The Yellow Dog

The Yellow Dog is a detective novel by the Belgian-born writer Georges Simenon, published in French in 1931 under the title Le Chien jaune, part of his long-running series following Detective Chief Inspector Jules Maigret of the Paris police. The novel follows Maigret to the small Breton coastal town of Concarneau, where he investigates a sequence of shootings and poisonings striking members of the town's local establishment, an inquiry entangled with a mysterious stray yellow dog that keeps appearing at the scenes. First translated into English in 1939 and adapted repeatedly for film and television, The Yellow Dog appeared early in Simenon's prolific Maigret series and helped establish the atmospheric, psychologically attentive style of provincial French detective fiction for which the series became known internationally.