The Man Who Wasn't Maigret: A Portrait of Georges Simenon by Patrick Marnham

 Perhaps the most enduring mark left on Simenon by the occupation of Liege was an ambivalence toward conventional ideas of right and wrong.  This became one of the major themes of the Maigret books; it might almost be called the "message" of the Maigret saga.  On the whole Commissaire Maigret finds criminality easy to understand and adopts a frankly sympathetic attitude towards many of his clients.  His first question is not "Who committed this crime?" but "Why was it committed", and in order to answer, he has to understand the person who committed it.

--Patrick Marnham, The Man Who Wasn't Maigret (Farrar, Straus, Giroux 1993)

I've been reading more of Simenon's Maigret novels (there are seventy-five) lately and, though they are fairly short and compact I have been finding them much more satisfying than most contemporary crime novels.  I think one of the reasons for this is the comment of Simenon's son John: "my father did not believe in evil"; motives in Simenon's novels are often complex and sometimes strangely mysterious. 

How useful the biography of a writer is to a reader of his work is questionable, though Markham finds many influences on Simenon's work in his life, from his relationship to his parents and wives to the influence on Simenon of the occupied countries he lived in during world wars I and II and to the many love affairs he had (he claimed he slept with 10,000 women, while one of his wives said it was more like 1000, often with her approval).  One of the reasons I read biographies of artists is to try to learn how they were able to accomplish so much in spite of all their neuroses and difficulties.  As usual this biography gives little insight into the creative process, with Simenon apparently going into a trance-like state when he wrote.  Simenon learned his craft by writing pulp novels, as many as forty-four a year when he first started; the year Maigret appeared, 1931, Simenon wrote eleven  Maigret novels. Aside from the Maigret novels Simenon also wrote more than 100 novels he called romans durs  "hard" novels, as brilliant as the Maigret novels, though considerably more downbeat. 

Simenon led a turbulent life, sometimes living with three women at a time and moving often, from Belgium to France to the United States, which he liked for a while, until Joseph McCarthy came along and Simenon abandoned his plan to become an American citizen.  His last years were spent in Switzerland where, in 1972, he stopped writing novels and published twenty-two volumes of autobiography, much of it fictionalized; Marnham does a pretty good job of separating the fact from the fiction in these volumes, few of which have been translated into English.

The Maigret novels now all exist in new translations from Penguin. I have my favorites, of course, but the quality is consistently high and I recommend them all.