Maigret and the Headless Corpse is a detective novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon. When a man's arm is fished out of the Canal St. Martin in Paris, Maigret and his colleagues are puzzled. A woman's arm they would understand as the work of a psychopath or a man's body as a gang related killing, but they are even more puzzled when the rest of the man, minus his head, is dug out of the Canal. Maigret's attention turns to Madame Calas, a strange woman running a bistro along with her husband near the canal. The husband is away in the country, Madame Calas willingly sleeps with anyone who... asks and the judge soon arrests her, her lover , and a young delivery boy . But Maigret is not satisfied and pushes further and uncovers a story, and a motivation for murder, that is far stranger than anything he has ever seen before. Originally written in French in 1955, the novel was translated into English by Eileen Ellenbogen and published by Harcourt Brace in 1968.
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