The Mysterious Case of Georges Simenon

 

The great French writers of the last century tend to evoke, in recollection, a single hue, a color tone that resonates from their work into our imaginations. Proust is all violet, the twilight mood of symbolism matched with the early-evening skies under which Swann pursues Odette. Camus is the whitened sand and unclouded blue sky of his native Algeria. Colette’s writing seems golden, filled with the afternoon light of the Palais Royale. (The movie “Gigi” is not really that far off, in its M-G-M Technicolor scheme, from the palette of her writing.)
 
Georges Simenon, the matchless French crime novelist and the author of the Inspector Maigret series—which has been completely retranslated and issued in a paperback edition from Penguin—takes gray as his distinct and constant color. No one has ever made more of a grisaille of ambiguity, ambivalence, and uncertainty, or positioned it more tenderly against a Paris rendered not in the (very misleading) light of Impressionist dapple but in the actuality of its dull winter days: “The neighborhood had put on its unsettling night-time face, with shadowy figures hugging the buildings, women motionless at the kerb and murky lighting in the bars that made them look like fish tanks.” Everywhere Simenon takes us is a gray-toned world. His early novel “The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien,” from 1931, begins in a Dutch train station: “It was five in the afternoon, and night was falling. The lamps had been lighted, but through the windows one could still see both German and Dutch railway and customs officials pacing along the platform, stamping their feet for warmth in the grey dusk.” Later:
 
   “” It was nearly dark. Their faces were receding into the shadows, but their features seemed all the more sharply etched.
    Lombard was the one who burst out, as if alarmed by the gathering dusk, “We need some light!”
 
Simenon was conscious of his grayness as a moral mood, something created inside modern minds, present even in an all-night Greenwich Village luncheonette, as in his “Three Bedrooms in Manhattan” (1946), a non-Maigret novel: “Why, despite the blinding brightness, did everything look gray? It was as if the painfully sharp lights were helpless to dispel all the darkness the people had brought in from the night outside.” Fluent in English, and resident for some years in Connecticut, he must have been well aware of the bilingual pun deposited in his hero’s name: Inspector May Gray.
 
His Maigret books, especially, make an art of half-lit evocation within a tightly circumscribed world set on the Right Bank of Paris. In fact, when I first read him, as a kid learning French—and Simenon’s novels are perfect for that purpose, being simple enough to be more or less fully grasped, and good enough to be worth the effort—I assumed that Simenon himself was, like his hero, living an enclosed existence somewhere in the Marais. I pictured him looking down, beetle-browed, from his typewriter at the Parisian scene below as he passed from black coffee to a single glass of Armagnac in the evening.
 
Not a bit of it. Writers often live at right angles to their fictional worlds, and no more colorful life is imaginable than Simenon’s. His place in French culture is closer to P. G. Wodehouse’s in English culture than it is to Agatha Christie’s; like Wodehouse, he was a superior stylist who happened to favor a repetitive genre format, rotating the same set of characters again and again. And just as Wodehouse, the most ecstatic of sentence-makers, was by reputation the dullest fellow alive, so Simenon, bard of the French middle-class bureaucratic virtues—stolidity, reliability, with a sharp edge of insight running through—was the least bourgeois man you’d ever meet. Where Maigret is stodgily and permanently lodged with Madame Maigret within “a network of narrow, busy streets bounded by Boulevard Voltaire on one side and Boulevard Richard-Lenoir on the other,” his creator was a vagabond who lived in more than thirty houses during his life. A voluble and indiscreet memoirist, he boasted of having had ten thousand lovers, starting at the age of twelve: some professionals, many volunteers. “I was . . . hungry for all the women I crossed paths with,” he confessed, “whose undulating derrières were enough to give me almost painful erections. How many times have I satiated that hunger with young girls older than me on the threshold of a house, on some dark street?” Married twice, he was a lover of Josephine Baker’s, and was darkly rumored to have had an incestuous liaison with his daughter.
 
Ten thousand lovers—and five hundred books! Set against Simenon’s rate of production, Graham Greene seems lazy, Dickens a tortured aesthete, Walter Scott sadly blocked. Simenon was unafraid to expound on his writing, but his self-accounting is, his biographers tell us, to be picked up with tongs. Then again, everything authors say about their work is a lie, or, at best, a misdirection. Simenon explained his fecundity as arising from ruthless minimalism, a stripping away of the effects of prose that left him with a supple and always applicable instrument. In a famous Paris Review interview, from 1955, he insisted that he excised anything “literary” from his work, including adjectives and adverbs. Yet descriptive modifiers are everywhere in his work. Pick up one of his books at random and you get sentences like “The lethargic blonde cashier stared at Maigret with mounting curiosity.” What is absent is the kind of breezy, genial belletristic running commentary on the events being narrated. He sits very much on the far side of the great break in prose that began with Flaubert and eventually transformed all modernist styles in French and English writing after the First World War, turning the mannered simplification of fin-de-siècle prose into something tough and tensile. Before the nineteen-twenties, that sentence would have read, “The lethargic blonde cashier, of a kind you find in every bar of this sort, usually a former dancer, stared at Maigret with the mounting curiosity that his bulk and position as a police inspector always attracted.” As with Simenon’s contemporary James M. Cain, in America, the events and their depiction become the same thing, and the commentary happens only in the reader’s mind, or in the inspector’s remarks. Maigret sometimes comments on the action, but we rarely go inside his head to find out what he thinks. We hear him as the world does.
 

In one of Simenon’s masterpieces, “Maigret and the Headless Corpse”—it’s from 1955, and he’s particularly good in the nineteen-fifties—the first forty pages are spent in a Frederick Wiseman-like documentary study of Maigret’s day. There’s no differentiation between the melodramatic and the mundane: the discovery of an arm and then a torso in the Canal Saint-Martin is interspersed with Maigret weaving in and out of bistros and brasseries as he makes guesses at the meaning of the discovered corpse, leading to a cold, blunt, and near-monosyllabic exchange with the owner of a bistro, in which she impassively volunteers that she has had many lovers in the back room. Simenon’s subject is how people who are pushed to the edge push themselves over it; the force of the sleuthing is that of psychoanalysis, not police interrogation. Maigret knows that people want to tell their stories, and, if prompted, will. Listening, not inquiring, is the detective’s gift; inner life, in these mysteries, manifests only as fragmented speech. Given that premise, the novel’s pages could be filmed without a single elision, so blankly empirical is the whole. Although the tautly minimal surface breaks from time to time into a narrator’s interjections—understandable given the speed with which he wrote—the prose is, for the most part, purely photographic: “A young girl lay on a Louis XVI bed. She was in an almost seated position, because she had lifted herself on one elbow, and in the movement she had made to look towards the door, a swollen, heavy breast had escaped from her nightdress.”
 
More than fifty feature films were made of his novels when he was alive (including Julien Duvivier’s celebrated 1946 noir “Panique”); Gérard Depardieu plays the inspector in a film from this year. Simenon was a prophet of and a participant in the style of French New Wave cinema, but his writing also presaged aspects of the nouveau roman, of Robbe-Grillet’s faith in describing only the surface of events. (It’s a practice still visible in the work of the fine French writer Annie Ernaux.)
 
Simenon’s early experience with the surface-haunted, what-where-when habits of the yeoman newspaper reporter must have influenced him. Simenon was born in 1903 in the French-speaking Belgian city of Liège, where his father, an accountant, worked in an insurer’s office, and where, at fifteen, Georges quit school and started working for a local newspaper, covering “fait divers.” Soon, he was writing about crime, and growing acquainted with the more sordid side of city life. Yet, later in his career, when Simenon spoke of his style, he generally avoided crediting newspaper work or the shaping practice of motion pictures. Instead, he loftily gave credit to Gogol and Cézanne—Gogol for the surreal edge of dark fable and Cézanne for the weighty individual stroke, the repetitive rhythm. (Hemingway, another newspaperman reluctant to seem so, credited Cézanne with the birth of his own style.) Declaring himself not at all arty, Simenon then piled on arty antecedents as much as any avant-gardist. He was, in this way, a trickster: when it came to the trappings of art, he feigned innocence or guilt, just as he wished.
 
Writing about Simenon is tricky, too, simply because the extent of his work—and the relatively small variations in tone within it—makes any one novel at once representative of the whole and too small a slice to offer as truly exemplary. The next book of the five hundred might be a halftone different. Still, he divided his own enormous œuvre into two broad kinds: the swiftly dispatched works of entertainment—a Maigret novel was typically written in two weeks—and the romans durs, the “hard books,” often set outside Paris and meant as works of more self-conscious art.
 
 
 
The Maigret books, seventy-five in all, seem the likeliest to live. The Penguin edition of the complete Maigret valiantly aims to update previously uneven translations through the skillful efforts of such worthies as David Bellos, Linda Coverdale, and Howard Curtis. Translating Simenon is thorny: as simple as his style is in certain ways, it is also delicate in tone, and can, rendered too literally, mislead as to its purpose. In Shaun Whiteside’s retranslated version of “Maigret and the Killer” (originally published in 1969), the inspector’s interview with a witness, the proprietor of a shop his wife frequents, concludes:
 
    “No other detail occurs to you?”
    “No. I’ve told you everything I know.”
    “Thank you, Gino.”
    “How is Madame Maigret?”
 
In truth, the original is more off-hand in tone and in spirit, something more like: “Nothing else?” “No, that’s it.” “Thanks, Gino.” “How’s Mrs. Maigret?” Spoken bourgeois French usually being more precise and formal than American English, it demands that the translator reproduce the dignities without giving an incorrect impression of formality, as happened when Hemingway insisted on rendering the familiar second person in Spanish as “thou.” Offering the more formal tone of French small talk without making it sound too mannered is an art, mostly well executed in these new translations.
 
The Maigret we first meet, in a 1931 novel titled “Pietr the Latvian,” remains essentially unchanged over the next forty years. There are some gradations. Early on, he is a more modern detective, ostentatiously using the new technologies of teletype and identification. But even in this first Maigret novel it’s clear that he views the apparatus of scientific detection as trivial:
 
    “Maigret worked like any other policeman. Like everyone else, he used the amazing tools that men like Bertillon, Reiss and Locard have given the police—anthropometry, the principle of the trace, and so forth—and that have turned detection into forensic science. But what he sought, what he waited and watched out for, was the crack in the wall. In other words, the instant when the human being comes out from behind the opponent.”
 
His perpetual search for that crack in the wall anchors his character over the decades; he is ponderous, pipe-smoking, devoted to his wife, and resident in the quartier populaire of the Eleventh Arrondissement, on the Rue Richard Lenoir. (At one point, he lived on the Place des Vosges, in the Fourth, back when that beautiful square was still part of a run-down and largely Jewish quarter.) An inspector in the Police Judiciaire, with headquarters on the Quai des Orfèvres, he has generally polite and formal relations with his underlings, and wary relations with the complicated bureaucracy of French justice, where the judges are also the district attorneys running the investigations, so that Maigret variously works with, for, and against them.
 
Four iconic generations of literary detectives passed through crime fiction during those decades, from the early thirties to the early seventies, when Simenon was writing his books. There was the Sherlock Holmes type, still dominant in the thirties, with all those eccentric, brainy, slightly comic puzzle solvers: Hercule Poirot, Nero Wolfe, Peter Wimsey, and so on. (A French variant was Arsène Lupin, a gentleman thief, whose creator actually borrowed the character of Holmes on occasion, violating copyright law as he did.) Then came the hardboiled kind, with Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade establishing it in the nineteen-thirties and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe giving it poetry in the forties. In the fifties and sixties, Ross Macdonald and John D. MacDonald introduced the philosophical, brooding, and discursive “therapeutic” detective, with Lew Archer in Los Angeles and Travis McGee in Florida. Finally, there’s the police-procedural detective: Evan Hunter’s Eighty-seventh Precinct is more memorable as a collective institution than is any one detective within it.

The magic of Maigret is that, in the course of the twentieth century, he superintends and effectively incorporates all these kinds. He has been called “the French Sherlock Holmes,” and Arthur Conan Doyle’s easily caricatured manner is right there, what with Maigret’s pipe and his own Watson in the ever-present Madame Maigret. In a classic detective story, the investigator’s second has to represent values that the detective both sees through and safeguards. Watson is the perfect embodiment of the Victorian soldierly virtues that Holmes defends, while Holmes himself engages in cocaine and irony. Madame Maigret, in turn, is the very type of the French bourgeoise chatelaine, whom Maigret both protects and patronizes.
 
But he is also hardboiled in ways that the Holmesian heroes certainly are not. James M. Cain influenced Simenon and he influenced Cain back, favoring tales unflinching in their often grim violence, and tending toward mindless labyrinths of crime leading to existential vanishing points. At the same time, Maigret is very much a philosophical, as opposed to deductive, detective, given to meaty psychological generalizations of the kind favored by Macdonald and MacDonald: “Maigret had often tried to get other people, including men of experience, to admit that those who fall, especially those who have a morbid determination to descend ever lower and take pleasure in disgracing themselves, are almost always idealists.” Conan Doyle invents the type, Hammett hard-boils it, Macdonald and MacDonald deepen it, but it is Simenon who humanizes it.
 
And, then, Maigret is so French! The British playwright David Hare, who adapted a Maigret book for the stage, insists that Simenon—being Belgian-born and so an outsider—disdained the usual French prattle about gastronomy, and therefore cared little for the subject. Hare misses the point, which is that it may be de trop to talk about these things all the time but it is essential to experience them. So, within a handful of pages in “Maigret and the Killer,” we are offered a bœuf gros sel, cognac, champagne, and Madame Maigret’s mackerel with white wine and mustard, and soon afterward we meet an andouillette. A little later, there is a poignant passage on snails. None of it is underlined or important in itself; it is part of the unconscious sensual intelligence of French life. The casual intrusion of food is a constant leitmotif of the books. In “The Headless Corpse,” an important line of inquiry is opened when Maigret realizes that the vin de region served at a shabby bistro is unusually good. At Maigret’s favorite brasserie, on the Place Dauphine, we learn that “among the smells still hovering in the air, there were two that dominated the others: Pernod, around the bar, and coq au vin wafting in from the kitchen.”
 
The most profoundly French thing about Maigret is that he is a salaried government employee and proud to be so. The books are filled with procedural matters—confronted with a wave of rapes, Maigret sighs primarily because he does not have enough officers to placate the press without weakening the service—but, against the usual run of the American police procedural, it is never the system itself that is annoying, only those who would undermine it. Where the amateur detective of the Sherlock Holmes kind acts as a consultant to the wealthy, and has contempt for the Scotland Yard policemen, Maigret is a pure fonctionnaire. And where in an American procedural the higher-ups are exasperated by the hero’s independence (“I’m telling you for the last time: clean up your act! There’s no place for cowboys in this department!”), in Simenon the underlings exasperate the Inspector with their servile inefficiency. At one point, Maigret shakes his head at the less successful policemen under his direction: “By dint of walking around Paris, they acquire the posture of butlers and café waiters who stand up all day. They almost assume the same dull colour as the impoverished areas that they patrol.”
 
Maigret is not openly reverential toward the French state, but he works comfortably within its envelope, like a priest within the Catholic Church in eighteenth-century Italy, where the state is the Church—the only credible source of order. (The investigating magistrates usually come from a higher educational caste than Maigret, but they respect his professionalism.) This difference between American and French attitudes toward the state appears on every page of the Maigret books. In a recent James Patterson procedural, half the Chicago police force turns out to be murderously corrupt. This doesn’t happen in Simenon. The heart is double; French institutions are not.

At the same time, Inspector Maigret is the anti-Inspector Javert, one of the least implacable policemen on record. In “The Hanged Man,” Maigret’s fourth outing, he traces a series of bizarre and seemingly random acts to a circle of philosophical nihilists. (“A few of us were off in a corner, talking about some Kantian theory or other,” one explains.) But they have now become earnest bourgeoisie, with wives and children and mortgages, and Maigret pardons them by his inaction. Justice is more entangled than it may seem. In “The Headless Corpse,” the inspector muses:
 
    “A suspect feels a kind of relief when he’s arrested, because now he knows where he stands. He no longer has to wonder if he’s being followed, if he’s being watched, if he’s under suspicion, if a trap is being set for him. He’s accused, and he defends himself. And now he benefits from the protection of the law. In prison, he becomes an almost sacred person, and everything that’s done to build up a case against him will have to be done according to a number of specific rules.”

 
Simenon’s paradox of the prisoner parallels Camus’s contemporaneous idea of the implicit collaboration of criminality and justice: the first is a private existential act, the second is a public contractual one. Murderers want to be found out as sinners want to confess; the religious function of confession and sacramental forgiveness has simply been passed to the organs of the state.
The idea that justice is often best served by being withheld is a very French one, almost designed to infuriate Americans, who wonder at the lack of indignation about this collaborator or that philandering cabinet minister. Sanctimony and self-righteousness, favored American traits, are disfavored in Simenon’s world. “You’re going to fry for it, doll!” the noirish detective says to the femme fatale, and we are meant to feel that justice has been served. No moment of that kind occurs in Simenon. A central theme of his novels, gaining salience in the nineteen-fifties, is that justice is sought but served only with a shrug, if at all.
 
Behind this French ambiguity about sin in the fifties is surely the fact of French collaboration with evil in the forties—in which Simenon participated, albeit on a low level. Under the Vichy regime, he sold the rights to some of his books to a Nazi-approved German film company, and, like many French writers during the war, he tried to carry on as though little had changed. He also managed a refugee center for displaced Belgians, and apparently did it well. But he was no resister, and the leftist French writers’ union took a dim view of his generally placid war, sending the Simenon family scurrying, in 1945, to Canada and the United States. (Eventually, like Charlie Chaplin, he settled in Switzerland.) Simenon never wrote directly about France during the war; the novels of the period are set in a “timeless” Paris, but long afterward he did write a fine novel entitled “Maigret in Vichy” (1968), in which the town appears not as the center of the Pétain government but only as the old spa city it had been before. (Maigret goes there, in the watchful company of Madame Maigret, for a cure.) Nonetheless, a note of defeated France—the France of endless compromise—fills the book’s slow-paced chronicle: Maigret spends the early part of the book walking round and round a music pavilion, staring at an elegant and solitary woman who later turns up dead. Beneath the standard Simenon devices, one senses an allegory of exhaustion and guilt. The good inspector is doomed to walk a Dantean circle, right in the center of the capital of collaboration.
 
Starting in the early nineteen-sixties, Simenon interrupted his usual novel-writing schedule to produce a series of memoirs, including the compelling “When I Was Old.” In addition to all the women, he also owned up to lifelong alcoholism and, yes, writer’s block, among other improbable sins. The question arises of how Simenon’s literary penchant for forgiveness relates to his own extravagant confessions. Now, sex with ten thousand women, whether claimed by Wilt Chamberlain or Simenon, is a proverbial expression, like the tumor as large as a grapefruit or the city rat as big as a cat—an exclamation of surprising scale rather than a measurement to be relied upon. A rough back-of-the-cahier calculation suggests that this would have meant something like one new liaison a day during the three decades of his prime, holidays included. (I don’t doubt the Frenchman’s appetite but do doubt his readiness to work on Christmas.) But let’s say: lots of women. Is there a connection between the mania of Simenon’s appetites, at least as they looked in his mental mirror, and his relentless productivity as a writer? Do writers who write a lot also do everything else a lot? Balzac, George Sand, William Carlos Williams, and H. G. Wells join Simenon in the much-sex / many-pages column of the ledger. In the other column are Trollope, who was far from a philanderer, and Wodehouse, who, with a single, long marriage, hardly seemed the type, either.
 
Still, when one reads a hyperproductive writer one can be sure one is in the presence of some kind of voluptuary. Most writers don’t actually like the act of writing, finding it tiring, depressing, or, most often, disappointing. For a few, writing is less labor than it is an exhilarating drug that can’t be taken too often. The football coach John Madden said once that being good at blocking in football is mostly just liking to block, meaning that the bruising and pain of it has to become a pleasure. Writing that much and that steadily is, similarly, mostly just liking to do it. Though Simenon claimed, unconvincingly, that he had difficulty in writing, in the next breath he admitted how much he loved all the appurtenances of writing: notebooks and pencils and papers, the thrill of the blank page, the feeling of being complacently superior to the rest of creation, wiser and more serene, when you begin. For such happy, addicted writers, fertility is less a function of energy than of dissipation: they’re doing what feels best.

All hyperproductive writers run the risk of repetition, of falling into a stylized world. Writers like Thornton Wilder, who come out with one book every ten years or so, rarely repeat themselves, and don’t always write the same book. But then they mostly don’t write any book at all. The reason Wodehouse and Simenon stand out is that their sense of style is strong enough to withstand the stylization. Still, there’s something limiting about the restricted locale the Maigret books inhabit. Like a travelling theatrical troupe that can’t afford more than a couple of sets, many of the novels bounce predictably from one place to another and back again.
 
Yet, if his settings sometimes seem scant, his characters do not. Simenon is an authentic humanist. The word in France has a slightly different meaning from what it may have here—there it is largely left-wing, and historically refers to not being allied with the Catholic Church. (The leading Communist paper is called L’Humanité.) But in French, too, it implies an acceptance of humanity on its own terms, and a value placed on the individuality of every individual. The weakness of humanism is the Gallic shrug that lets everything pass as too complex for judgment; its strength is its assertion of the plurality of human experience which cautions us from judging others too easily.
 
Judge not that ye be not judged: the Christian doctrine contains both an implicit ethos of sentencing and an explicit claim of permanent mercy. Self-forgiveness comes too soon; the accusation of others comes too quickly. Between those two truths lie the Maigret mysteries. In “The Headless Corpse,” the secret of the broken body turns out to involve a troubled rich girl who defied her father by running off with his manservant and, decades later, finds herself immured in that Paris bistro. What looks at first like a cold-blooded murder is revealed to be a hot-blooded and excusable act of protective passion on the part of a middle-aged lover, and the pathos comes from the woman’s “animal in its burrow” desire to remain in her humble place rather than accept a large inheritance and venture out into the world. The dénouement is handled in some ways too briskly and conveniently, with a well-drawn provincial lawyer who comes to Paris only to explain the backstory. (The mechanics of Simenon’s mysteries can be slipshod.) And yet the pomposity and the sybaritism of the lawyer as he leads Maigret on a walk across the darkened lamplit boulevards from one late-night dive in Paris to another lend a human note to what would otherwise be a plot device. Besides, Maigret, we’re given to believe, already knows the basic story. Confronting the woman, he speaks without accusation:
 
    “You did it deliberately, didn’t you?” Maigret continued without clarifying what he meant.
    He had to get there in the end. There were moments, like now, when it seemed to him that it would only take a slight effort, not only for him to understand everything, but for that invisible wall between them to disappear.”
 
That is always the way with Simenon. There is never an “Aha!” moment, only an “Ah!” one. In a genre all about solutions and clarity, he found equivocation and doubt. He entirely understood the symbolic power of his own chiaroscuro. He once tossed off a brilliant aperçu on Rembrandt. “His chiaroscuro is already a critique of pure reason,” he wrote in “When I Was Old.” In Rembrandt’s paintings, he noted, “man no longer has definite outlines.” So it is with Simenon: reason asserts its power, then resigns its place. The reward is watching blacks turn to grays, in small developments of understanding. “More light!” Goethe called out famously as he died. Simenon’s cry is sadder: We know what light we need, and we know we’ll never get it. We settle for just enough light to see the streets by.

The Mysterious Case of Inspector Maigret. By Adam Gopnik. The New Yorker, September 12, 2022. 

A compulsive need to understand human behaviour drove Georges Simenon to write more than 400 novels and at least 1,000 short stories. When the Belgian writer finally decided to quit fiction in his eighth decade, the moment came etched with relief. “I no longer needed to put myself in the skin of everyone I met,” he wrote. “I was free at last.”

 
Simenon was born in 1903, and his life as a writer was a habitually restless one, flavoured by a Dickensian upbringing that forced him to cut short his studies and bail out his indebted father. His prodigiousness afforded him luxury, but also led to accusations of collaboration during the second world war, when several of his books were turned into films by German backers.
 
His most famous literary creation was the streetwise, pipe-chomping police commissioner Jules Maigret, who starred in 75 novels, beginning with Pietr the Latvian in 1931 and ending with Maigret and Monsieur Charles in 1972. Maigret was not so much Simenon’s alter ego as his polar opposite. Simenon depicted Maigret as a faithful husband, devoted homebody and modest interlocutor. It was a world away from his own life as a serial philanderer, intrepid traveller and tireless self-promoter.
 
“It’s a strangely Roman Catholic thing,” suggests the English crime writer Alison Joseph on this subject, “to create a character and to allow it to be his best self. It’s a kind of paradox, a tinderbox spark that lights the whole oeuvre.” Joseph is one of several Simenon devotees — among them noted authors, literary critics and publishers — interviewed by the crime fiction expert (and FT critic) Barry Forshaw in this genial primer that could nonetheless have dug a bit deeper.
 
When Forshaw mentions in passing that Simenon had been drawn into crime as a young man, one yearns to know more. Likewise, Simenon’s early days as a reporter for La Gazette de Liège, when he penned several virulently anti-Semitic articles, could have stood more considered scrutiny.
Where Forshaw’s book comes into its own is in its detailed dissection of the books Simenon wrote and the many film and television adaptations that they spawned. Particularly noteworthy for readers whose familiarity of Simenon extends only as far as his Maigret novels are Forshaw’s descriptions of the author’s so-called romans durs.
 
Simenon used the difficult-to-translate French term to refer to all of those novels that he regarded as specifically literary works. Forshaw surmises that “what the author was probably trying to suggest is that these novels reflect disturbing aspects of life in a frank and unflinching way”. One such work was 1933’s Georgia-set The People Opposite, which Forshaw calls Simenon’s most “starkly political work” for the way it highlighted “the fear, suspicion and alienation that ultimately allowed the USSR to control its people”.
 
Simenon remains the most successful writer of crime fiction in a language other than English, and his novels have aged surprisingly well. There has been a groundswell of new interest in his work since 2013, when Penguin retranslated his Maigret novels into English. Forshaw suggests that it is Simenon’s psychological acuteness that sets him apart from many other crime writers. The French crime writer Thomas Narcejac called him a “connoisseur of souls” for his sympathetic treatment of both victim and perpetrator.
 
But surely no one loved Simenon quite so much as the New Wave film director Claude Chabrol, who adapted several of his books for the cinema. Asked about his reading tastes, Chabrol replied: “I read all of Simenon, and when I’m done, I start all over again.”
 
Simenon: The Man, The Books, The Films: A 21st Century Guide by Barry Forshaw, Oldcastle Books, £12.99, 256 pages
 

 Simenon: The Man, The Books, The Films — how the Maigret creator made crime pay. By Tobias Grey. The Financial Times,  July 29,  2022

If forced to nominate any positives at all out of the last two years of global pandemic, it is the increased time I’ve had to read. In the first year of Covid I made good on a long-standing desire to read John le Carré’s George Smiley books. A literary focus of 2021 was the work of the Belgium born writer, Georges Simenon. Simenon’s output was a staggering 400 novels, although some have claimed he wrote as many as 500. The best known of these is his acclaimed series of crime procedurals featuring the French police detective Jules Maigret, 75 of which appeared between 1931 and 1972 (Simenon died in 1989). But my interest in Simenon is in his other, somewhat more shadowy body of work, his so-called romans durs or ‘hard novels’: tightly plotted, intensely psychological, often quite slim stand-alone volumes that have so far yielded some of the best noir fiction I can remember reading.
 
My introduction to Simenon’s romans durs was what some claim is his best book, The Snow was Dirty or Dirty Snow as it is known in the United States, an uncompromisingly bleak noir tale of a 19-year-old amoral pimp, Frank, in an unspecified European city under Nazi occupation. Frank lives with his mother, who runs a brothel out of their apartment. He is never short of food, most of which his mother procures on the black market, nor sex, which he gets from the girls in his mother’s employ, nearly all of whom have been forced by the war from rural areas into the city and left with no alternative but to sell their bodies to survive. The world outside their apartment is a bleak urban landscape in the grip of a seemingly never-ending winter, imbued with constant paranoia and suspicion. It is not clear who works for ‘the occupiers’, as the Germans are only ever referred to, who is resistance, and who is simply trying to survive. Having already come of age sexually, Frank is intent on embracing another milestone, knowing what it is like to kill a man. One night, in a kind of existential wager with himself, he borrows a knife from a brutal big talking gangster who frequents the same dive bar as Frank, and picks a target, a low-ranking policeman who may also be a collaborator. Frank kills the man without remorse but is seen by a passing tram driver, Holst, who dwells in the apartment opposite his mother’s. Obsessing over whether Holst will report him to the authorities, Frank becomes infatuated with the tram driver’s shy 16-year-old daughter. I will not give too many more details about the plot, except to say that murder is just the start of Frank’s exploration into the depravity he is capable of.
 
Simenon was born in the Belgian city of Liège in 1903 into a French speaking lower middle-class family. He worked for a local newspaper after World War I, which gave him entry into the city’s nightlife and criminal milieu. He also wrote for various scandal sheets, some of which made money by quashing negative stories for a fee. Simenon decamped for Paris in the company of his then fiancée in 1922 and by the late 1920s was established as a prolific pulp writer under a myriad of pseudonyms, before finding success with the Maigret character. He produced a staggering seventeen Maigret novels between 1931 and 1933 alone, then grew weary of his creation, announcing his intention to write something different. Thus were born his romans durs. When I first started reading Simenon’s romans durs I understood they numbered 17 or 18. But some have claimed Simenon wrote as many as 117, the majority of which have not been translated into English. Whatever the exact total, these stand-alone novels did not sell anywhere near well as his Maigret books. For several decades those romans durs that did appear in English were usually only published in the United Kingdom. New York Review of Books released a handful in the early 2000s and Penguin Books currently has a number in print.
 
After The Snow Was Dirty, my next two romans durs were The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, first published in English in 1938, and Monsieur Monde Vanishes, which appeared in English in 1945. The central character in The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, Kees Popinga, is a respectable middle-aged Dutchman working in the office of a major shipping company. His smug, materialistic life is thrown into chaos by the discovery that his employer is secretly bankrupt. Popinga flees to Paris and immerses himself in a criminal environment that allows him to vent his various desires, including murder. Monsieur Monde Vanishes features another bourgeois family man. He wakes one morning, withdraws a large amount of money from the bank and disappears, travelling in secret to Paris, where he falls into a life of debauchery. Unlike the clearly insane Popinga, however, although Monsieur Monde may have fled his old life, his middle-class habits and outlook prove far harder to shake. Both novels encapsulate the tone of Simenon’s romans durs, scalpel sharp dissections of human nature and its various obsessions revolving around sexual desire, jealousy, and regret. Luc Santé described them as ‘hard, blunt, frequently punishing studies of human beings driven by circumstance and personality to the end of their tethers, forcing them to extreme measures.’ The characters have usually spent a lifetime acquiring the trappings of middle-class respectability, only to have it slip away from them due to some unforeseen event beyond their control. Or, for reasons of their own, they decide to simply cast away their old lives in the hope of experiencing something different, usually involving refuge in a faraway, transient, exotic, low life environment. I won’t lie to you: having spent a considerable chunk of 2021 in lockdown with my family in a small house, it was an idea that appealed to me.
 
Simenon infused his romans durs with contradictions and obsessions from his own life. He was a devoted father and husband, who craved literary and social respectability. He also had a fondness for slumming it and boasted of having had slept with as many as 10,000 women. His tastes ran to prostitutes but included domestic staff and personal assistants. He also had a famous affair with the noted cabaret singer Josephine Baker while she was working in Paris. Both the sex and violence in Simenon’s romans durs are remarkably explicit. This is combined with a lean, less is more prose style and a propulsive forward energy that is reminiscent of the work of Patricia Highsmith. And while Simenon’s focus is usually a male central character, this is not always the case. Betty, first published in 1960, is told from the point of view of a woman in her late twenties whose sexual urges, stemming back to a childhood shock, manifest in a compulsion to be promiscuous and a desire for this to be discovered. The book begins just after Betty has been cast out of her prosperous marriage and she is existing as a barfly in a French holiday town. Rescued by a kindly woman, the widow of a prominent doctor, Betty is nursed back to health. But her deeper habits are not easily broken.
 
Sex is not the only aspect of Simenon’s life that finds its way into his romans durs. The Snow was Dirty is arguably infused with the young author’s experiences in German occupied Liège during World War I, watching the adults around him discard their morals in their struggle to survive. At the conclusion of World War II, Simenon fled France for the United States to escape accusations he had collaborated with the Nazis by allowing a German film company to adapt his books, one of which was reportedly made into anti-Semitic propaganda. Ironically, he was also accused by the Gestapo of being Jewish and subjected to a lengthy police interrogation. These experiences no doubt gave Simenon the cold-eyed view of humanity that manifests in works like The Snow Was Dirty, as well as a keen understanding of how armed conflict impacted on individuals and social structures. The occupiers in The Snow Was Dirty rule the nameless city with an iron hand; however, crime, so long as it does not involve any challenge to their power, is allowed to run rampant, leaving the characters free to engage in everything from theft to murder, seemingly without retribution. When Frank is eventually picked up by the occupiers and interrogated at length, it is not for his actual crimes but on suspicion of an offence, the exact nature of which is never spelt out.
 
While Europe is the backdrop for many romans durs, Simenon set several in America, including two next up in my Simenon TBR pile, Three Bedrooms in Manhattan (which first appeared in English in the late 1960s) and The Hand (first published in English in 1970). Indeed, Simenon travelled extensively both between the wars and after 1945. Tropic Moon, takes place in the African French colony of Gabon, which Simenon visited in the early 1930s. Originally published in 1933 and republished by NYRB in 2005, it concerns Joseph, a young man from a respected family, keen to escape his meaningless life in France. He heads to Gabon, where through an influential relative he secures a job in a timber company. Arriving in the capital, Libreville, he finds the company bankrupt. Effectively marooned, Joseph falls in with a crowd of louche, amoral white expatriates and starts an obsessive affair with a local woman, the wife of the Frenchman who owns the hotel he is staying in, whose sexual charms obscure the fact that she may also be a murderer. Before he knows what is happening, Joseph is slowly driven mad by the heat, constant alcohol consumption, and brutality around him. And herein lies one of the reasons the romans durs are so fascinating. Apart from being magnificent short, sharp slices of noir, Simenon always layers them with something much deeper. In Tropic Moon he pens a devastating indictment of French colonialism. As writer Norman Rush, who wrote the introduction to the NYRB edition of the novel, puts it, although Simenon’s reasoning was complex and to a large degree more concerned with the impact of the imperial project on white people than the black population, he nonetheless does not flinch in depicting the violent and racist way in which the French exploit Gabon for everything from its timber to its women. ‘It’s hard not to think of Simenon as a rich, entitled white erotomane first and anti-colonialist second,’ writes Rush. In any case, ‘Tropic Moon incited resentment in official circles, and when he sought to revisit the French colonies in 1936, he was denied a visa.’

The bleak, propulsive Noir of Simenon’s Romans Durs. By Andrew Nette.  Crimereads, February 17, 2022.

Georges Simenon (1903-89) was a phenomenon, a writing machine. The author of over 400 novels, published in 50 languages, with sales to date of more than 500 million copies, he is an awesome and awful monument to those of us who ply the same trade. This was a man who could write 80 pages a day at full speed. For ­example, ­between 1924 and 1931 he wrote 190 ­“popular” novels – trashy, ephemeral works, as he would have happily described them – under 17 different pen names. It’s hard to imagine anyone else like him; he makes Balzac look lazy.

 
That this toiling hack created Commissaire Maigret – a character as memorable and as enduring as Sherlock Holmes – is astonishing. That such incredible productivity resulted in works of literary fiction – his “romans durs” – that still possess an unrivalled potency is no less remarkable. Simenon is a unique monolith in the 20th-century literary landscape.
 
And Simenon was also – for a brief, fervid time – a photographer, another facet of this singular man to try to analyse and comprehend. He became a near obsessive photographer for a few years, in the first half of the 1930s. Simenon was then a young man, in his early thirties. Born in Belgium in 1903, he had been an enthusiast of photography from a young age and was able to develop and print his own images from his late teenage years. He insisted on photographic covers – very unusual at the time – for his early novels. He even wrote a novel illustrated by photographs taken by Germaine Krull. Photography was close to his creative heart.
 
A large exhibition of Simenon’s photographic output occurred in 2004 – at the Jeu de Paume in Paris – and a lavish catalogue was produced that explains why and how we know about this intriguing aspect of his artistic life. There are two ways of looking at the photographs Simenon took. The first is the insight they give us into what interested Georges Simenon – what drew his eye. The second is how they stand up as photographs in their own right.
 
Most of the photographs exhibited were taken as “reportage”. In the early 1930s Simenon was just beginning to taste the first fruits of success. He moved to France in 1922, where, having worked as a journalist and then as a writer, churning out sketches and what were known as “contes galants” – sensational, whimsical and erotic short stories for newspapers and magazines – he began to write novels under a series of pseudonyms.
 
Maigret made his first appearance in 1931 and slowly but surely Georges Simenon began to emerge from behind the palisade of his noms de plume. He published 31 titles with the Parisian imprint Fayard between 1931 and 1934 and began to make some serious money. He sold the film rights of his novel La Nuit de Carrefour to Jean Renoir. He was on his way. But Simenon did not abandon journalism – he couldn’t yet afford to. He undertook, in the early 1930s, a series of journalistic assignments, paid trips abroad – to Africa, to central Europe, to Russia and finally around the world – and his accounts of these journeys, illustrated by his own photographs, appeared in various magazines, including Voila and Paris Soir. This was the beginning of the great age of the illustrated magazine. The images taken on Simenon’s commissioned trips in the 1930s constitute the largest part of his photographic output.
 
Simenon described himself as “un fabricant d’instantanés” – a maker of snapshots. And the “snapshot” is the key to understanding the motivation behind his photographic creativity, I believe. In fact, I have argued elsewhere that the “snapshot” is the defining factor of photography as an art form. The camera is a stop-time device. The image, mechanically produced, freezes and preserves a split-second in the endless flow of time. Painting can try to do this but it doesn’t come close. The camera’s ability to distinguish and enshrine a moment is its unique facility.
 
This is what so fascinated photographers in the early years of the 20th century. And by the time Simenon was taking photographs, the technology had moved on rapidly. Cameras had become small, light, sophisticated; 35mm film was highly responsive to available light. No special supplementary equipment was necessary to take a photograph – you simply needed to focus and press a button. It’s intriguing to think that as Simenon was taking his photographs in the 1930s, so too was the young Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004). Both young men were captivated in their separate ways by what Cartier-Bresson called “the decisive moment” – another phrase for a snapshot. Simenon wasn’t in Cartier-Bresson’s league as a photographer but there’s no doubt that he was similarly fascinated by the camera’s potential to stop time. The photographer had become a “fabricant des instantanés”. It was a seductive power.
 
Simenon took many photographs on assignment as he travelled during those first years of the 1930s. A few dozen were reproduced in magazines to illustrate his articles but he kept all the others, dutifully sticking them into six large photo albums, all the images numbered, with places and dates added. These images were never exhibited during his lifetime, yet it’s obvious they were very important to him. It’s only after his death that we have come to know that there was this period of intense photographic activity in Simenon’s life.
 
Most of the photographs conform, largely, to the genre of “reportage”. Here, the camera functions as a kind of vicarious eye, reproducing the lands the photographer travelled through and the people he encountered. Ethnographic reportage is, in its way, the simplest sort of photography to understand – the intrinsic interest of the image is paramount; any sort of aesthetic judgement is subsidiary. But what’s fascinating about Simenon’s reportage is how he, from time to time, undermines the documentary nature of the subject.
 
He took pictures, for example, in the estaminets and working-class bars of Charleroi in Belgium. Some of these images are worthy of the Hungarian-French photographer Brassaï. In Africa and Tahiti one can sense Simenon’s erotic interest in the unclothed, unselfconscious female form. Simenon was a sailor – he owned a large boat on which he lived for periods of his life when he was starting out as a writer. Many of his photographs are images of ships, docks, wharves and the life of a bustling harbour. But from time to time one senses that his real interest lies in the composition of clustered masts or of the curved gantries supporting lifeboats. These photographs are not illustrations to a travelogue; they are composed pictures that subscribe to a fine-art aesthetic. They are meant to be judged as photographs in their own right – photographs as an art form.

 
Time and again, Simenon’s photographs call to mind other photographers. His pictures of eastern Europe, of the poor in Romania, Lithuania and Poland, remind me of Roman Vishniac’s undying images of the Jewish shtetl. Simenon’s love of the snapshot – the image frozen, the subject’s feet raised from the ground, movement magically halted in mid-activity – recalls Jacques Henri Lartigue. Some of Simenon’s photos are out of focus, snatched quickly on the run, the camera tilted, but those errors don’t impede the success of the shot. His candid photos of people passing by remind me of that great American master of street photography, Saul Leiter.
 
Among the dutiful images required to illustrate the articles that Simenon would write, the photographer as artist emerges. In Africa he is moved to take a picture of a tall, stark standing tree – no use for an article. In Russia he takes a shot of three giggling girls on a beach, and a picture of a sunbather in Batum, Georgia, framed by the timbers of a half-finished beach house, that could be a Bill Brandt photograph. Compositionally, the image is perfect – the diagonals of the stark beams, replicated by their shadows on the shingle are almost abstract. It’s only a second glance that lets you pick out the tanned body of the prone sunbather.
 
Simenon was stretching and exploiting the potential of the camera in his hand. A ship in a storm, waves rushing over the fore-deck. Shots from high windows or decks looking down on people – where the purpose of the image is its design, not its import. New York’s skyscrapers are pictured through a haze of grainy light. Rigging, masts, deck-clutter, ladders and balustrades are taken for the special geometry of the image and not for any documentary purpose. There is one photograph of a girl in Tahiti making lei; the floral necklaces given out as symbols of welcome. She is deliberately off-centre; the long lens has removed any sense of depth of field so the background is indistinct, flattened. It’s an image that could have been taken yesterday – entirely modern in its composition and what it displays.
This image was taken on a round-the-world trip – also commissioned – that lasted 155 days during 1934-35. Looking through his work one begins to sense Simenon’s talents as a photographer congregating, growing richer, becoming more sophisticated on this journey. There are snatched candid portraits; images with lettering in them; experiments with texture, focus and light.
And then he stopped. Suddenly. There are no more photographs taken of any interest – other than familial – for the rest of his life. Why? I suspect that he may have worried that an interest in photography might have impeded the main artistic project of his life – his novels. Very few novelists can practice more than one art form at a time.
 
But another reason may be biographical. All these photographs were being taken as the real Georges Simenon emerged, fully formed, as an author in his own right, discarding his many pseudonyms and the derisory hack work that had kept him in funds since he had come to Paris to make his name as a writer. That process was now fully under way and his focus on it – and its eventual success – was as intense and potent as ever.
 
However, that notion may also explain why the photographs of these years were so precisely annotated and so carefully preserved and then hidden away in their six albums. They represent a cusp in his life, a watershed. Maybe when he opened the albums from time to time it took him back to that “decisive moment” in his own journey. Perhaps they were crucial mementos – images taken by a young man on his way to becoming a world-famous writer. Another mystery to add to the aggregate of mysteries that is Georges Simenon.
 
 
How Georges Simenon found his eye. By William Boyd. The New Statesman, March 24, 2021.

Georges Simenon, creator of the sombre, pipe-smoking Paris detective Jules Maigret, pursued sex, fame and money relentlessly. By the time he died in 1989, he had written nearly 200 novels, more than 150 novellas, several memoirs and countless short stories. His demonic productivity and the vast sales and fortune it brought him were matched by a vaunted sexual athleticism. Simenon claimed to have slept with 10,000 women. (‘The goal of my endless quest,’ he explained, ‘was not a woman, but the woman’ — which is French for wanting lots of it, very often.) It was not love-making, but a desire for brute copulation that drove Simenon to demand sex at least once daily of his wives, secretary and housemaid-mistresses. How he found the time to write the Maigret books is a matter for psychoanalysis. (Simenon described himself, without irony, as a ‘psychopath’.)
 
On the 30th anniversary of his death on 4 September, Simenon continues to be read and enjoyed. Although he dismissed his 75 romans Maigret as ‘semi-potboilers’, they are unquestionably literature. ‘In 100 years from now,’ Ian Fleming told him in 1963, ‘you’ll be one of the great classical French authors.’ Like the 007 extravaganzas, the books were written fast, without outline and hardly corrected at all. Simenon demanded silence as he set out to write one Maigret adventure a week. When Alfred Hitchcock telephoned one day, he was told: ‘Sorry, he’s just started a novel.’ ‘That’s all right, I’ll wait,’ came the reply. A one-man fiction factory, Simenon despised the Paris literary establishment and what he called literature with a ‘capital L’.
 
Over a period of six years, at the rate of one a month, Penguin have been issuing new translations of all the Maigret novels. The project is now almost complete, and not before time. The uneven quality of earlier translations, where endings were sometimes altered and the register was at times jarringly American (‘Maigret had gotten into the habit’), was unfortunate. The 11-strong team of Penguin translators, among them the late Anthea Bell, have restored a stylistic brilliance to the romans Maigret.
 
With rare narrative verve the books conjure the workaday rhythms and guilty secrets of Paris and small-town France. Simenon’s is a world of second-class hotels and third-class railway carriages, of drifters, bargemen, tarts and luckless creditors. His interest was not in intellectuals or master criminals but in his beloved ordinary people — les petits gens. Ordinary people are driven to ordinary acts of violence and social outrage. Criminals look like us, Simenon seems to be saying. His motto, ‘comprendre et ne pas juger’ (understand and judge not), is also Maigret’s.
 
Maigret’s is, triumphantly, a search for understanding. The earthily dependable flic in his trademark velvet-collared overcoat and bowler hat is presented as a neutral observer, who looks on crime with an unbiased curiosity. The sense of complicity between criminal and policeman is omnipresent in the books. Strikingly, Maigret compares his role with that of a priest or ‘mender of destinies’. In The Saint-Fiacre Affair, translated by Shaun Whiteside, Maigret’s almost sacerdotal knowledge of the human soul is evident as he draws on childhood memories of communion wafers and ‘the secret of the confessional’. An elderly woman is murdered at Mass; Maigret seeks to understand why.
Born in the Belgian city of Liège in 1903, Simenon said he had a ‘middle-class soul’. Maigret is a bourgeois adrift in a murky underworld but, unlike his creator, he is dutifully uxorious. Madame Maigret pampers him like the needy man he is. (‘Men, they’re all the same!’) Alsatian-born, she serves him  cassoulet and is aware of his many dislikes (whisky, champagne, calf’s liver, central heating). He is an only child. Madame Maigret calls him ‘Monsieur Maigret’ when she wants to tease; he can be extraordinarily overbearing. (‘Now, please will you fill a pipe for me and plump up my pillows?’)
 
His devotion to his wife is something that his creator clearly envies. The Maigrets have a holiday home in the Loire; in Paris they enjoy quiche suppers at an Alsatian restaurant near their flat on Boulevard Richard-Lenoir. (‘What’s the point of being Alsatian if you don’t know how to make quiches?’ Madame Maigret demands.) Perhaps it is fortunate that they have no children; Simenon’s much-loved daughter, Marie-Jo, committed suicide in 1978.
 
No fewer than 10 Maigret novels were published in 1931, with another seven the following year. (The last, Maigret and Monsieur Charles, appeared in 1972.) Pietr the Latvian, the first in the cycle, translated by David Bellos, displays a faint anti-Semitism in its portrayal of ‘garlic-eating’ Jews. As a cub reporter in early 1920s Belgium, Simenon had written vitriolic anti-Jewish articles for the Gazette de Liège. He later repudiated them, but a taint of Jew-baiting remains. (‘Jews usually have sensitive feet,’ Maigret tells his wife in The Madman of Bergerac. ‘And they’re thrifty.’) During the German occupation Simenon lived in seigneurial self-sufficiency in the French countryside; after the war, fearing charges of collaboration, he spent ten years in America. At some level, Simenon was a morally dubious man.
 
Impressively, the Maigret adventures show little sign of haste or overstrain in the writing. Simenon confessed that he typed many of them while half drunk. (He was intermittently alcoholic.) Unsurprisingly, they are awash with quantities of Calvados, Vouvray, Armagnac, Pouilly, caraway-flavoured kummel, pastis and rosé. Maigret is at times ‘glassy-eyed’ from too much Vermouth or else wretchedly hung over. In the early books he is a casually conceived figure with a detachable shirt collar, trouser braces and a dark ministerial suit. He becomes the archetypal fictional detective of the 20th century and the template for Inspector Morse, Kurt Wallander and any number of sternly pensive sloggers on the beat. The pipe is an essential prop. Maigret plugs it with tobacco when he wants to appear informal in the interview room. He carries at least two pipes in his pockets at all times. (Sometimes they overheat and sizzle.) His height is given as ‘1 metre 80’ — almost six foot. He is broad-shouldered, stubborn-browed and faintly bovine in appearance.
 
We learn more about Inspector (later, Commissaire) Maigret in Maigret’s Memoirs, an almost Pirandellian exercise in role-reversal where the detective talks in the first person about his creator’s perceived literary shortcomings. ‘Simenon likes to describe me as being heavy and grouchy,’ we read (in Howard Curtis’s translation), but the heaviness is frankly ‘exaggerated’. Maybe Simenon should re-write some of those descriptions?

Published in 1951, Les mémoires de Maigret is easily the funniest of the Maigret sagas. Scarcely a conventional detective, Maigret has no interest in Sherlock Holmes-style scientific deduction and prefers instead to operate by instinct. If pushed, he will resort to violence. Often he enters an abstracted, absent state or ‘trance’ while investigating — a sign that a breakthrough is imminent. In his fascinating biography of Simenon, The Man Who Wasn’t Maigret, Patrick Marnham relates that Maigret was based on the author’s adored father Désiré Simenon, an insurance salesman who died at the age of 44.
 
Georges Simenon died, aged 86, in his 36-room château outside Lausanne, a mausoleum residence where Jules Maigret would have felt ill at ease. Simenon is often and rightly read as an author who offers no hope. By the end of his life he had all the money and women he wanted, yet he was encircled by low spirits and the sadness of days gone by. His château had become his tomb. All that remained was Commissaire Maigret and his pipe.
 
If only Georges Simenon had been a bit more like Maigret. By Ian Thomson. The Spectator, August 31, 2019. 

Like many bookish children, I grew up consuming detective fiction more than any other kind. Even then I had noticed that stories supposedly driven by narrative depended for their real vitality on establishing ambience. Crime writing came to life when it had density, when you felt that the paint was being laid on thick. A strong sense of time and place was far more exciting than a clever puzzle. Anyone could create a mystery, but only the best could summon up a world in which the mystery could take root.
 
My taste in literary fiction – I read every word of Patrick Hamilton and Graham Greene – was towards those authors whose techniques most closely resembled those of thriller writers. When, at university, I came across WH Auden’s suggestion that Raymond Chandler’s books “should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art”, I was bewildered. It had never occurred to me that thrillers were anything less. By then I had already graduated from Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers to Dashiell Hammett and the chill ambiguity of Patricia Highsmith. But when I discovered that the author of the Maigret series – which I knew chiefly through the BBC television series with Rupert Davies – was also the author of stand-alone novels, my expectations of the genre changed and expanded. These books belonged more alongside Camus and Sartre than Arthur Conan Doyle. The popular joke in Le Canard enchaîné that “M Simenon makes his living by killing someone every month and then discovering the murderer” seemed nothing more than that. A joke.
 
It’s symptomatic of our misunderstanding of the unique Georges Simenon that so many people believe he was French. In fact, he was Belgian, born in Liège in 1903 and brought up in a poorly defined country that had often suffered under occupation. In Belgium, few people fostered illusions about national greatness. “Under occupation,” he wrote, “your overwhelming concern is with what you will eat.” Simenon’s background, and his lifelong feeling that he was disliked by his mother, left him with the aim of developing, equally as a writer and as a man, a wholly undeluded view of life. As he later observed: “It must be great to belong to a group, a nation, a class. It would give you a feeling of superiority. If you’re alone you’re not superior to anyone.” Or as he put it rather more bitterly: “During earthquakes and wars and floods and shipwrecks you see a love between men that you don’t see at any other time.”
 
In fact, he could hardly have been less French. What Frenchman or woman would speak of their loathing of gastronomy – “all that terrible fussing about what you eat”? What French writer or politician would agree that “every ideal ends in a fierce struggle against those who do not share it?” Simenon was particularly horrified by Charles de Gaulle’s pretence that the French had won the war. The untruth offended him. Simenon believed the events of the 1930s and 40s had defeated the French as thoroughly as they had the Germans. “I’ve ceased to believe in evil, only in illness. Nixon believes he’s the champion of the United States, De Gaulle the rebuilder of France. Yet nobody locks them up. Those who invent morals, who define them and impose them, end up believing in them. We’re all hopeless prisoners of what we choose to believe.”
 
Simenon, not prone to grand literary statements, once said that he wanted to write like Sophocles or Euripides. Over and again, he describes someone quietly living their life, until some random fait divers – a road accident, a heart attack, an inheritance – brings out a fatal element in their character that trips them up. Striking out towards freedom, they fall instead into captivity. He had the idea that a book, like a Greek tragedy, should be experienced in a single session. “You can’t see a tragedy in more than one sitting.” Serial killers, soon to become the thundering cliches of modern drama, whether speaking Danish, Swedish or English, would have held no appeal for Simenon precisely because they are, by definition, extraordinary – and considerably less common in life than on television. Typically, in one of Simenon’s stories, a single crime is enough to ensure that a hitherto normal life falls apart, with no notice, as though any of us might at any time suddenly encounter a crisis that we will turn out to be powerless to overcome.
 
The thrill of reading a novel, said Simenon, is to “look through the keyhole to see if other people have the same feelings and instincts you do”. The man who, when adolescent, says he suffered physical pain at the idea that there could be so many women who would escape him, has the intense focus of a voyeur. An ex-journalist, he often describes towns from their canals or railway lines, because from there you could look into the back of residents’ lives and not be deceived by the front. He may have said “Other people collect stamps, I collect human beings”, but remarkably he refuses at all times to pass judgment on anyone. “You will find no priests in my work!” Not only does Simenon take care to exclude politics, religion, history and philosophy from his character’s dialogue and thoughts, but the deadpan flatness of his prose style and his bare-bone vocabulary create a disturbing absence of moral control. “Fifty years ago people had answers, now they don’t.”
 
It was this fallen universe of compromise that I found so convincing when I was growing up. It matched what I had already seen of life. I knew at first hand that Simenon was right when he said that “the criminal is often less guilty than his victim”. But it was only when I was older that I became addicted to the hard stuff – the unsparing novels that take his fatalistic view to its ultimate. If, as is generally thought, Simenon wrote around 400 books, then about 117 are serious novels, the romans durs that meant most to him. André Gide, one of his many literary admirers, when asked which of Simenon’s books a beginner should read first, famously replied: “All of them.” But to my own taste, Simenon’s most searching work came out of his queasy, compromised time in occupied France, and in his desperate hunt thereafter for personal happiness in heavy-drinking exile in the US. If you want to read three of his greatest books, try the deceptively light Sunday, written in 1958 about a Riviera hotel-keeper who spends a year preparing to kill his wife; try The Widow, published, like The Outsider, in 1942, and at least equal to Camus’s work in portraying a doomed and alienated life; and above all be sure to read Dirty Snow, a story of petty crime and killing at a time of collaboration in a country that remains unnamed, but which is always taken to be France under the Nazis.
 
Because he was foolish enough in an interview to claim to have slept with 10,000 women – the real figure, said his third wife rather crisply, was nearer 1,200 – Simenon has sometimes been accused of misogyny, just as by allowing films to be made of his books at the Berlin-supervised Continental Studios in Vichy France during the war, he was also accused of collaboration. The charge of misogyny at least is unfair. A small man’s fear of women is often his subject, and he describes that fear with his usual pitiless accuracy. In his books, casual sex is fine – it may or may not be satisfying – but passion is always dangerous because it arouses feelings neither party can control – and loss of control is seen to be a particularly masculine terror. In these circumstances, sex comes closer to despair than to joy. The women he portrays are not usually manipulative or cruel or deceitful. Far from it. They simply possess an inadvertent power to disturb men and to drive them mad. They exercise this power more often in spite of themselves than deliberately. All of his books are, in one way or another, about power of different kinds, and he specialises in depicting the lives of those near the bottom of society, the concierges and the salespeople, the waiters and the clerks, who possess very little. No wonder, when he went to America, that he remarked how everyone was expected to have a hobby, so that in one small field at least they might exercise at least a measure of domination.
 
The inspiration for finally deciding to write a play from Simenon came from my friend Bill Nighy, who knew that I was a fan. He gave me a present of a rare first edition of a novel that had been almost entirely forgotten. Even now, I have yet to meet anyone in Britain who claims to have read La Main. In Moura Budberg’s translation, long out of print, the book had been published as The Man on the Bench in the Barn. It was written in 1968, but its atmosphere clearly derived from Simenon’s own period of residence in Connecticut, where he moved to live with his new wife, Denyse Ouimet, in the late 1940s. In the book, the town he then lived in, Lakeville, is renamed Brentwood. His house, Shadow Rock Farm, becomes fictionally Yellow Rock Farm. But the topography and feel of the place are pretty much identical, with beavers playing in a nearby stream, and the local Connecticut community expecting strong but already threatened standards of private morality. The only detail omitted was Simenon’s own telephone number: Hemlock 5.
 
We hear a lot about Henry James and the Americans’ traditional fascination with Europe. We hear rather less about its opposite. In my view, there is something rare and interesting artistically when a European sensibility engages with American morals. La Main describes America at a point of change, when the suburban world patrolled so brilliantly by writers such as Richard Yates, Sloan Wilson and Patricia Highsmith is about to yield to a newer way of life, theoretically freer but equally treacherous. It was characteristic of Simenon to suspect that sexual liberation might not deliver everything it promised. After all, he doubted most things, except his own writing. But it was even more characteristic of Simenon to be in the right place, as he had been in France and Africa before the war, and at the right time, equipped with a reporter’s calm genius for putting a moment in a bottle.
 
David Hare’s The Red Barn, based on Georges Simenon’s novel La Main, starts at the National theatre on 6 October
 
 
David Hare: the genius of Georges Simenon. By David Hare.  The Observer, September 25, 2016.