The prolific author Georges Simenon, in the years between 1931 and 1972, published 75 novels and 28 short stories featuring Jules Maigret, a police officer working in Paris in the mid-twentieth century.

In some ways the stories resemble Columbo in that the focus is not on providing a surprise ending. In many stories, like Columbo, Maigret strongly suspects who the criminal is early on and sets about finding ways to get evidence against him. Like Columbo, he prefers not to use his first name and is referred to as just Maigret, even by his wife. Like Columbo, he is said to be happily married with no children. But unlike with Columbo, his wife does appear in the stories in a supportive and empathetic role. Also unlike Columbo who works alone and seems to be given a free hand by his superiors, Maigret has a team of assistants to aid him but is often interfered with by his superiors for political reasons.

Maigret is a middle-aged man who smokes a pipe and is soft-spoken, contemplative, and measured in his utterances. He is extremely low key and in solving cases, he uses psychology to to get in the mind of the victim and the criminal, trying to figure out the reasons behind their actions. He is kind, empathetic, and a good listener and is known to be highly ethical and thus respected even by the criminal classes.
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Back in the day when there was only broadcast television in the US, writers tended to be confined to just one episode to tell a story, similar to a feature film. Limited series, where the writers could spread the story over many hours were relatively rare, because they disrupted the weekly TV schedule, not to mention being more expensive to produce. Yet, the examples of blockbuster hits like Roots, Shogun, and The Thorn Birds showed that there was a market for them, because the extended time enabled the telling of complex stories and better character development.

The arrival of streaming services has seen the flourishing of the limited series since there are no scheduling issues. One downside is that freed from some time constraints, some of the writing is a little bloated but on the whole, the limited series fills an important niche between feature films that tell one story and a normal weekly TV show in which each episode had to be largely self-contained within a short time and thus cannot accommodate complex and lengthy storylines.

There is one problem with the current limited-series model and that is how to end it. If the story is planned as a one-off from the very beginning, then there is no problem. You just end the story at the end and that is it. But some producers want to have the option, if the series is a hit, to bring it back a sequel with many of the same characters. But you do not know in advance when making the first series if it will be a hit so you want to end the series in such a way that viewers will look forward to a sequel series if there is one.
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In yesterday’s post about the 1973 film The Three Musketeers, I mentioned that the director Richard Lester had once had the idea of casting the Beatles in the role of the four Musketeers.

Ever since then, I have been idly thinking about which Beatle would be best to play each role and this is what I ended up with:

Paul – D’Artagnan
John – Athos
Ringo – Porthos
George – Aramis

One can extend this silly speculation even further and ask about casting the Marx brothers in the four roles. One would have to add one of the lesser known brothers such as Zeppo or another serious actor to serve as the foil for the antics of Groucho, Chico, and Harpo in order to make up the quartet.

My choice would be for the serious brother to play D’Artagnan, with Groucho playing the cynical Athos, Harpo playing the somewhat spiritual Porthos, and Chico playing the Lothario Aramis. And of course the long-suffering Margaret Dumont would play Milady.

I actually think that this idea might have worked for the Marx brothers back in the day.

When I read the sprawling novel The Three Musketeers written in 1844 by Alexander Dumas, I was puzzled by two things, both arising from the title. The main character is D’Artagnan, a brash young man from the country who journeys to Paris in search of adventure. He is not a Musketeer himself but dreams of joining that elite squad of warriors who protect the king. He wants to prove his mettle and challenges everyone to duels over the merest slights. He first challenges Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, the three Musketeers of the book title, but the four of them become friends and go on various adventures. D’Artagnan only becomes a Musketeer towards the end of the book, in recognition of his services. I am not sure why Dumas did not call the book The Four Musketeers or D’Artagnan and The Three Musketeers, which would have been more accurate.

The other puzzle is that the Musketeers never seem to carry any actual muskets. This was addressed by Simon Kemp, Oxford University Fellow and Tutor in French.

“One of the odder things about Dumas’ novel for the modern reader is its singular lack of muskets.

“In the mid-1620s, when the story is set, the Mousquetaires are the household guard of the French king, Louis XIII, an elite force trained for the battlefield as well as for the protection of the monarch and his family in peacetime. They are named for their specialist training in the use of the musket (mousquet), an early firearm originally developed in Spain at the end of the previous century under the name moschetto or ‘sparrow-hawk’. Muskets were long-barrelled guns, quite unlike the pistols shown in the trailer, and fired by a ‘matchlock’ mechanism of holding a match or burning cord to a small hole leading to the powder chamber. By the 1620s they were not quite as cumbersome as the Spanish originals, which needed to have their barrels supported on a forked stick, but they were still pretty unwieldy devices.

“There are lots of weapons in the opening chapters of Les Trois Mousquetaires, where D’Artagnan travels to the barracks and challenges almost everyone he meets along the way to a duel (including all three of the musketeers). Lots of sword-fighting, but no muskets in sight. One of the musketeers has nicknamed his manservant mousequeton, or ‘little musket’, and that is as near as we get to a gun until page 429 of the Folio edition, when an actual mousqueton makes its first appearance. A mousqueton is not quite a musket, though, and in any case it’s not one of the musketeers who is holding it.
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Their absence from the novel up to this point is simply for the historical reason that the heavy and dangerous weapons were appropriate for the battlefield, not for the duties and skirmishes of peace-time Paris. Even when his heroes are mobilized, Dumas remains reluctant to give his musketeers their muskets.

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This film, that has won many awards and was nominated for best film at the latest Academy Awards, will evoke long forgotten memories in viewers who have reached or passed middle age. Who amongst us does not recall past loves from whom we drifted away for a variety of reasons, and now occasionally wonder what our lives might have been like if things had turned out differently and we had stayed together?

This film tells the story of Nora and Hae Sung, childhood sweethearts in Seoul, South Korea who get separated at the age of 12 when Nora’s family emigrates to Canada. She subsequently moves to New York to pursue a career as a writer while he remains behind in Korea to become an engineer. But he still thinks of her and at the age of 24, he reaches out to her through Facebook and they start talking via Skype where they discover that they still feel warmly towards each other. But there is little chance of them meeting in the near future and that brief period of connection also fades and they do not make contact for another twelve years, when they are in their mid-thirties. In the meantime, she attends a writing residency and ends up falling in love and marrying Arthur, a fellow writer she met there, while Hae Sung also gets engaged.
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