Georges Simenon returns

Georges Simenon
PIETR THE LATVIAN
Translated by David Bellos
162pp. 978 0 141 39273 8

THE LATE MONSIEUR GALLET
Translated by Anthea Bell
155p. 978 0 141 39337 7

THE HANGED MAN OF SAINT-PHOLIEN
Translated by Linda Coverdale
138pp. 978 0 141 39345 2

THE CARTER OF LA PROVIDENCE
Translated by David Coward
152pp. 978 0 141 39346 9

THE YELLOW DOG
Translated by Linda Asher
134pp. 978 0 141 39347 6

NIGHT AT THE CROSSROADS
Translated by Linda Coverdale
151pp. 978 0 141 39348 3
Penguin Modern Classics. Paperback, £6.99 each

Published: 7 May 2014

Artwork by Jean Tarride for the 1932 film of The Yellow Dog

G eorges Simenon (1903–89), the author first of pulp fiction, then of detective novels and romans durs, who wrote extremely quickly, disliked “literature” and had a voluptuous interest in both fame and money, was admired by, among others: Gide, Cocteau, Céline, Anouilh, Colette, Mauriac, Somerset Maugham, Thornton Wilder, T. S. Eliot, Henry Miller and John Cowper Powys. The public homage and private fan letters of his coevals were flattering to Simenon, but also embarrassing. “I wish I liked the work of my friends who write”, he said in When I Was Old (one of his many autobiographies). “I try to make myself, I try to pretend, for it’s rarely true . . . . I like them as men, while regretting that I cannot admire them professionally.”

Gide was a key case. He corresponded with Simenon, boosted him, praised him in his Journal, and worked for some time on a long eulogy (never published and probably destroyed). Simenon enjoyed the attention, addressed the older man as Cher Maître – but found Gide’s books completely unreadable. He managed to combine a supremely practical approach to the creation and economics of writing with a self-delusion so maniacal that it could at times be charming: “Maybe I am not completely crazy”, he once admitted, “but I am a psychopath.” Thus in 1937, when he was thirty-four, and by his own estimate had written 349 novels, he plotted his future career as a “real” novelist. “Everything . . . I have predicted so far has come to pass. So, I will win the Nobel Prize in 1947.” This is psychopathic in that it sees only the monstrous self, misreading both the outside (literary) world and the qualities (indeed, existence) of others. Unfortunately for Simenon, in 1947 the Nobel Prize went to André Gide. And thereafter, for year after year, it kept on going to writers who weren’t Georges Simenon. By 1961 he was so fed up that he told his diary he would refuse the prize if offered: “Let them fuck off and leave me in peace”. But three years later, he was continuing to abuse “the cretins who still haven’t awarded me their prize”.

What do “literary” novelists admire in Simenon? The combination of a positive and a negative, perhaps: a mixture of what he can do better than they, and of what he can get away with not doing. His admirable positives: swiftness of creation; swiftness of effect; clearly demarcated personal territory; intense atmosphere and resonant detail; knowledge of, and sympathy with, les petites gens; moral ambiguity; a usually baffling plot with a usually satisfactory denouement. As for his enviable negatives: Simenon got away with a very restricted and therefore very repetitive vocabulary (about 2,000 words, by his own estimation) – he didn’t want any reader to have to pause over a word, let alone reach for the dictionary. He kept his books very short, able to be read in one sitting, or (often) journey: none risks outstaying its welcome. He eschews all rhetorical effect – there is rarely more than one simile per book, and no metaphors, let alone anything approaching a symbol. There is text, but no subtext; there is plot but no subplot – or rather, what appears to be possible subplot usually ends up being part of the main plot. There are no literary or cultural allusions, and minimal reference to what is going on in the wider world of French politics, let alone the international arena. There is also – both admirable positive and enviable negative – no authorial presence, no authorial judgement, and no obvious moral signposts. Which helps make Simenon’s fiction remarkably like life.

Though his romans durs may be superior, it was the seventy-five Maigret novels that were best known during Simenon’s lifetime, and continue to be so. I first read some of them around the time the BBC did its memorable adaptations (fifty-two between 1960 and 1963) with Rupert Davies as Maigret and the excellent Ewen Solon as Lucas. Back then – a mere thirty years on from the publication of the first Maigret novel – France, for all its post-war recovery, still contained large stretches where life seemed to continue as in Simenon’s fiction: the canals and waterways, small bistrots and family hotels, the enclosed towns and villages with their faces turned against the outside world, where history and rancour gathered, the bourgeoisie held sway, and faces were white. La France profonde still survived; nowadays, it exists in smaller and smaller pockets. As a French friend recently pointed out, La France profonde – so treasured by outsiders (and Simenon, though francophone, was Belgian and thus an outsider) – has become La France branchée.

What do “literary” novelists admire in Simenon? The combination of a positive and a negative, perhaps: a mixture of what he can do better than they, and of what he can get away with not doing

Penguin, Simenon’s British paperback publishers since 1952, have begun the admirable project of issuing, at the rate of one per month, new translations of all the Maigret novels, to be followed by some of the romans durs. Rereading the first six (all first published in 1931) confirms both how solidly imagined and carpentered Maigret’s world was; and also how far distant it now seems. It is a world that – even when colours are described – is rendered by the reader’s imagination in black and white: it exists in the monochrome of Jean Gabin movies (and the BBC series); also, the monochrome of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s first photographs, which are contemporaneous with Maigret’s first cases. Here pipes are cleaned with chicken feathers; calling cards are delivered; horse traffic is still common, while cars contain flower-holders and “marquetry side pockets”; regional papers publish on a Sunday; and fingerprints are sent to Paris over the berlinograph. Maigret wears a bowler hat and an overcoat with a velvet collar, as well as a “celluloid protector” which cradles his tie-knot – all of which come as sartorial surprises (Rupert Davies definitely wore a soft hat of some fedora/homburg variety). When, in The Carter of La Providence, a man falls into a lock and is pulled out unconscious, one rescuer tries to bring him round by the method of tongue-traction: a rhythmical yanking on the waterlogged victim’s tongue. I hadn’t come across this form of artificial respiration since 1897, when it was used on Alphonse Daudet – for an hour and a half, long after he was clearly dead. Though it lacks any resuscitatory value, the technique had clearly lingered on as a folk remedy.

There is a great deal of eating and drinking in Maigretland, often class-defined and sometimes indicative of criminality. Never trust a man whose “light” lunch consists of an omelette aux fines herbes, a veal cutlet in crème fraiche and a bottle of the finest burgundy. Contrast this with an honest breakfast of Maigret’s: a hunk of bread, a terrine of paté, and a mug of white wine. A villain will order an 1867 Armagnac; an Etonian rotter will call for still champagne; while Maigret swigs his wife’s home-made plum liqueur – and many, many other drinks as well. The Inspector is clearly, on the evidence of these first six books, a functioning alcoholic, forever at the beer, the wine, the fine and the Calvados; today he would be sent off to HR to help him share and confront his problem. It’s possible Simenon didn’t notice how much Maigret was drinking because the novelist was himself a functioning alcoholic at the time. He even drank while at the typewriter; and a sympathetic doctor suggested that on writing days he limit himself to just the two bottles of red, preferably neither too old nor too young. Patrick Marnham, in The Man Who Wasn’t Maigret (1992), tells how the BBC’s adaptations were so faithful to the books that “a temperance pressure group started to count the amount of alcohol Maigret drank in each episode and an Anglican bishop implored the producers to reduce it”.

In the first Maigret novel, Pietr the Latvian, we learn that Maigret is forty-five, the son of a gamekeeper in the Loire valley, and a failed medical student; that he has a “proletarian frame” but looks after his hands nicely, and is married to a woman from Alsace who cooks le frichti (or “Swiss fries”). The next five books add very little to this back story: by the end of them we still do not even know that Maigret’s first name is Jules (his wife calls him “Maigret”). If he was born in 1884, he is unlikely to have escaped war service, yet he makes no reference to having done so, or to the war itself. Does he have hobbies? Does he follow sport? Have a favourite newspaper? Political opinions? Is he interested in sex? A vague answer to the final question is suggested in Night at the Crossroads, where he is seriously vamped over several chapters by a pseudo-Danish femme fatale in (of course) a silk peignoir. She even reveals to him a “small round breast”. Is he shaken or stirred? The most Simenon will allow is that Maigret “was savouring this most unusual familiarity perhaps a little too much”. In one of the subsequent sixty-nine Maigrets, Simenon will allow his creature to climb into bed with a prostitute – but only in order to have a conversation.

So, towards sex, as towards everything, Maigret remains “imperturbable” – the adjective most commonly applied to him. He is “like a wall”, “a monument of placidity”; in The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien he is described as having eyes “as still and dull as a cow’s”, and being coarse-featured. “There was something implacable and inhuman about him that suggested a pachyderm plodding inexorably towards its goal.” He often seems inert and unreactive; silent, dull. He stares at people disconcertingly, and mumbles incomprehensibly. Part of this, of course, is deliberate investigatory technique. (Joan Didion once attributed part of her success as an interviewer to a frequent inability to find the right question: muteness made interviewees take pity and blurt.) But it is also Simenon’s deliberate decision. By not fully characterizing Maigret, and offering few glimpses of his interior life, he invites us to fill in the blanks, which we happily and sympathetically do.

towards sex, as towards everything, Maigret remains “imperturbable” – the adjective most commonly applied to him

While every Maigret case is a several-pipe problem, the Frenchman’s investigatory techniques are far from those of Sherlock Holmes, who tends to sits in a chair and ratiocinate. Maigret occupies the scene of the crime, absorbs the atmosphere, makes himself irritatingly visible, and waits for things to fall into place. He works by a kind of sub-intuition. In Pietr the Latvian he explains what he calls “the theory of the crack in the wall”: that within each criminal there is a human being, and that the policeman must wait until “the instant when the human being comes out from behind the opponent”. In The Yellow Dog, Maigret is assigned a keen young assistant, Leroy, fresh out of police college. He is a technocrat, keen on forensics and fingerprints, whose notes on the case consist of what has happened, or might have happened, and identifying the problems to be resolved. Maigret’s notes, by contrast, are short character sketches of the main suspects (the detective as novelist). When Leroy said “I deduce”, Maigret interrupts with “I don’t go in for deductions”. When asked what he believes about the case, Maigret replies, “I never believe anything”. When Leroy talks about method, Maigret – contradicting what he said in Pietr the Latvian – replies, “My method has actually been not to have one . . . it’s a question of atmosphere, a question of faces”. And when Leroy gets over-excited, Maigret hauls him back with, “Easy! Easy, my boy! No jumping to conclusions. And no deductions, remember?” This is a very romantic presentation of police work: you stand there, sniffing the air like some great pachyderm, appearing not to do much, waiting for the crack in the human being which leads to the cracking of the case. It’s also a very attractive fictional sell. But in fact, it’s only part of how Maigret operates: he frequently uses deduction, and technology, as well as more traditional police methods, such as beating a suspect up.

If Maigret is no reliable guide to his own methods, nor was Simenon, whose statements about his own life and beliefs were voluminous and often self-contradictory. In When I Was Old, he claims that “For thirty years I have tried to make it understood that there are no criminals”. Which probably means something close to its opposite: that everyone, given certain circumstances, has within them the capacity to commit a crime – after all, even he, Simenon, had been a minor black-marketeer back in Liège during the First World War. Maigret certainly doesn’t believe there are no criminals, though he has considerable sympathy for those unfortunates brought to crime by poverty, or forced reluctantly into association with professional crooks. He is therefore inclined to bend the rules, and take a nuanced view of justice: at the end of The Yellow Dog, he lies before witnesses to protect a waitress who has put strychnine in a round of drinks.

Of these first six books, Pietr the Latvian is the most hectic, and the most anxiously complicated, featuring a pair of identical twins who adopt triple identities. But it is impressive how swiftly the template of the classic Maigret novel is put in place: it is there by the opening paragraph of the second book, The Late Monsieur Gallet, where a crime is described as being “mundane, difficult and unforgettable all at the same time”. There is great unease in several of the books about downward social mobility, which often entails taking on a false identity. Even some of the drinks operate with forged papers: a “false absinthe” and a “synthetic calvados” are fired down Maigret’s gullet along with more authentic liquors. And in some of these thrillers, the pull of the roman dur is clear. Simenon can make the world feel equally strange and menacing whether a villain has a gun or not. In The Hanged Man of Saint- Pholien, there is a blackmailer who, on being paid off, burns the money; the psychological ramifications of this detail linger well after the crime has been solved. The Late Monsieur Gallet, concerning a case in which “everything, without exception, is fake”, features a commercial traveller who continues to pretend he is going off to work eighteen years after being sacked; in reality, he spends his time soliciting contributions from ageing royalists for various legitimist projects, and then purloining their contributions. This is a rich novelistic idea which feels as if it deserves fuller treatment than a thriller can award it.

Apart from delivering the usual satisfactions of crime fiction, the Maigret books work because they offer a continuous, reliable, easily re-enterable world. Those early readers never had to look up a word in the dictionary; and we later readers, whether foreign or French, never have to get out histories of the first half of the twentieth century to understand what is going on. Theodor Fontane’s No Way Back is set against the backdrop of the Schleswig-Holstein problem, which Palmerston said had only ever been understood by three men (one of them was dead, another had gone mad, and the third was himself, who had forgotten). The Penguin edition of the novel therefore begins with four pages of historical background. There is no need for any of this with Simenon. The world he describes may exist as a moral and economic consequence of the First World War, but in the first six Maigrets that war is mentioned on only two occasions, once as part of a rare simile: The Carter of La Providence is set among the chalk hills of Champagne, “where at this time of year the vines looked like wooden crosses in a Great War cemetery”. Where the larger, outer world has been, is and may be heading does not impinge, any more than it does on, say, the world of Jeeves and Wooster. We enter Maigretland confident that the weather will be extreme, the Inspector will solve a seemingly insoluble crime, and that we shall not need to Google anything. This blithe sense of security will now continue for another sixty-nine volumes. One small but serious complaint: Penguin have employed some of the best-known translators for this series. They ought to be given a proper biographical note of their own, beneath that of their Belgian paymaster.



Julian Barnes’s books include The Sense of an Ending, 2011, Through the Window: Seventeen essays (and one short story), 2012, and, most recently, Levels of Life, which was published last year. He played the part of Georges Simenon in several BBC Radio Four adaptations of the Maigret stories.