At the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, the latest winner will be announced this evening of the “Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction Award”. Past recipients have included Martina Cole, Ian Rankin, John Grisham and PD James. The festival has been going since 2003, but that was 14 years after the death of the Belgian novelist Georges Simenon, otherwise he would surely have been on the list.

Between 1931 and 1972, Simenon published 75 novels and 28 short stories featuring his pipe-smoking police inspector, Jules Maigret, who is less a sleuth than a student of humanity. He spends a lot of time waiting and watching, usually in a café or bar. As Graeme Macrae Burnet, author of the Booker Prize-shortlisted His Bloody Project, has put it, “One does not read the Maigret novels in expectation of wild revelation or plot twists, but to inhabit the vividly realised world of Parisian streets, dives, bistros and high-class hotels.”

A new opportunity to enjoy that experience comes at the end of this month when a “Maigret Capsule Collection” of a dozen novels will be reissued by Penguin (July 27, £9.99 each). In them, the detective is solving mysteries not only in Paris (he has his wallet stolen in Maigret’s Pickpocket) but along a misty stretch of canal in the Marne, in the north-east of France (The Carter of La Providence), and — when he is supposed to be having a break from work — in the Atlantic coastal resort of Les Sables d’Olonne (Maigret’s Holiday). Simenon himself lived in Les Sables d’Olonne towards the end of the Second World War, a time when he was accused and cleared of collaboration with the Germans, and his association with the town has been remembered both in a festival and in the naming of a square, Place Georges Simenon.