The Hatter’s Phantoms

Five women strangled in three weeks in the port town of La Rochelle, and the killer is the town's most respectable hatter — a man whose inner life Simenon tracks with the steady, merciless attention he brought to all his romans durs, the serious psychological novels he distinguished from his popular Maigret series. The hatter goes about his days, tends his shop, watches his neighbor the tailor through uncurtained windows, and constructs an elaborate fiction to conceal that his invalid wife is also dead. It is a portrait of a mind organizing itself toward ruin.

Originally published in French in 1949, Les Fantômes du chapelier had to wait until 1976 for its first American edition — translated by Willard R. Trask and published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich as a Helen and Kurt Wolff Book, the imprint responsible for bringing much of the best European literary fiction to American readers. This copy carries a library stamp on the title page; dust jacket shows wear. A good reading copy of one of Simenon's most admired psychological novels.