[Jayaprakash]

Georges Simenon's Maigret mysteries are generally quite good. They're all fairly short as well, and several are available in translation as Penguin Modern Classics and Penguin Red Classics. Maigret And The Toy Village may be a good starter title. It has a good bit of that mundane, yet oddly transcendent mood of these books at their best.

I've read a fair amount of what they call cozy mysteries, and a few of the more forensic mysteries one sees in bookshops these days, and I find I prefer something that falls in between, is neither a thinly-disguised puzzle with stock characters or a gruelling excursion into the mind of a killer and the various fluids and emissions he leaves behind. Simenon about hits that spot to perfection with his matter-of-fact, man of the people Inspector Maigret.

The Indian film maker, Satyajit Ray, wrote a rather good series of mystery stories about a detective named Feluda, which were released in translation by Penguin India at some point and may well have found their way to the international list.