Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 26, No. 4. Whole No. 143, October 1955

Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 26, No. 4. Whole No. 143, October 1955

The Little Doctor and the Slipper Fiend by Georges Simenon

Translated by Frances Frenaye

We have given you our own high opinion of Georges Simenon’s work so often that we think the time has come to tell you what others say and feel about the man who has already written more than 350 books. For example, here is an American critic’s shrewd appraisal and comments: John K. Hutchens of the “New York Herald Tribune” wrote: Are we not all agreed that “this astonishing, prolific, many-sided writer is an artist?... with a swift, austere, impersonal style precisely suited to the demands made upon it... They now call his stories simenons, and that’s eminence for you — a writer’s name as a generic term for his work... his observer’s eye for detail, weather, clothes, customs, food, all the revealing ‘little facts,’ as Stendhal called them, is wonderfully true.”

And now let us hear from an anonymous critic on the “London Sunday Times”: “Ordinary readers buy Simenon’s books ‘as they buy their daily bread’ [certainly more true, we would say, in France than in America, or even in England]... in recent years eminent literary men have saluted his incisive style, and the clear-sighted, compassionate humanity which informs his writing.”

And now we bring you one of Simenon’s Little Doctor stories — one never previously published in the United States. You won’t penetrate easily to the real secret in this story — not until the end, or very near it.

For this tale not only reveals Simenon’s individual style, his grasp of telling detail, and his compassion for people, it also demonstrates his flair for plot; indeed, this story of a private investigator who gets “into a dead man’s skin” is one of Simenon’s most ingenious detective puzzles.

* * *

He always came at a quarter past 6 — a pot-bellied little man with beads of perspiration on his forehead which he wiped with a colored handkerchief as he made his preliminary round of the shoe-and-slipper section of the department store. It was a big store, near the Opéra, and at this hour a great mass of people surged out onto the sidewalks, while the streets were packed with jerkily advancing cars, ten abreast.

Inside, elevators darted ceaselessly up and down and customers bumped against one another, each one trying to get waited on before closing time. Only this one placid little man, who looked as if he must live off a modest pension of some kind, failed to share the general excitement and seemed unaware that at half-past 6 shopping hours were over. The slipper section was near the C entrance, and when the little man sat down, Gaby the shoe clerk gave a resigned sigh.

“What will it be today?” she asked, trying to maintain the appearance of a polite sales transaction, although it was time to freshen her make-up and prepare to go home rather than try slippers on a customer who was unquestionably a lunatic.

“A soft slipper, something in brown...”

“The same as yesterday, is that it?”

“No, the ones you showed me yesterday had too thick a sole.”