Some time ago, knowing my love of Georges Simenon's fiction, a friend started to give me one of his novels each year at Christmas.

Sadly, after only a handful of titles, these gifts dwindled and died, having gone from British editions, to American, to none at all. As was painfully evident, it was almost impossible to purchase all of Simenon's novels in the UK, and certainly not from one publisher. So a cry of delight went up in my house, and no doubt his, when Penguin announced it is to publish all of the Maigret novels, at the rate of one a month, each of them newly translated by such stellar names as David Bellos and Anthea Bell.

After the brickbats Penguin has recently received for its moment of Morrissey madness, this venture deserves nothing but plaudits. Never before have all 75 Maigrets been released by a single house. Next year they will also publish for the first time in English his novel A Circle Of Disapproval.

That it's a superb idea was demonstrated when a colleague, seeing me last week with the first of these - Pietr The Latvian - snatched it out of my hand, and thereafter didn't listen to a word I was saying. Not that I can blame him. One of the first of Simenon's countless novels to appear under his own name (not the first, as Penguin claims), it is the first full sighting of Inspector Maigret who before then had only featured in a couple of other stories, L'Amant Sans Nom, in 1929, where a bulky pipe-smoking detective called N.49 appears, and later that year in Train De Nuit, in which he is given the name Commissaire Maigret. Despite Simenon's romantic depiction of creating Maigret one freezing winter's day on his river boat, the Ostrogoth, it seems this was just one of many embellishments of the truth.

A typically dark, rain-sodden tale, Pietr The Latvian, written in 1930, shows the beefy, imperturbable Maigret and his equally unflappable wife, who is always waiting at home with his dinner, no matter what time of day.

Simenon saw this series as a halfway house between the pulp fiction he'd previously churned out and the serious literary career he intended to pursue. He predicted he'd win the Nobel Prize one day yet, while obviously not lacking in self-assurance, it seems he did not recognise just how excellent these gritty, spare crime stories were.

Patrick Marnham, Simenon's biographer, points out that Pietr The Latvian contains themes that were to be found repeatedly across the series: "… the use of hotel settings, both cheap hotels and luxury hotels, the power of political influence over justice, the power of social snobbery, the casual introduction of sex and the strongly cinematic nature of the descriptions of town life in general and port scenes in particular."

What is also noticeable is Maigret's non-judgmental attitude towards criminals. This was in part because he too had dabbled in serious crime as a young man; but it was more a reflection, Marnham suggests, of the terrible German occupation of the Belgian town of Liege in 1914 that Simenon witnessed as a 13-year-old. This, it seems, made him ambivalent towards conventional ideas of right and wrong, and sealed his conviction that criminals were often less guilty than their victims.

Simenon wrote of that time, "Occupation is not a chain of events. It's an atmosphere, a state of things, it's a smell of barracks in the street, a moving stain of unfamiliar uniforms, it's marks in your pockets instead of francs, and an overriding concern - that dominates all others - about what you're going to eat."

As Maigret fans already know, these novels are as much an insight into Simenon's embittered mind as into the life of France in that period. Never entirely at home in France, despite his success, he uses Maigret to give a foreigner's far-from-flattering view of the country. The result is fiction so pungent, it hovers for the rest of the day around one's head like a cloud of the inspector's pipe-smoke.