Pietr the Latvian

Pietr the Latvian is a detective novel by the Belgian-born French-language writer Georges Simenon, published in 1930 under its French title Pietr-le-Letton, and generally regarded as the first novel in which Simenon's recurring detective, Chief Inspector Jules Maigret of the Paris police, appears as a fully developed character. The novel follows Maigret's pursuit of an elusive international crime figure known as Pietr the Latvian, an investigation complicated when several men matching the same description turn up, drawing in a ship-owner, a Norwegian sea captain and a Russian drifter whose intertwined pasts gradually explain the deception. Simenon himself considered it the first true Maigret novel and the first book he published under his own name rather than one of the many pseudonyms he had used earlier in his career. The novel established Maigret, whose methodical, psychologically attentive style of investigation contrasted with the puzzle-driven detectives common in the genre at the time, as one of the most enduring characters in detective fiction.