A moan

Regular readers may have worked out that I have a spreadsheet of the all the Maigret stories, built from my Rencontre collected edition, augmented by the BBC series starring Rupert Davies.

One of the worksheets contains a list of all the stories - probably excluding a number of short stories which never appeared in book form - to be found in the Rencontre edition. So 77 stories running from1931 to 1972, an average of getting on for two a year. One row or record per story. With the present interest being the rather tricky story at reference 1, to which I shall return in due course.

I wanted to look at the Maigret production over the years, eventually arriving at the chart snapped above. Showing the initial rush in 1931, followed by a gap through most of the 1930s, followed by a steady stream of two or three a year.  Maybe Simenon had by then got a bit bored with Maigret, and just did them for income and relaxation.

But I found that I could not just do a chart on the data as it stood. Nor could I do a chart from a pivot table derived from the data as it stood. I had to give a count of one to all the real records and create an additional dummy record for every year with a count of zero. Further fiddling about to make sure that the text 1931s got grouped with the number 1931s. And then I got a pivot table from which I was able to produce the chart above, in which the initial spurt followed by the ten year holiday is clearly visible.

The present story, set in Maigret's retirement, comes a few years after that.

Maybe I need to consult an Excel expert.

PS: I remember that back in the 1980s, shortly before spreadsheets were invented, or at least shortly before I knew about them, I had a tabulator in which one specified the rows in one's table as (meta) data in its own right, quite separate from the data proper, and where one would not have had this sort of difficulty. The Microsoft default seems to be the lazy way of doing things, deriving the rows of one's table directly from the data itself, which, as here, is not always the same thing at all.

References

Reference 1: Les Mémoires de Maigret – Georges Simenon – 1950. In Volume XV of the Rencontre collected Maigret.