Georges Simenon

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Here is a portrait I made recently.

Simenon was a Belgian writer.

Ecoline on paper.
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Belgian-born French novelist, one of the most skilled and prolific writers of detective fiction. Simenon is best known as the creator of Paris police detective Inspector MAIGRET. He turned out 84 Maigret mysteries and 136 other novels. Over 500 million copies of Simenon's books have been printed and translated into 50 languages.

Georges Simenon was born in Liège on 13 February 1903, the first son of Désiré Simenon and Henriette Brüll. Because his birthday was Friday the 13th, his superstitious aunt changed the date to February 12. Simenon's father was an accountant for an insurance company. He died in 1921. At the age of sixteen Simenon was forced by his father's ill health to abandon his studies. He worked as a baker and a bookseller and started his career as a writer at a local newspaper, Gazette de Liège. This experience provided the young Simenon with the perfect apprenticeship. At the age of seventeen he published his first novel. He joined a group of painters, writers, and dilettantes who called themselves La Caque (The Cask) and spent time drinking, trying drugs, and discussing philosophy and art. Later he returned to the group and several of its members in the novel LE PENDU DE SAINT PHOLIEN (1931). In 1923 he married Règine Renchon, a young artist, whom he had met in Liège. The marriage ended in divorce.

In 1922 Simenon went to Paris, publishing short stories and popular novels under almost two dozen different pen names. He worked as an office clerk for a right-wing writer, and was a secretary to a wealthy aristocrat, the Marquis de Tracy. Simenon lived in France from 1923 to 1939, during which time his writing turned into an industry of novels. Between 1923 and 1933 Simenon produced more than 200 books of pulp fiction under several pseudonyms. From 1931 to 1934 Simenon wrote 19 Maigret novels. After a pause of 8 years, Maigret returned again in 1942 with three new stories.

The social life of Paris provided for the successful author innumerable sources of delight. In 1925 Simenon saw the legendary Josephine Baker dance in the famous show, La revue Nègre, and they became close friends. In 1928 and 1929 he sailed the rivers and canals of France, Holland, and Northern Europe, writing all the while. These journeys supplied material for several of his novels, among them LE CHARRETIER DE LA ' PROVIDENCE ' (1931). Throughout the 1930s Simenon lived in many houses, he cruised the Mediterranean, and travelled in Lapland, Africa, and eastern Europe. In Odessa Simenon saw starving people and was followed by the secret police. Simenon's LES GENS D'EN FACE (1933), an anti-communist novel, was considered by André Gide an accurate description of the Russian atmosphere.

Between the years 1934 and 1935 Simenon made an around-the-world cruise. "I have never been able to write a novel about a country which I have known only as a tourist, and I have never traveled around the world with a notebook in hand, jotting down impressions." (preface in Simenon: An American Omnibus, 1967)

The first novel, which Simenon published under his own name, was PIETR-LE-LETTON (1930, The Strange Case of Peter the Lett), where he introduced to the public Inspector Maigret. The character was apparently modelled on the author's great-grandfather. In this and the following books Simenon combined his moral objectivity and psychological insight to create characters that are wholly credible. Another series character, Jean Dollent, "the Little Doctor", appeared in short stories, which have been collected in The Little Doctor (1943). In the early 1930s Simenon produced eighteen Maigret books, but abandoned the character for eight years. By the end of the 1930s he was the favorite of such writers as André Gide, Ford Madox Ford (who mentions him in Vive Le Roy), and Robert Graves.

In 1939 Simenon was appointed commissioner for Belgian refugees at La Rochelle. When the German army invaded France, Simenon settled in Fontenay. During the years of occupation he continued writing and enjoyed success in the film business - under Nazi bureaucracy nine films based on his text were produced.

After the war Simenon found himself in the lists of collaborators. In 1945 he moved to Canada and from there to Tucson, Arizona. He spent the late 1940s and early 1950s in the United States. In New York Simenon met the bilingual young French-Canadian woman, Denyse Ouimet, with whom he had one of the great love affairs of his life. The relationship inspired the novel TROIS CHAMBRES Á MANHATTAN (1946). He married Denise in 1949 and moved with his new family to Connecticut, where he lived for the next five years. During this period he wrote several novels with an American background. Belle (1954) was a story of murder in a small Connecticut community. The Hitchhiker (1955) explored a battle of wills between husband and wife, and The Brothers Rico (1954) was a Mafia story. Simenon's unusually hard-boiled style echoes the work of Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain.

"Call me Mike."
But there was no mistake about it. This was no license to get chummy with him. It applied to the respectful familiarity which in certain groups, in certain small towns, surrounds those of importance.

He looked like a politician, a state senator, or a mayor, or like someone who bosses the political machine and makes judges and sheriffs alike. He could have played any role of these parts in the movies, especially in a Western, he knew, and it was obvious that it pleased him, that he kept polishing up the resemblance.
"How about a highball?" he proposed, pointing at the bottle.
"I never drink."
(from The Brothers Rico)

Simenon's semi-autobiographic, naturalistic PEDIGREE (1948) was exceptionally long compared to most novels, over five hundred pages. Simenon wrote the book after a doctor misread an x-ray and told him that he had less than two years to live. The book was meant for his young son so that he would be able to know about his father when he grew up. However, Simenon still had 41 years ahead.

In 1955 Simenon returned to Europe and settled eventually in Lausanne, Switzerland. Beneath the illusion of a happy household, Simenon's marriage was deteriorating and his family disintegrating. He had started a sexual relationship with Teresa Sburelin, a new servant, who became his devoted companion. In 1964 Denise entered a psychiatric clinic, never returning to Epalinges, their home. Her bitter memoir of the marriage, Un Oiseau pour le chat, was published in 1978. Simenon's daughter Marie-Jo began the first of several psychiatric treatments in 1966, but ultimately in 1978 she committed suicide. In MÉMOIRES INTIMES I-II (1981) Simenon blamed Denise for her death.

The critic and awarded mystery writer H.R.F. Keating selected My Friend Maigret (1949) and Maigret in Court (1960) in 1987 for his list of the one hundred best crime novels. Maigret's method of investigation doesn't rely on vast amounts of police work. He operates more on the basis of intuition. His method also has many similarities with hermeneutics – the theory of interpretation, of understanding the significance of human actions, utterances, products, and institutions. In My Friend Maigret a small-time crook is murdered on the island of Porquerolles off the Mediterranean coast. Maigret is sent to investigate. He collects impressions, and tries to see behind the facts that the local inspector offers him. Thoughts start to rise up from his subconscious. "He sensed a whole heap of things, as he always did at the start of a case, but he couldn't have said in what form this mist of ideas would sooner or later resolve itself." And in the end he finds the answer.

A number of actors have impersonated Maigret in films and television series. Simenon's favorite was Jean Renoir's brother Pierre, who appeared in La Nuit du carrefour (1932). The director had happy memories of the film. His nephew Claude made his debut as a cameraman, Jacques Becker was producer, and the famous film critic and historian Jean Mitry was part of the crew. The film has been praised for its poetic atmosphere full of fog, rain, and car-lights. Jean Gabin played the inspector in Maigret tend un piège (1957), Maigret et l'affaire Saint-Fiacre (1959), and Maigret voit rouge (1963), carrying off the role with appropriate world-weariness. Simenon's stories have also inspired a number of other films, including L'ainé des Ferchaux (1963), directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, starring Charles Vanel, Stéfania Sandrelli, and Jean-Paul Belmondo. The story was remade in 2000 as a television series, directed by Bernard Stora. Belmondo played the old millionaire, Dieudonné Ferchaux.

The Bibliothèque Simenon opened in Liège in 1961, and in 1966 a statue of Commissaire Maigret was unveiled in Delfzijl, Holland. The last Maigret, MAIGRET ET MONSIEUR CHARLES, was published in 1972, and the next year Simenon announced his retirement. In the following years he published only non-fiction of an autobiographical sort. In his autobiography QUAND J'ÉTAIS VIEUX (1971, When I Was Old) Simenon claimed to have had sex with more than twenty thousand different women. LETTRE À MA MÈRE (1974) examined his relationship to his mother. Simenon died in Lausanne, on September 4, 1989. He left instructions at his death that his body be cremated without any ceremony and that his ashes, mingled with his beloved daughter's, be scattered beneath a huge tree in the back garden of his last house in Lausanne.


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