute in Street View, not for me anyway. There has been a bit of artistic license or a bit of redevelopment. Or both. But at least I am a bit clearer about this use of ‘bis’ in house numbers.

The butcher’s safe is an important element of the end of the story. A safe which appears to have both a key and a combination. No reason why it shouldn’t, but it just niggles that the few safes that I have known had either key or combination, but not both.

Another important element is Maigret’s dream, in which he dreams that he has found the key to the mystery. Except that when he wakes up, the key in missing, he is just left with the certainty that he had had it. But he does edge forward, and all of sudden, minutes too late, the key comes back to him. I believe that Simenon read widely in medicine and psychology and was quite possibly familiar with Freud on dreams. Perhaps these few pages were his take on the subject?

There seem to be quite a lot of very forceful, more or less unpleasant, self made men scattered across the Maigret oeuvre. Is Simeon, in this way, in Freudian fashion, unloading unpleasant parts of himself?

Conclusions

Both versions of the story worked and my appetite for Davies has been whetted again. 

I find also that the complete set has now been released on DVD, with ebay asking between £50 and £100 for it. A bit too much – but we shall see. Maybe prices will fall or I will weaken.

References

Reference 1: Death of a butcher – Rupert Davies, BBC – 1961. Season 2, Episode 3.

Reference 2 : https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0853878/. 

Reference 3: Un Échec de Maigret – Simenon – 1956. Volume XIX of the collected works.

Reference 4: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/10/more-irritation.html.