Les 13 énigmes

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.

Before Inspector Maigret's editorial debut, Simenon had, under the pseudonym Georges Sim, created several investigator figures, among them Inspector G.7. The thirteen puzzles featuring him first appeared in the weekly Détective, from 12 September to 19 December 1929, in the form of a competition inviting readers to solve each mystery before its solution was published. Collected in 1932 together with Les 13 coupables and Les 13 mystères by Fayard, they formed, in the eyes of the American critic Alexander Woollcott, a veritable ideal library of the detective novel, a judgment that would later earn Les 13 coupables a place in the canon of the Queen's Quorum. The photographic illustrations for this volume are the work of a now nearly forgotten photographer, J. Constantinesco, probably of Romanian origin, whose staged compositions for Simenon, as documented in a 2018 article published in the Cahiers du Musée national d'art moderne (concerning Les 13 mystères in particular), foreshadow the more systematic use the author would later make of photography in his work with André Vigneau.

A flawless copy of the deluxe issue of this rare Simenon, standing at the crossroads between the author's earliest detective fiction and his photographic experiments.