Monsieur Hire, a small-time crook of Jewish origin, lives a lonely isolated life without female companionship (apart from his visits to the brothel).

Unpopular with his neighbors, he becomes the ideal suspect for the murder of a young prostitute whose corpse is found in a vacant lot near his home.

At the moment of his arrest, with a lynch mob pursuing him, Hire takes refuge on the roof of a building but falls to his death and dies in the arms of firefighters.

The book has been filmed four times: Panic (Panique) by Julien Duvivier in 1946, starring Michel Simon and Viviane Romance;[3] in Spanish language as Barrio by Ladislao Vajda in 1947[4] and Portuguese as Viela (Rua Sem Sol),[5] both in 1947; and as Monsieur Hire by Patrice Leconte in 1989, starring Michel Blanc and Sandrine Bonnaire.

[6] It was also dramatised for television by Donal Giltinan as 'The Suspect', one of 13 episodes in the 1966 BBC series drawn from Simenon's non-Maigret stories, Thirteen Against Fate with Marius Goring as Monsieur Hire.