This year happens to mark 75 years since publication of the first two Maigret romans policiers out of the 76 Georges Simenon would write.
I picked up a few second hand a couple of years ago, and was dazzled by the tight form, the suspense, the minimal vocabulary. Dazzled too by the fact that in the last three quarters of a century, everyone from Elizabeth Bowen to Muriel Spark, from Thornton Wilder to Joyce Carol Oates, seems to have been a fan, and here was I, coming along so late in the day to a great writer. Immune to modesty, Simenon saw himself as the Balzac of his place and time. Certainly he shared some of Balzac's genius. As Wilder put it: "The gift of narration is the rarest of all gifts in the 20th century. Simenon has that."
Born in Liège, Belgium, into a French-speaking family, from the start Georges Simenon could write six short novels a year and match quantity with quality. According to his most recent English biographer, Patrick Marnham, by the time Simenon retired from fiction in 1973, there were 76 Maigrets and 127 "tough novels." On the surface these romans durs were rather like old black and white B-movies, steeped in underworld atmosphere, but with a rich understanding of human nature beneath.
Simenon never did any research and never got stuck. The plot apparently sprang to mind complete and the story was tied up in a couple of weeks, so he could spend most of the year not writing. His fiction received so much praise in his lifetime that he never bothered with an agent. Great publishers beat a path to his door and he dictated his own terms. In 1951 alone he sold over 3m books worldwide. André Gide was an early champion in France. Another celebrated literary novelist, François Mauriac, told Simenon simply: "You have the gift of creating living people in a living atmosphere."
The British began to muster the same enthusiasm around 1940, when the first Maigret novels appeared in translation in the famous green and white Penguin "mystery and crime" series. "One is struck by the subtle but amazingly successful evocation of town and countryside, by the economy of words and descriptions, and by the psychological accuracy of the character-drawing," wrote one critic. John Banville, 2005 Booker prize winner, recently called Simenon one of the "greatest writers of the 20th century."
Simenon had the right apprenticeship for a popular novelist. A bright boy with a gift for words, he early on skipped classes and turned to the school of life. At 16 he was a star journalist on a local paper. Finding he could write anything, he turned in his spare time to fiction and published his first novel aged 18. Two years later, leading a hand-to-mouth existence in Paris with his new wife, he sent stories to a daily newspaper where the literary editor, the writer Colette, accepted one, but turned many others down. "No literature!" she warned. She meant: nothing fancy, no writing for its own sake. He took that advice and never looked back. Among other things he is said to have trimmed his vocabulary to a rudimentary 2,000 words. It's certainly the case that anyone with a fair knowledge of French can read him in the original.
Of course, his life (1903-89) fed his achievement. From his youth in occupied Belgium, which taught him about the murky business of collaboration and survival, through his thousands of brief affairs, his complicated family arrangements, his experience of the second world war in occupied France, and above all from the lasting psychological pressures of his father's early death and his mother's fear of poverty, he had a rich stream of material on tap.
But Muriel Spark pinned down a great deal of what made Simenon "marvellously readable—lucid, simple" when she singled out his capacity to be "absolutely in tune with that world he creates." Carefully nurtured intuition was his skill and his art. That, in turn, was the gift he gave to Maigret, and so, subtly, each novel not only revealed its crime but showed how it was humanly imaginable.
The ability to make the right connections followed from the detective's "terrible patience." From the first pair of novels in 1931, Maigret was a giant presence, hanging around; pipe-smoking, eating and drinking to fill in the time. He never stood outside a case to try logically to deduce what happened. Instead, in Paris, Antibes, New York, wherever he found himself, he immersed himself in his suspect's world and lingered until, often sweating and overcome with nausea, or dreaming violent dreams, or waking suddenly, he could feel the crime happening.
The novels, apart from these moments of revelation, are studies in the gentle art of watching the world go by. But, at a deeper level, they are about the relation of willpower to understanding and truth. Typically Simenon's criminals lacked willpower and Maigret, often described as "irresolute" while trying to solve a human puzzle, had a technique which bound him to them. There was a theory lurking here, which he almost passed on to his underlings verbatim, but preferred in the end simply to show. It was that exercise of will, the presence of a strong personality, gets in the way of truth-seeking. Not for nothing does Simenon describe Maigret as pataud—like a clumsy dog with big paws. He comes to a problem obliquely, more with his body than his mind, and that's his trick.
The Maigret novels are about wrapping up cases on the books of the police judicière. But, as so often with art, they're also about themselves. The Simenon message, repeated 76 times, although you'll only find it if you're looking for it, is that novelists and policemen, or at least policemen in Simenon novels, have to ditch their prejudices and abandon their intentions if they want to grasp what really makes other people tick. Few novelists can do it, which is why the best admire the Belgian master.
