Simenon, Georges

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Georges Simenon

Georges Joseph Christian Simenon (February 13, 1903 - September 4, 1989) was a Belgian writer who wrote in French. Most of his works, including his classic series of short novels about Inspector Maigret, have been translated into English.

Simenon, who was born in Liège, established himself in Paris in 1922, and in 1930 he began the famous Maigret series of detective novels, which he published under his own name. Through the dozens of novels in which he appears, as well as through many films and television adaptations of them, Inspector Maigret, of police headquarters in Paris, has become as well known as Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. Maigret, a sensible and tolerant but not brilliant man with simple tastes, puzzles his way to the solution of his cases by patient thought and insight--all the while peacefully puffing his pipe. The added psychological dimension enriches the reader's normal interest in learning the solution to the mystery.

Simenon was one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century. He was able to write 60 to 80 pages a day. He travelled widely and stayed in the United States for ten years, from 1945 until 1955. In 1957, he moved to Switzerland. During his lifetime, he published about 450 novels and short stories. He is best known, however, for his 75 novels and 28 short stories featuring Commissaire Maigret. The first novel in the series, Pietr-Le-Letton, appeared in 1931; the last one, Maigret et M Charles, was published in 1972. The Maigret novels were translated into all major languages and several of them were turned into films (starting with La nuit du carrefour, adapted for the screen by Jean Renoir as early as 1932).

For many critics, however, Simenon's best novels are those that lie outside the Maigret series. In the 1930s he wrote many other thrillers, a notable example being L'Homme qui regardait passer les trains (1938; The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By). Pedigree, written during the war years and published in 1948, is a largely autobiographical novel that presents a powerful and convincing picture of the life of a boy and his parents in Liège from 1903 to 1918. Subsequently Simenon wrote novels in which the psychological analysis of the leading character, exceptional in some way, forms the center of interest. Examples include Les Volets verts (1950; The Heart of a Man), which portrays the closing stages in the life of a great actor, and Le Petit saint (1965; The Little Saint), which treats the formative years in the life of a great artist.

During his "American" period, Simenon reached the height of his creative powers, and several novels of those years were inspired by the context in which they were written (Trois chambres à Manhattan (1946), Maigret à New York (1947), Maigret se fâche (1947)).

Simenon also wrote a large number of "psychological novels", such as La neige était sale (1948) or Le fils (1957), as well as several autobiographical works, in particular Je me souviens (1945), Pedigree (1948), Mémoires intimes (1981). Simenon was known as "the man of 10,000 women", a self-confessed sex addict who "needed" to have sex three times a day. Quite a few women were prepared to humour him for nothing, but that total was said to include 8,000 prostitutes. In this he was quite different from his fictional creation, Maigret, a homeloving sort of chap (when he wasn't in a bar).

He also wrote under many pseudonyms - Christian Brulls, Georges Sims, and Jean du Perry, amongst others.

Georges Simenon died in Lausanne, aged 86.

A comprehensive Simenon site with an emphasis on Maigret can be found here.

It was [Simenon] who led the movement away from detective-fiction towards fiction-about-detectives. He deliberately set out to challenge the GAD style of novel and in the process he allowed a lot of mediocre hacks (of which, IMHO, he was one) to flourish and prosper by writing about psychological mumbo-jumbo instead of contructing ingenious plots and puzzles. You can always spot a fiction-about-detectives novel. There's never a surprise about the guilty party: it's always 'society.' --- John P.

Mike Grost on Georges Simenon

Georges Simenon's work shows the influence of Freeman Wills Crofts. His Inspector Maigret is a policeman, just like Crofts' Inspector French. Both officers solve crimes by patient, routine investigation, realistically depicted in step by step fashion by their authors. Maigret walking down a suburban street at the opening of his first published case, M. Gallet décédé (The Death of Monsieur Gallet) (1931), reminds one of French sleuthing on suburban streets in The Box Office Murders (1929). Both do a lot of traveling, going to different cities. Both writers have an international orientation, with their characters coming from all over Europe, and their detectives solving international crimes. Both are nationally based, French in Scotland Yard, Maigret with the Sûreté, and both interface with a lot of local police officers. Both study physical clues, and make deductions from evidence left behind at crime scenes. Both detectives are married, and discuss their work with their patient wives. Both have to use considerable tact to deal with difficult suspects.

While Simenon's works reflect Crofts' in their detective work, characters, and social background, their plotting technique does not completely follow the standard interests of the British realists. There is little emphasis on alibis, or on the "breakdown of identity" used to create them - although Simenon characters often have more than one identity, often to aid in their criminal activities. Science and engineering play a smaller role in the Simenon stories than in Crofts, although there is the murdered man's interest in mechanical gizmos in M. Gallet décédé. Simenon will later introduce a doctor detective, Jean Dollent, in the book The Little Doctor (collected 1943). Physician detectives are part of the traditions of the realist school. The careful account of Simenon's characters' financial status and activities, also reminds one of such British realist writers as Crofts and, especially, Henry Wade. Simenon's characters are often middle class, just as in the realists. Crofts included a portrait of adultery in The Cask; Simenon has many unhappy couples in his novels. Simenon's non-mystery works in which guilty people are psychologically pursued by their crimes perhaps owe something to the inverted detective stories of which the British realists were so fond. The gloomy, downbeat tone of some of Simenon's work also reflects the tragic tone of much British realist writing.

Many of Maigret's interviews with suspects are essentially psychological portraits of the characters in the book. This technique is very popular in modern mystery fiction, especially private eye tales, and one associates it with Raymond Chandler, and even more with Chandler's follower Ross MacDonald. But here it is in Simenon, in a fully developed form in the first Maigret novel M. Gallet décédé (1931), long before either Chandler or MacDonald. This gives this Simenon book a peculiarly modern flavor. Many of the chapters seem more like the detective fiction of the 1990's than of the 1930's.

The many complex, original criminal schemes in Simenon's tales remind one of the similar criminal operations in Crofts books like The Pit-Prop Syndicate (1922) and The Box Office Murders (1929). Simenon's plotting style often involves two separate plots. The first is a scheme by some crook; the second is a counterscheme developed by a second crook in response to the first. The detective and the reader only see a confused trail of evidence left by the two schemes. Their job is to try to see into the two level scheme behind it. Sometimes this works brilliantly, as in "Death in a Department Store". (This story has also been anthologized by Ellery Queen as "The Slipper Fiend".) But all too often, it results in a non fair play mystery. It is hard to see how any reader could deduce the real nature of the plot and counterplot from the clues given. They are just too complex, and largely hidden from the reader, with only a handful of scattered clues suggesting what is really going on. And M. Gallet décédé, while it starts out with some vivid writing, eventually devolves into a series of tangled coincidences.

The film director Akira Kurosawa was a big fan of Simenon, and he reportedly wrote his detective movie Stray Dog (1949) first as a novel, before shooting it as a film. Kurosawa's detectives are policemen, like Maigret, who engage in realistic, ploddingly detailed police work. Like Simenon, and the British realists before him, Kurosawa explores a great many locations, in this case, the poorer districts of Tokyo. The extreme heat, which constantly afflicts the characters, also is present in such Simenon novels as M. Gallet décédé, where it affects his heavily built Maigret perhaps more than it would Kurosawa's athletic star Toshiro Mifune.