The detective novel was to change … in the wake of the disillusionment with science that followed World War I. At the same time, faith in reason was diminishing as Freud gave primacy to the irrational forces of the unconscious. New methods of investigation that relied on instinct, intuition, and empathy replaced rational deduction. Simenon's Maigret, who has been called the Bergson of the detective novel, illustrates this change in emphasis. Maigret's role, unlike that of Holmes, is not to reason but to understand intuitively. (pp. 36-7)

Maigret's ability "to live the lives of every sort of man, to put himself inside everybody's mind" remains constant throughout the Maigret cycle, as do Maigret's methods. While the technique remains essentially the same, there is a change in emphasis from the early novels, where Maigret is solely a sympathetic witness, to the later works in which he occupies the entire novel...