Possibly apocryphal, the story goes that when Alfred Hitchcock once telephoned Georges Simenon, his assistant answered and promptly informed the legendary director that Georges was otherwise engaged – he had just sat down to write his new novel. Undeterred, Hitchcothe invck replied ‘That’s okay, I’ll wait.’
Such was the prolificacy of the man who wrote over 400 novels – some in his famed Inspector Maigret series, but many other standalones besides, which he often referred to as his romans durs or ‘hard novels’. Not, it should be noted, because they were any more difficult to write – or took any longer to write – but because he considered them to engage with weightier topics and loftier concerns than the more broadly formulaic adventures of the returning detective who made Simenon’s name. To view the Maigret novels in this way does Simenon a great disservice. Yes, there is a certain paint-by-numbers approach to these books – isn’t this largely true of the genre as a whole? – but they are every bit as nuanced, as philosophical, as thoughtful and thought-provoking as Le Main (translated as The Man on the Bench in the Barn) or Le Chat. Simenon was a master of the compact treatise.
Key to the Maigret investigative method is his walking a yard or two in the shoes of not just the victim to learn the circumstances of the crime, but the perpetrator too, ostensibly to understand the killer’s motivations. But that is where the black-and-whiteness of the good guy-bad guy starts and ends. Invariably Maigret finds his victims just as flawed as their killers, and in some cases, he goes further: he sympathises with the killer. Not, necessarily with their crime – he always retains a strong, centred and unwavering moral compass – but with the set of conditions that engendered the killer’s inevitable acts of latent rage. Maigret understood and felt, more keenly than those around him, the socially-produced noose that was forever fastened around many of these poor, downtrodden and disenfranchised individuals. One could lay the blame at their feet, but that was too easy – they, too, were victims of a society to which they would always be outsiders by dint of their birth, their standing or else their education. Simenon wasn’t just interested in a body and who put it there, but in the economic and cultural headwinds, not to mention the governments and institutions, that loaded the gun.
The killers are often complex people, with profound interiorities and divergent psychologies. And that, for Simenon is the real puzzle. As Scott Bradfield wrote in his NYT article, ‘Maigret rarely solves crimes; instead he solves people.’ In some strange sense, the crime at the heart of each novel is the MacGuffin – it’s the characters we’re really pursuing.
Take La Tête d’un homme (A Man’s Head), among the earlier crop of Simenon’s Maigret novels. Joseph Huertin, a slow-witted delivery boy, faces the gallows for the twin murders of the wealthy American Mme. Henderson and her maid. Certain of his guilt, all others have long deserted Huertin. Maigret, however, senses there is more at play here. And it’s not often that our hero is wrong. Sure enough, Maigret follows his intuition, rather than clues in the strictest sense, and bags the real culprit, shining a spotlight, in turn, on a special kind of desperation at the heart of Parisian life. But Maigret does not rejoice in the capture and inevitable sentencing; his reward is resolution, a greater understanding of what makes us tick, and an ice-cold beer and sandwiches from the Brasserie Dauphine.
Simenon once said of his famous creation: “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.”
Such is the power of a nuanced, well-rounded, and iconic character that in Maigret, Simenon had a detective he could take (almost) anywhere. To luxury hotels, seaside resorts, ramshackle slums and country piles. But more than that: Simenon could take Maigret into the deepest and darkest recesses of the human psyche. And that’s a trip worth taking, for a reader or a writer. We can all learn a great deal from the godfather of crime fiction – not just about the lives of others, but about ourselves too.
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