CALGARY HARALD

October 5, 1992, Monday

Pg. A11

MYSTERY!
LEE WINFREY

MYSTERY!: MAIGRET, premieres 9 p.m. Thursday on Ch. 2.

Although Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes continues to reign as the definitive detective, a strong second echelon of fictional sleuths has established firm position just beneath his eminence: Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Georges Simenon’s Jules Maigret, to name just a few.

So it is a pleasure to report that the latest manifestation of Maigret, previously portrayed in many movies, is perhaps the best so far. The many millions of readers of the prolific Simenon (1903-1989), who wrote 84 novels and 18 short stories about the pipe-smoking Maigret, are likely to accept Michael Gambon’s television portrayal of him as a thoroughly admirable piece of work.

The high-quality Mystery! series begins its 13th PBS season with six Maigret episodes, the first one airing Thursday. All six were filmed in Budapest, which comes across on the little screen as a good contemporary representation of Paris in the 1950s and 1960s, when both Simenon and Maigret were in their prime.

Maigret, a Paris police inspector, is not a hard-nosed private eye like Spade and Marlowe, nor is he as highly polished and cerebral as Holmes and Poirot. He solves crimes by trying to think like the criminals he is pursuing, and catches his crooks because he knows more than they do about the warped turns of human nature.

The Mystery! series accurately reflects the work of Simenon, charged correctly by his critics as a writer who was “long on character and short on plot,” the opposite of most crime fiction. Unlike Holmes, Maigret never descends to his knees to examine a clue under a microscope. Instead, he probes the psyche of the suspect before him, in pursuit of a telling admission.

Gambon’s portrayal is less than definitive, no match for Jeremy Brett’s ongoing mastery of Holmes on PBS. But Gambon’s Maigret is solid, self- assured and unfailingly entertaining.

Thursday’s premiere, Maigret Sets a Trap, airing at 9 p.m., begins with the discovery of the body of a fifth young woman found stabbed to death in similar style in the same section of Paris.

Maigret (pronounced “may-gray”) sets a trap by flooding the area with policewomen dressed as ordinary citizens. After one of the policewomen is grabbed by a young man and escapes, she identifies her assailant as Marcel Moncin, an interior decorator portrayed by Richard Willis. But the seemingly clear case is clouded when another young woman is murdered while Moncin is in custody.

Kinky sex and warped manifestations of love are frequent motifs in the works of Simenon, and a variation of those themes is the key to the case here. Count on Maigret to press all the right emotional keys to produce a surprising confession.

In Maigret and the Mad Woman, airing on Oct. 15, an elderly widow tells Maigret that somebody has been repeatedly searching through her apartment without stealing anything. The day after her report, she is found murdered.

Although not as good as the premiere, this episode includes a virtuoso performance by Mark Frankel as a gigolo named Marcel. Marcel’s flashy clothes alone are enough to justify tuning in.

After the first five, one-hour episodes, the series concludes with a 90-minute show, The Patience of Maigret. The inspector’s patience is severely tested when the story begins with the 73rd consecutive jewel theft in seven years that he has failed to solve.

Maigret is circling around his prime suspect, Manuel Palmari, portrayed by Trevor Peacock, when Palmari is found shot to death. Fittingly for a Simenon series finale, sex is finally found to lie at the bottom of it all.