Maigret, Simenon, and France: social dimensions of the novels and stories

221 Pages·3.309 MB·English

by  Alder, Bill, Simenon, Georges

Maigret, Simenon and France
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Maigret, Simenon
and France
Social Dimensions
of the Novels and Stories
BILL ALDER
Foreword by Stephen Knight
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina, and London
ISBN 978-0-7864-7054-9 (softcover : acid free paper )
LIBRARYOFCONGRESSCATALOGUINGDATAAREAVAILABLE
British Library cataloguing data are available
© 2013 Bill Alder. All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying
or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
Front cover images © 2012 Shutterstock
Manufactured in the United States of America
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com
To the memory of my father,
BERT ALDER
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Professor Stephen Knight of the Uni-
versity of Melbourne and Doctor Heather Worthington of Cardiff
University for their support and enthusiasm for this project. I
have learned a great deal from them both. I have also benefited
greatly from the comments of Doctor Maurizio Ascari of Bologna
University and Professor Claire Gorrara of Cardiff University. I
would like to thank Doctor Laurent Demoulin, curator of the
Fonds Simenon at the University of Liège, for his hospitality and
help during my visits. Tony and Sybil Clegg showed great kind-
ness and generosity in their donation of their collection of Maigret
texts.
vi
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vi
Foreword by Stephen Knight 1
Preface 5
Introduction 9
CHAPTER 1
The Fayard Maigret Novels: Narratives, Contexts,
Settings and Themes, 1931 21
CHAPTER 2
The Fayard Maigret Novels: Narratives, Contexts,
Settings and Themes, 1932 53
CHAPTER 3
The Fayard Maigret Novels: Simenon’s Perspective 91
CHAPTER 4
Short Stories and Journalism: Maigret, Simenon and
the Crises of the 1930s 114
CHAPTER 5
What Maigret Did Next 145
CHAPTER 6
Conclusions 173
Bibliography 197
Index 205
vii
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Foreword by Stephen Knight
Georges Simenon is one of the great forces of the crime fiction world.
Not only did he create for Maigret 75 novels and 28 short stories, he produced
well over a hundred other crime stories, notably the psychothrillers the French
call romans durs, “hard novels.” He was enormously successful in translation
as well: only Edgar Wallace and Agatha Christie have matched his world
dominion.
Like theirs, his style seems simple, his stories unelaborated. If this sug-
gests that triumph in crime fiction depends on naivety, one contradiction is
the ability of critics to see much in Simenon’s fiction, and another, wholly
Gallic, one is the range of French star filmmakers who have found inspiration
in his work—Renoir, Clouzot, Carné, Autant- Lara, Melville, Tavernier, Chab -
rol, and Delannoy (starring Jean Gabin, no less).
More depth lies in the life of Simenon. Born half Belgian- French, half
Flemish (one of the more difficult citizenships of Europe), he was at school
with World War I brutally close. He grew up through the financially dramatic
1920s and, especially in France, the politically melodramatic 1930s; he then
lived in rural France through World War II. We do not know what Simenon
thought when the local Nazis, perhaps not the best informed, felt Simenon
was the same as the Jewish surname Simon. What we do know is that none
of these drastic contexts make any overt mark on Simenon’s work. Bill Alder
has written the first study to look closely at Simenon’s France as well as his
fiction. He focuses on the intimately local currents of history and society, the
fears, arrogances, deceptions and ultimately the crimes that people feel they
are backed into by a changing, frightening, local world.
Simenon started very young as a news reporter, and always had the
power to write quickly: he could finish a book in a week. As he moved towards
Maigret he published the hundred and fifty pulp novels in the period 1924–
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