Georges Simenon, the Belgian master of crime fiction, wrote 75 Maigret novels and 28 Maigret short stories and Penguin Classics have been issuing the yarns in translation over the past number of years and continuing to do so, much to our delight. Two recent reissues are My Friend Maigret and Maigret’s Dead Man.
So respected is Inspector Jules Maigret in the business of detection that Mr Pyke, an officer from Scotland Yard has arrived in France to study how his Gallic counterpart goes about solving seemingly intractable cases. That’s the set-up in My Friend Maigret in which the two men are attempting to uncover the secrets of the island of Porquerolles off the Cote d’Azur. A small-time crook has been murdered on the island, the night after he had enthusiastically proclaimed his friendship with the self-same Maigret in the presence of a large group of the island's residents. The two inspectors duly leave drably grey Paris for the sparkling Meditterranean to solve the murder. Someone has to do it.
Simenon cleverly points up some differences in the men’s characters, implying a certain logical patience in Pyke and a more epiphanic, visionary thing from Inspector Maigret. “In a few words, the Englishman had said what he had to say, “ we read - and a little later: "Maigret would have had trouble expressing a single idea. He was completely different. He sensed something. He sensed a lot of things, as he always did at the start of an investigation, but he couldn’t have said how that fog of ideas would sooner or later end up clearing." Rest assured, the fog clears in the course of 178 pages.
Simenon (right) pictured with the actor Rupert Davies
In Maigret’s Dead Man, a series of strange phone calls leads the Inspector through the streets of Paris towards a man out of his depth amid a network of merciless criminals. Rowan Atkinson is the latest in a long list of actors - Richard Harris, Michael Gambon and Rupert Davies also - who have taken on the role of the pipe-smoking, uxorious detective. Expect the ITV adaptation of Maigret’s Dead Man in December, following Maigret Sets a Trap which aired Easter Monday last. Both star the 61-year old Atkinson as the Inspector - no laughs this time round.
In the mid-Eighties, Georges Simenon’s crime fictions were selling 300,000 copies a year in the USA alone and their popularity continues apace, helped along by the seemingly endless roll of TV and film adaptations.The celebrated author – who himself joined the Parisian police force in his early twenties - characteristically offered little background on his fictional creations.
However, the following few words are interesting sidelight on how he viewed his best-known character. “My motto, to the extent that I have one, has been noted often enough, and I’ve always conformed to it. It’s the one I’ve given to old Maigret, who resembles me in certain points.....’understand and judge not.’
Georges Simenon (1903-1989): Master of Noir
Paddy Kehoe
