Ailurophiles can rest easy. The cat is dead before the story begins. We do learn about its demise in one of the novel’s many flashbacks, but Georges Simenon does not torture us with scenes of animal cruelty. Cruelty to parrots is another matter, but even the feather-plucking incident pales next to the psychological torment that the human characters, Emile and Marguerite, inflict on each other. Theirs started out as a marriage of convenience between a bourgeois widow, who felt cheated out of her birthright, and her neighbour, a lower-class widower who had been helping her with DIY tasks around the house. They are clearly mismatched, socially and temperamentally. When the novel begins, they are living in a neighbourhood of a Paris suburb that is literally being demolished around their ears. They can’t stand each other. But they can’t live without each other either. It’s a marriage made in hell.

Simenon, born in the Belgian city of Liège in 1903, wrote about four hundred novels in all, seventy-five of which – along with dozens of short stories – revolve around the police detective Maigret. The Cat, first published in 1967, is an example of what he called his romans durs