Best known as the author of the Maigret books, Georges Simenon’s classic crime novels are currently being reissued by Penguin in paperback.
Simenon was born in Liège, Belgium, in 1903. His prolific output of over 400 novels and short stories have made him a household name in continental Europe and in the English-speaking world, through myriad translations.
He died in 1989 in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he had lived for the latter part of his life. The noirish, gritty realism of his narratives made many of them naturals for screen adaptations. “Maybe I am not completely crazy”, he once admitted, “but I am a psychopath.”
He wrote pulp fiction firstly, then got into detective novels, wrote speedily, turned his nose up at “literature” and was driven by an unashamed desire for fame and money.
“I wish I liked the work of my friends who write,” he once wrote. “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.”
“One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, "enthused the Guardian. "Simenon was unequalled at making us look inside, though the ability was masked by his brilliance at absorbing us obsessively in his stories.“
Linda Coverdale has translated a selection of the Belgian writer’s work into English, which Penguin are currently reissuing with very stylish covers, novels such as The Mahé Circle, A Crime in Holland, The Grand Banks Café and Night at the Crossroads.
