About the book
It all started with a telephone call. A breathless, frightened voice: 'I wanted to come and see you at first... I hung about the Quai des Orfevres, but I didn't go in, because he was at my heels... I suppose he wouldn't have hesitated to fire.'
Was the man a lunatic? Or was this a mad hoax? Maigret had had them often enough before. But something in the man's voice, a kind of terrified sincerity, convinced the chief inspector that this was serious. the dead body, lying in the cold night air of the Place de la Concorde, its face battered in, confirmed, in a brutally plain fashion, that it had been no hoax.