The Shadow in the Courtyard (other English-language titles are Maigret Mystified and The Shadow Puppet; French: L'Ombre chinoise) is a detective novel by Belgian writer Georges Simenon, featuring his character inspector Jules Maigret.
[1] The book has been translated three times into English: in 1934 by Anthony Abbot as The Shadow in the Courtyard , in 1964 as Maigret Mystified by Jean Stewart, and in 2015 by Ros Schwartz as The Shadow Puppet.
[2] The first German translation by Milo Dor and Reinhard Federmann was published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in 1959.
The new translation by Claus Sprick was published by Diogenes Verlag in 1982.
[8][9] Anthony Boucher of The New York Times summarized the novel in 1964: "Maigret works against a background of respectable middle-class apartments, a cheap music hall and a sordid hotel in the Place Pigalle, all vividly realized, to solve a safe-robbery-plus-murder that reveals an unusually well-characterized killer".