Georges Simenon - master of etective fiction
Belgian-born French novelist, one of the most skilled and literate writers of detective fiction.Simenon is best known as the creator of Paris police detective Inspector Maigret. He turned out 84 Maigret mysteries and 136 other novels, but he never wrote the 'big' novel that many critics demanded of him. Simenon's books have been printed over 500 million and translated into 50 languages.
Truth never seems true. I don't mean only in literature or in painting. I won't remind you either of those Doric columns whose lines seem to us strictly perpendicular and which only give that impression because they are slightly curved. If they were straight, they'd look as if they were swelling, don't you see? (from Maigret's Memoirs, 1950)
Georges Simenon was born in Liege as the son of an accountant for an insurance company. At the age of sixteen Simenon was forced by his father's ill health to abandon his studies, and in 1921 his mother died. He worked as a baker and a bookseller and started his career as a writer at a local newspaper, Gazette de Liège. This experience provided the young Simenon the perfect apprenticeship. At the age of seventen Simenon published his first novel. He joined a group of painters, writers, and dilettantes who called themselves La Caque (The Cask) and spent time drinking, trying drugs, and discussing philosophy and art. Later he returned to the group and several of its members in the novel LE PENDU DE SAINT PHOLIEN (1931). In 1923 he married Regine Renchon, a young artist, whom he had met in Liege. The marriage ended in divorce.
In 1922 Simenon went to Paris, publishing short stories and popular novels under almost two dozen different pen names. He worked as an office clerk for a right-wing writer, and was a secretary to a wealthy aristocrat, the Marquis de Tracy. Simenon lived in France from 1923 to 1939, during which time his writing turned into an industry of novels. Between 1923 and 1933 Simenon produced more than 200 books of pulp fiction under several pseudonyms.
The social life of Paris provided for the successful author innumerable sources of delight. In 1925 Simenon saw the legendary Josephine Baker dance in the famous show, La revue Negre, and they became close friends. In 1928 and 1929 he sailed the rivers and canals of France, Holland, and Norther Europe, writing all the while. These journeys gave material for several of his novels, among them LE CHARRETIER DE LA 'PROVIDENCE' (1931). Throughout the 1930s Simenon lived in many houses, he cruised the Mediterranean and travelled to Lapland, Africa, and eastern Europe. Between the years 1934 and 1935 he made an around-the-world cruise.
I have never been able to write a novel about a country which I have known only as a tourist, and I have never traveled around the world with a notebook in hand, jotting down impressions. (preface in Simenon: An American Omnibus, 1967)
The first novel, which Simenon published under his own name, was PIETR-LE-LETTON (1930, The Strange Case of Peter the Lett), where he introduced to the public Inspector Maigret. The character was apparently modelled on the author's great-grandfather. In this and the following books Simenon combined his moral objectivity and psychological insight to create characters that are wholly credible. Other series character, Jean Dollent, "the Little Doctor", appeared in short stories, which have been collected in The Little Doctor (1943). In the early 1930s Simenon produced eighteen Maigret books, but abandoned the character for eight years. By the end of the 1930s he was the favorite of such writer as Andre Gide, Ford Madox Ford (who mentions him in Vive Le Roy), and Robert Graves.
In 1939 Simenon was appointed commissioner for Belgian refugees at La Rochelle. When the German army invaded France, Simenon settled in Fontenay. During the years of occupation he continued writing and enjoyed success in the film business - under Nazi bureaucracy nine films based on his text were produced.
After the war Simenon found himself in the lists of collaborators. He spent the late 1940s and early 1950s in the United States. In New York Simenon met the bilingual young French-Canadian woman, Denyse Ouimet, with whom he had one of the great love affairs of his life. The relationship inspired the novel TROIS CHAMBRES Á MANHATTAN (1946). He married Denise in 1949 and moved with his new family to Connecticut, where he lived for the next five years. During this period he wrote several novels with an American background. Belle (1954) was a story of murder in a small Connecticut community. The Brothers Rico (1954) was a Mafia story and The Hitchhiker (1955) explored a battle of wills between husband and wife.
"Call me Mike."
But there was no mistake about it. This was no license to get chummy with him. It applied to the respectful familiarity which in certain groups, in certain small towns, surrounds those of importance.
-He looked like a politician, a state senator, or a mayor, or like someone who bosses the political machine and makes judges and sheriffs alike. He could have played any role of these parts in the movies, especially in a Western, he knew, and it was obvious that it pleased him, that he kept polishing up the resemblance.
"How about a highball?" he proposed, pointing at the bottle.
"I never drink."
(from The Brothers Rico)
Simenon's semiautograph, naturalistic PEDIGREE (1948), was exeptionally long compared to novels, over five hundred pages. Simenon wrote the book after a doctor misread an x-ray and told him that he had less than two years to live. The book was meant for his young son so that he would be able to know about his father when he grew up. However, Simenon still 41 years ahead.
In 1955 Simenon returned to Europe and settled eventually in Lausanne, Switzerland. Beneath the illusion of happy household, Simenon's marriage was deteriorating and his family disintegrating. In 1964 Denise entered a psychiatric clinic never returning to Epalinges, their home. Her bitter memoir of the marriage, Un Oiseau pour le chat, was published in 1978. Simenon's daughter Marie-Jo began the first of several psychiatric treatments in 1966, but ultimately in 1978 she committed suicide. In MEMOIRES INTIMES I-II (1981) Simenon blamed Denise for her death.
The critic and awarded mystery writer H.R.F. Keating selected My Friend Maigret (1949) and Maigret in Court (1960) in 1987 for his list of the one hundred best crime novels. Maigret's method of investigation doesn't rely on vast amounts police work. He operates more on the basis of intuition. His method also has much similarities with hermeneutics - a theory of interpretation, of understanding the significance of human actions, utterances, products, and institutions. In My Friend Maigret a small-time crook is murdered on the island of Porquerolles off the Mediterranean coast. Maigret is sent to investigate. He collects impressions, and tries the behind the facts that the local inspector offers him. Thought start to rise up from his subconscious. "He sensed a whole heap of things, as he always did at the start of a case, but he couldn't have said in what form this mist of ideas would sooner or later resolve itself." And in the end he finds the answer.
A number of actors have impersonated Maigret in films and television series. Simenon's favorite was Jean Renoir's brother Pierre, who appeared in La Nuit du carrefour (1932). The director had happy memories of the film. His nephew Claude debuted as a cameraman, Jacques Becker was producer, and the famous film critic and historian Jean Mitry was part of the crew. The film has been praised for its poetic atmosphere full of fog, rain, and car-lights. Jean Gabin played the inspector in Maigret tend un piège (1957), Maigret et l'affaire Saint-Fiacre (1959), and Maigret voit rouge (1963), carrying the role with appropriate world-weariness.
In 1961 Simenon begun a relationship with Teresa Sburelin, who became something like his official companion. The last Maigret, MAIGRET ET MONSIEUR CHARLES, was published in 1972, and next year Simenon announced his retirement. In the following years he published only nonfiction of an autobiographical sort. In his autobiography QUAND J'ÉTAIS VIEUX (1971, When I Was Old) Simenon claimed to have had sex with more than twenty thousand different women. LETTRE À MA MÈRE (1974) examined his relationship to his mother. Simenon died in Lausanne, on September 4, 1989. He left instructions at his death that his body be cremated without any ceremony and that his ashes, mingled with his beloved daughter's, be scattered beneath a huge tree in the back garden of his last house in Lausanne.
The Maigrets focus on the circumstances and stresses that compel one person to murder another. They are written in a spare, undecorated style. Simenon described them sketches, comparable to the sort of things a painter does for his pleasure or for preliminary studies. The production of 115 'Simenons', short, intense psychological analyses of modern man, started with LE RELAIS D'ALSACE (1931, The Man from Everywhere). Among these works is his most Dostoyevskyan tale L'HOMME QUI REGARDAIT PASSER LES TRAINS (1938, The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By), which centers on the theme of the sense of guilt - as many of his stories. Simenon's more or less optimistic side and joy in life is seen in such novels as LE PETIT SAINT (1965, The Little Saint) and LE PRÉSIDENT (1958, The Premier). L'HORLOGER D'EVERTON (1954) was filmed by Bernard Tavernier in 1973. In the story a father, Dave Galloway, begins to review his own life, when he hears that his son Ben has murdered a man and eloped with an underage girl. Dave realizes that he, his father, and Ben "were of the same breed, all three of them. ... It seemed to him that, in the whole world, there were only two sorts of men, those who bow their heads the others."
Source: Pegasos