Les 13 coupables

First edition, one of 50 copies on pur fil paper, the only deluxe-paper copies (cf. Claude Menguy).

A rare and fine copy, mistakenly lettered "alfa" halfway down the spine, though certainly printed on Lafuma pur fil paper (no copies were printed on alfa paper). White wrappers reserved for the deluxe-paper copies, the photographic wrappers being used only for the ordinary issue.

Illustrated with staged photographs by J. Constantinesco.

Les 13 coupables features examining magistrate Froget, a stern and impassive figure who exposes the guilt of the accused through the art of interrogation alone, without ever leaving his office. Before creating Maigret, Simenon devised several detective figures: Froget is among the most fully realised, his quiet insight already foreshadowing the methods of the future Chief Inspector. These thirteen stories were written aboard the Ostrogoth, the barge on which Simenon was then living at Stavoren in the Netherlands, during the winter of 1929-1930, before appearing serially in the weekly Détective during the first half of 1930 under the pseudonym Georges Sim.

The collection received particular critical recognition across the Atlantic. In Ellery Queen's standard reference work Queen's Quorum (1951), which ranks it among the finest achievements in short-form detective fiction, Queen notes that the American critic Alexander Woollcott held it in particularly high regard. It appears as no. 85 in this canon, alongside the classics of the genre, a distinction that accounts for the only English translation ever made of Fayard's three-volume series, based specifically on this volume.

A very fine deluxe-paper copy, as issued.