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Georges Simenon

A Dozen Views of the Fall of France, June 1940

I recently spent the equivalent of two days listening to the audiobook version of The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940 William L. Shirer’s massive follow-up to his classic The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. At over 1,000 pages, the book will satisfy all but the most obsessive reader’s appetite for the workings of French politics between 1870 and 1940. And if there is one resounding criticism I’d make, it’s that Shirer’s is very much an old-school history. This is history from the top down, as seen (and then exhaustively recounted in memoirs) by the politicians and generals at the highest levels of the government and military. With few exceptions, we get little sense of how the events of May and June 1940 were experienced by ordinary people.

One reason I find this episode fascinating is that it represented, in a matter of weeks, at times even just days, the complete overturn of the status quo of millions. At every level from the individual to the national, things that were taken for granted were torn away or fell apart. For me at least, I cannot read an account from this time without wondering, What would I have done? How would I have reacted? Would I have acted selflessly or heroically? Or panicked and clogged the roads like thousands of other refugees? I hope I never have to learn that answers to these questions, but here is a selection of 12 different ways in which people responded.

• Divided Loyalties: A Scotswoman in Occupied France, by Janet du Tessier Cros
Janet Griegson was a Scotswoman who married François Teissier du Cros, a physicist, in 1930. She found herself in the rural Cevennes region in southern France with her husband on military service in May 1940. In this memoir of her experiences during the war, she recalls first hearing the news of the invasion:

A little beyond Mandiargues some soldiers stopped the bus and came on board. They told us that their leave had been cancelled because at that very moment the Nazi troops were pouring into Holland. A buzz of dismay went through the bus. i sat frozen. Something in my mind was rushing desperately hither and thither, hunting for a way out. There was none. My sister Alice was married to a Dutchman and lived in The Hague. What would become of their children and of themselves? What about François? It was the end, the terrible end I had sensed from the beginning….

• Death and Tomorrow (American title: The Germans Came to Paris)(1942), by Peter de Polnay
Peter de Polnay, a Hungarian-born novelist who wrote in English, was living in Paris and enjoying the best of la vie bohème when war broke out. He first felt himself outside the conflict, and even the start of the Blitzkrieg seemed, at first, of little import:

I went to play bridge in the house of an English friend, and at that bridge party only English and Americans were present. They all said that the French were running; I heard the word running the whole afternoon. Now that the Germans are inside France, I suggested, the running will stop. The answer was that the Stukas and the seventy-ton tanks were invincible. But there was Weygand [the marshal commanding the French army], I said. It was a pretty gloomy afternoon, though nobody quite believed that those tanks were really invincible, it was talking of the devil in the hope that the talk would exorcise him.

Death and Tomorrow is a vivid description of the first days of the German occupation of Paris, enriched by the fact that de Polnay seemed to cross paths — and be trusted — by everyone: Germans, French, collaborators, black marketeers, and Resistance members. Eventually, though, his freewheeling ways attracted the attention of the Gestapo and he was forced to flee, making his way to England, the story of which comprises the second half of his book.

• The Train, by Georges Simenon
Twenty years after the fact, the prolific novelist Georges Simenon wrote one of his best novels — Brigid Brophy called it his masterpiece — about the choices people make when their lives are suddenly disrupted. The story opens as a Belgian couple are fleeing their home to escape the Germans. Familiar with the experience of occupation from the First World War, some of their fellow townspeople have decided to stay:

Other people, like us, were walking towards the station, burdened with suitcases and bundles. An old woman asked me if she might put hers on my cart, and she started pushing it along with me….

There was a rather wild look in most people’s eyes, but that was chiefly the result of impatience. Everybody wanted to be off. It was all a matter of arriving in time. Everybody was convinced that part of the huge crowd would be left behind and sacrificed.

Were those who were not leaving taking greater risks? Behind the window-panes, faces were watching the fugitives, and it seemed to me, looking at them, that they were stamped with a sort of icy calm.

The couple become separated in the evacuation and the husband meets a Czech woman who leads him to reconsider where he wants to go with his life. It’s a classic Simenon story, in which one unexpected accident, one step in the wrong direction, sets off a series of events that overturns everything an individual has taken for granted — rather as the fall of France did on a much larger scale.

• Running to Paradise (1943) and Bid the Soldiers Shoot (1955), by John Lodwick
Finding himself in France at the outbreak of the war, John Lodwick joined the French Foreign Legion and was involved in numerous skirmishes as the French and British armies gave way before the Germans. He wrote about the experience twice: first as a novel with his fictional counterpart Adrian Dormant and again, 15 years later, in a memoir that encompassed his time as a prisoner of war, his escape to England, and his work as an agent for the Special Operations Executive in France and the Balkans.
Both books demonstrate that Lodwick, for all his superficial nonchalance, was a veteran of intense combats. In Running to Paradise, he describes the psychological effects of being attacked by Stuka dive bombers:

Both the precision of their aim and the destruction caused by it were intense. The effect of it was moral as well as material. A bomb takes a certain time to fall, and whistles as it drops. The blast and danger of its explosion are as nothing compared to the agonized suspense of these few moments. A man lying with his belly married to the soil or in the shallow shelter of some hole, feels himself annihilated in advance, a grubby penny lying on the counter of eternity. He cannot see. He dare not raise his head. He can only hear, and since the enemy realize this and know the control which his auditory system exercises on his nerves, they fit sirens to their aeroplane engines — sirens, whose mournful wail, like the last breath of a banshee, shall deafen him and curdle his quaking tripes.

• F.S.P.: An N.C.O.’s Description of His and Others’ First Six Months of War, January 1st–June 1st, 1940, by Arthur Gwynn-Browne (1941)
Gwynn-Browne was an NCO assigned to a Field Security Post (a military police unit) with the British Expeditionary Force deployed to France after the German invasion of Poland. He witnessed, therefore, not only the truce-like “Phony War” but the panic and retreat when the German Panzers began driving through Belgium and France. Gwynn-Browne’s might be considered the first modernist account of World War Two, as his prose style shows the clear influence of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein.
In the early days, his unit is assigned to try to manage the masses of refugees filling every passable road leading away from the Germans:

There were hundreds of cars, thousands of refugees. They all looked much the same and one car looked much the same as the next one coming after. On the top there were always the mattresses laid flat on the roof and on them lay blankets pillows eiderdowns rug and these were securely corded and then usually a bicycle and a child’s scooter and sometimes a pram securely corded on top of them. It was hot and dry and it was all right, later on it was cold and wet and then it was not so all right. Inside the cars there was everything the family had and all the women inside all wore little round hats with little veils on them. The children usually there were two or three children they were asleep. There were never any pet animals and the windows were tight shut though it was hot but they were closed. Perhaps it is not kind to say they all looked very bourgeois but they did, they were plump scented and stuffy.

• Europe in the Spring, by Clare Boothe (1940)
Playwright and occasional reporter Clare Boothe (not yet adding husband and Time/Life owner Henry Luce’s name to hers) traveled to Europe in April 1940 expecting to travel around and witness the uneasy stalemate underway since the end of the German and Soviet takeover of Poland. Instead, she found herself caught up in the flight from the German attack, waking up on her first day in Brussels to the news that German troops were crossing into Belgium and German planes bombing its cities and forts. She makes her way to Paris, where she watches as the facade of Parisian sophistication crumbles as the government and army fall apart:

Paris got its information about what France had been doing all day, all night, the way a woman gets hers about what her husband has been up to. You know how a woman says, the split second her husband walks in the door with a carefully arranged smile on his face: “So things have been going badly at the office?” And he says: “My God, how did you know?” And she replies: “Because I know you so well, darling.” That is how Paris, the wife, knew what was happening to France, the husband. All the smiles or frowns on the politicians’ faces when they left their offices, the way military moustaches drooped or bristled at midnight, the inflections of well-known voices saying nothing or something or anything on the radio, on the telephone; the way important. people walked in the street; the way ministry doors were slammed; by the significant silences of a great race of talkers; by a thousand little downward percolating uncensorable gestures and indications, the contagious climate of a mood spread from the top of Paris to the bottom—from clerk to doorman, to domestic, to waiter, to policeman, to taxi-driver, to the people—so that the people of Paris knew from hour to hour how the fate of France fared.

• Assignment to Catastrophe, by Major General Edward L. Spears (1955)
Spears, who grew up in France and had the dual advantages of a fluent mastery of the French language and culture and the trust of Winston Churchill, was appointed as Churchill’s personal representative to French prime minister Paul Reynaud soon after Churchill took over as British prime minister. Assignment to Catastrophe, Spears’ two-volume memoir of the lead-up to the war and of the fall of France, is a fascinating account of the personalities and politics at work in the last days of the Fourth Republic.
Knowing Marshal Pétain from his work as a liaison officer between the British and French forces during World War One, Spears paid a call soon after Pétain’s return from his post as ambassador to Franco’s Spain. He soon realized that the man who was being lauded as the savior of France was senile, ineffectual, and completely unsuited to the task:

Very sadly I said: “What France needs today, Monsieur le Marshal, is another Joan of Arc.” His reaction was startling. Once more he was all animation, his face lit up. “Joan of Arc! Joan of Arc!” he exclaimed, “Have you read my speech on Joan of Arc?” “No, Monsieur le Marechal “Now that is too bad, it should have been sent to you. I made it at Rouen; now when was it, in 1937, ’38? It was an extremely fine speech, I may say. I shall read it to you.”

To my amazement, not to say consternation, he went to some bookshelves between two windows, pulled out one or two bound volumes of typescript, did not find what he wanted, then bent right down to look at the lowest shelves. The effort was considerable, he straightened stiffly, and said: “I shall have it found, it is certainly here,” and, moving back to his desk, rang a bell. In a moment his Chief of Staff, General Bineau, appeared. He was almost as old as his chief (age was a major quality in the Marshal’s eyes) and, I think, very lame.

The problem was explained, and with courteous apologetic haste the General began to hunt for the speech.

It was presently found. “ Je vous remercie ,” said the Marshal, as, adjusting his pince-nez once more, he settled himself in a stiff arm¬ chair with his back to the window.

All I remember about that speech was that it was very, very long and that he read it in a monotone. I cannot recall a single sentence, or even its gist. What I do remember was the terrible sadness I felt as I watched him, a sadness now based on pity for a very old man for whom I had, till so recently, felt the deepest affection and regard. He was infinitely pathetic in his childish satisfaction as he read.

• My First War: An Army Officer’s Journal for May 1940, through Belgium to Dunkirk, by Basil Bartlett (1942)
Like Gwynne-Browne, Basil Bartlett was assigned to an FSP with the B.E.F., but in his case as the commanding officer. My First War is a case study in the incoherence of an army and society in collapse. Macmillan tried to market the book as “British nonchalance and dry humor at its most enchanting,” but what comes across more strongly is a world view consistently failing to take in the magnitude and reality of the chaos it was experiencing.
As his unit approaches Dunkirk, Bartlett asks a Belgian for the name of a good hotel there, “as we’re all tired and feel we’d like a wash and a sleep.” The man looks at him in amazement. He soon discovers why:

Dunkirk was a nasty shock. I knew it had been bombed, but I hadn’t realised quite how seriously. As I entered the town there was a roar of engines overhead. I looked up and saw about thirty pale-green aeroplanes with a black cross on their underwings flying very low above me. There were no airraid shelters to be seen. So I dived down a side-street and hid myself under a stone seat. At that moment the bombs began to fall. Each aeroplane dropped a 500-pound screaming bomb. Then they all scattered hundreds of little delayed-action and incendiary bombs. By a miracle I escaped being hit.
I crawled out feeling rather shaken.

• Strange Defeat, by Marc Bloch
Bloch, one of the leading historians of his time as well as a veteran of World War One, wrote a brief account that combined personal memoir with searching political and social criticism that was published after his execution by the Gestapo in 1944 for his work in the French resistance.
Serving as a fuels officer when his unit was cut off by the German assault in early May, Bloch evaded capture for ten days by disguising himself as … himself:

What, in fact, I did, after standing for a few moments deep in thought on the pavement of that hilly street, was to choose what seemed to me then the simplest, and, in the long run, the safest method of getting away. I went back to the house where I was billeted. There I took off my tunic. My rough serge trousers had nothing particularly military about them. From my landlord, who, with his son, showed, on this occasion, a high degree of courage, I got, without difficulty, the loan of a civilian jacket and tie. Then, after first making contact with an old friend who was a professor at Rennes, I booked a room in one of the hotels. Arguing that the best way to escape being noticed was to retain one’s identity, I put my real name and occupation on the form handed tome by the manager. My grey hairs were sufficient guarantee that no one would suspect the presence of an army officer beneath the outward semblance of so obviously academic a figure?

• The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940, by Lion Feuchtwanger (1941)
Novelist Feuchtwanger and his wife left Germany in 1933 after Hitler came to power, knowing that their status as liberal intellectuals and Jews put them at risk of Nazi persecution. Within two weeks of the German invasion of France in May 1940, however, he was told to report to the internment camp at Les Mille. After several months, he managed to arrange his escape from internment, disguising himself as a woman and making it to Marseilles. There, with the help of American consul Varian Fry, the couple were given passage to New York, where Feuchtwanger wrote this account of his treatment by the Germans.
Feutchwanger wrote of the experience of captivity with thousands of other prisoners in Les Mille:

What I found most difficult about the camp was the fact that one could never be alone, that constantly, day and night, every act, every physical function, eating, sleeping, voiding, was performed in the presence of hundreds of men, men who were talking, shouting, moaning, weeping, laughing, feeding, smacking their lips, wiping their mouths, sweating, smelling, snoring. Yes, we did everything in the most public view, and no one seemed to feel the slightest embarrassment.

• The Fall of Paris, by Ilya Ehrenburg
Ehrenburg spent the late thirties as a Soviet correspondent in Paris (and managed to avoid some of the personal and ethical risks of Stalin’s purges). In response to the fall of France, he quickly wrote a lengthy novel that, like Sartre’s Roads to Freedom trilogy, traced the decay and breakdown of French society and the early impact of the Occupation. In it, he describes the despair of Parisians during the first days under Nazi rule:

All this time the Parisians had been staying indoors. They could not get used to the German soldiers in the streets. In the morning Agnés went shopping. The long queue was silent. The people tried not to think about anything. Searching for a pound of potatoes or a bottle of milk helped to distract their minds. If they talked at all it was about relations who had disappeared one had lost a husband, another a son.

Once an old man in a queue exclaimed: “What about France?”

Nobody answered, but everybody thought: “France is also lost.”

• Troubled Sleep, by Jean-Paul Sartre
In the third volume of his unfinished tetralogy about French society from the Munich crisis of 1938 through the fall of France and the Occupation, The Roads to Freedom, Jean-Paul Sartre follows a group of soldiers as they learn of the Armistice and are rounded up and shipped off to German prison camps. He describes a carload of prisoners watching as the French landscape rolls away from them:

Brunet saw a chateau that was not yet within their range of vision, a chateau in a park, white, and flanked by two pointed towers. A small girl in the park, holding a hoop, stared at them with solemn eyes; it was as though all France, an innocent and outmoded France, through those young eyes was watching them pass. Brunet looked at the little girl and thought of Pétain; the train swept across her gaze, across her own future of quiet games and healthy thoughts and trivial worries, on toward fields of potatoes and factories and armament works, on to the dark, real future of a world of men. The prisoners behind Brunet waved their hands; in all the cars Brunet saw hands waving handkerchiefs; but the child made no response, she only stood there clasping her hoop.

Simenon’s romans Américains

Georges Simenon was one of the world’s most prolific and best-selling authors when he was alive and he remains so today. Few of Simenon’s current readers, however, know that he not only lived in the United States for almost ten years but also set over a dozen novels here. But what’s even more surprising is these novels have appeared in English so haphazardly.

Simenon achieved his tremendous output through tremendous discipline. Despite the fact that he moved from place to place almost constantly, he kept to a strict routine of sitting down to his typewriter each morning, and once there, he wrote at a furious rate. A typical novel might take him two to three weeks. There was at least one Maigret a year, plus two to four of the psychological thrillers he called romans durs, plus countless stories. And if these weren’t enough, he also wrote further works under a variety of pseudonyms throughout the first half of his career.

Simenon claimed that living in the United States was a goal he had set himself as a young man, and soon after the war in Europe ended, he applied for visas for himself, his wife Tigy, and their son Marc. They landed in New York City in October 1945. Knowing almost no English, Simenon quickly hired an American agent and put out a request for a bilingual secretary to help him with his correspondence. He met the first application, a French Canadian woman named Denyse Ouimet, for an interview at a restaurant named Brussels near Central Park. As Denyse later told Simenon biographer Pierre Assouline, “I met him at the Brussels at 1:45. I saw him again at the Drake at 4:45. At 7:00 we were making love.”

Now a party of four, the Simenons headed for Quebec, where at least they avoided the language problem. There, he wrote his first two American novels, both set in New York City.

• Trois chambres à Manhattan (1946); first published in English as Three Beds in Manhattan (1964), translated by Lawrence G. Blochman.

Simenon transposed his first meeting and the early days of his affair with Denyse into this story, with his role played by François Combe, a French actor, and hers by Kay Miller, the estranged wife of a Hungarian count. In her introduction to the NYRB Classics edition of the book, Joyce Carol Oates called it “the most existential of love stories,” and it represented something of turning point for Simenon in that it was his first novel in which sexual passion — which soon became one of his favorite narrative accelerants — was the driving motivation.

But it’s also about Simenon’s romance with Manhattan. The book is filled with scenes that show that even having spent just some weeks in the city, Simenon soaked in countless details. When not in bed with each other, François and Kay spend hours walking:

They were on the street again. No doubt about it, they felt most at home in the street. Their mood changed immediately. The magic, lighthearted comradeship they had found by accident returned the moment they were again caught up in the noise and confusion of traffic.
People were lining up in front of the move theaters. Gaudily uniformed doormen guarded the padded portals of night clubs. They passed them all by. They zigzagged aimlessly through the sidewalk crowds until she turned to him with a smile he recognized instantly. It was the smile that had started everything.

Later, while waiting for Kay to return after a separation, François walks endlessly, the city now devoid of the energy they experienced together:

… the little dark men swarming like ants under the lights, the stores, the movie houses with their garlands of light, the hot-dog stands, the bakeries with their displays of nauseating pastries; the coin machines that played music for you or allowed you to play at rolling balls into little holes that rang bells and lit lights; everything a great city could invent to deceive man’s loneliness…

Simenon may have written Three Beds in Manhattan having scarcely set foot in America, but he managed to produce not only his best romantic novel but also one of his best American ones.

The was filmed in France as Trois chambres à Manhattan in 1965, starring Maurice Ronet and Annie Girardot.

• Maigret à New-York (1946); first published in English as Maigret in New York (1980)

If you’ve read any of Simenon’s Maigret novels, you can guess that the Inspector was far less impressed with New York City than were the lovers of Three Beds in Manhattan. The beer is poor, the streets too noisy, he can’t smoke his pipe in a movie theater, and no one seems to understand why he wants his “little lunch” in the morning. The practice of numbering streets he finds particularly frustrating: “I’ve never had a memory for figures and you people are really tiresome with your numbered streets. Why couldn’t you say Victor Hugo Street, or Pigalle Street, or President-What’s-His-Name Street….?”

The story starts at convoluted and gets messier. There is a missing young man, perhaps the heir to a fortune or perhaps an imposter, a jukebox millionaire who started as a vaudeville musician, elements of the mob (some English editions are called Maigret and New York’s Underground), retired carnival performers and FBI men who aren’t always as helpful as they could be. Despite this, the book remains among the most popular of the many Maigret novels.

• La jument perdue (1947); not yet translated into English.

Simenon wrote this novel (the title could be translated as The Lost Mare Ranch) within weeks of arriving in Tucson, Arizona in September 1947, and he drew upon places and people he discovered there. Jane Eblen Keller, who wrote an extended study of Simenon’s time in Arizona and the books he wrote there for the Journal of the Southwest in 2002, describes it as “one of the few sunny books Simenon wrote,” a tale involving a pair of aging cowboys and a couple of elderly sisters in a town resembling Tucson — although Keller does add that the plot “deals in treachery and sorrow, skullduggery and betrayal, crooked business dealings and corrupt politics.”

• Le Fond de la bouteille (1948); first published in English as The Bottom of the Bottle (1954), translated by Cornelia Schaeffer.

This was the first of the romans Américains I read and I enjoyed it even more when rereading it recently. Simenon wrote the book while renting a house called the Stud Barn in the Santa Cruz Valley near Tumacacori, Arizona, about a fifty miles south of Tucson and just across the border from Nogales, Mexico. There, the eastern bank of the Santa Cruz River was broad and productive, and the area was mostly populated by a few dozen wealthy ranchers. The Simenons — Georges, his wife Tigy, mistress Denyse and son Marc, now joined by their French cook Boule (coincidentally another of Georges’ mistresses — quickly fit into the little community.

The ranchers and their wives enjoyed a relaxed and highly social lifestyle, often gathering at one or another’s large houses for parties that could go on for days — earning the area the nickname of Santa Booze Valley. At times when the river flooded, the eastern bank became completely inaccessible and the ranchers’ parties could then run on for weeks.

This is the situation into which Donald Ashbridge, a convicted murderer and escapee from a prison in Illinois, arrives. He wants money and help from his older brother P.M., a lawyer who’s married a woman with one of the largest ranches in the valley. Donald needs to get across the river and into Mexico, where his wife and children are waiting. But P.M., having built up a reputation of integrity, needs to distance himself from Donald and his own less than respectable upbringing. Meanwhile, the storm rages, the river rises, and the booze spins the party at ever-faster speeds.

The Bottom of the Bottle introduced a theme that appears in most of Simenon’s romans Américains — that of the supposedly upstanding citizen who’s ultimately undone by some fatal flaw rooted in a secret past or association. As long as nothing disturbs the status quo, that secret can remain hidden and inert. But when some catalyst upsets the formula — a brother on the run or a young woman found murdered or being black-balled from the country club — that stability quickly devolves into chaos.

In his Intimate Memoirs, Simenon recalled one concept that struck him while living in America: “In any American town, ‘you have to belong.’ To the community.” He himself admitted that when he was living in Connecticut, he had the illusion that he really belonged. But he also realized, as do his protagonists such as P.M. Ashbridge and Eddie Rico, that the flipside of belonging was ostracism and the ostracized person had not place in the American of the 1950s.

The novel was filmed — partly on location in the Santa Cruz Valley — as The Bottom of the Bottle, starring Joseph Cotten, Van Johnson, and Ruth Roman, in 1956.

• Maigret chez le coroner (1949); first published in English as Maigret at the Coroner’s (1980), translated by Frances Keene.

In Maigret at the Coroner’s, Maigret is less inspector and more witness. He’s essentially dumped in a Tucson coroner’s inquest by an FBI agent he’s visiting on his way across the U.S., and most of the book is devoted to his following the courtroom proceedings, all the while trying both to figure out the case and decipher the odd habits of Americans. The case itself seems straightfoward: a young woman goes out partying on a Saturday night with five airmen from a nearby base and is found dead the next morning. Is it murder, accident, or suicide? We’ll never know, because Simenon ushers Maigret along to his next stop before the inquest closes.

It’s Maigret/Simenon’s observations about American manners and customs that are far more interesting than the crime (if there was one). Such as how they managed to avoid the hangovers that plagued him every time he indulged in American whiskey rather than his beloved beer:

From his first days in New York he had been amazed to see men whom he had left the night before in a state of advanced drunkenness all fresh-faced and, as they said, rarin’ to go the next morning. Then someone had told him their secret. After that, he noted in all the drugstores, in cafés, in bars, the special blue bottle mounted on a wall bracket, its spout down, out of which the proper dose of effervescent powder could be measured. Dropped into a glass to which the barman added water, the compound fizzed and tingled. This was served you as promptly as a morning coffee or a Coca- Cola, and a few minutes after ingesting it the fumes of the alcohol had been dispersed.

Yet why not? Machines for getting drunk, machines for getting over being drunk. They were logical people, after all.

Logical, yes, but this would not be Simenon if he didn’t also hint at the worm at the core. The clean-cut, Power of Positive Thinking-minded American men got that clean-cut look by taking their shirts to the dry cleaners instead of wearing them again and again like any sensible Frenchman. This emphasis on appearances is, to Maigret, just a façade. “He suspected that, at bottom, they suffered the same anxieties as the rest of humanity but that they assumed this happy-go-lucky appearance out of embarrassment.”

The book closes as Maigret’s plane is about to land in Los Angeles, the next stop on his tour. “Whatever would he see now?” he wonders as the book closes.

• Un nouveau dans la ville (1950); not yet translated into English.

Un nouveau dans la ville or A stranger in town is alone among les romans Américains in being set in a seaside town in Maine. As Jane Eblen Keller summarizes the book, the stranger acts a catalyst, unleashing the town’s many dysfunctions. He sets Charlie, the owner of the only bar in town, to wondering about the one foreigner in town, a quiet man called Yougo (he’s thought to be from Yugoslavia), and Charlie’s doubts infect the rest of the town. At the same time, the stranger suggests to Yougo that his situation is at risk, that the town’s latent xenophobia is about to make him its target. Simenon sets up a conflict that ends … well, for that we’ll have to wait for an English translation.

New York Daily News article on Simenon's second marriage, to Denyse Ouimet, in 1950.
New York Daily News article on Simenon’s second marriage, to Denyse Ouimet, in 1950.

• La Mort de Belle (1952); first published in English as Belle (1954), translated by Louise Varèse.

Belle is the first of three novels set in Connecticut, where Simenon settled after divorcing his first wife and marrying Denyse. At the time he wrote the books, Connecticut was within commuting distance of New York City by train but still full of small, quiet towns whose inhabitants could often point out generations of ancestors in the local cemetery. But in some ways, these books are more specific to a time than a place: specific, that is, to the time of blacklisting, McCarthyism, and whisper campaigns. And of course, these were all symptoms of that question Simenon saw Americans asking each other: “Do you belong?”

In the case of Spencer Ashby, the answer to that question is already a little unclear. A teacher at a local exclusive boarding school, he’s become a local artificially, by marrying the daughter of the school’s late headmaster. But when Belle, the daughter of one of his wife’s old friends, staying with the Ashbys temporarily, is found strangled in her bedroom, that artificial link becomes brittle. See, the problem is that Ashby was working in the basement, turning a piece of furniture on his lathe, at the time that Belle must have been murdered.

There’s no evidence of his being involved, no obvious motive. Yet it seems oddly suspicious to everyone. He’s questioned repeatedly by the police … and let go. Is it just a matter of time before they find the evidence? The doubt is enough to make the townspeople keep their distance: “The newspaper dealer was gaping at him as if he came from another planet; and two customers, who only came in for their papers and out again, cast a curious glance in his direction.”

And more than that — and this is really where Simenon excels in his dissections of his protagonists’ psyches — Ashby begins to doubt himself. “Why, not being guilty of anything, did he have a feeling of guilt?” The fragile props of his comfortable life begin to weaken, to give way. Whether Ashby has already committed some sin or only committed the sin of inaction, his self-doubt ultimately becomes a propelling force and drives him forever out of his comfortable inertia. Simenon plays out his drama quietly, subtly, simplying adding one straw after another until something catastrophic happens.

• Les Frères Rico (1952); first published in English as The Brothers Rico (1954), translated by Ernst Pawel.

The Brothers Rico demonstrates that Simenon had learned quite a bit about the workings of organized crime during his time in the U.S.. Eddie Rico is, to all appearances, a prosperous fruit and vegetable broker somewhere in central Florida. In reality, he’s a local boss, running the gambling and prostitution operations in his area while keeping the local sheriff on his payroll. It’s a nice, quiet affair, one that keeps him in good with the big bosses in New York without forcing him to get his hands dirty.

Eddie doesn’t really have the appetite for the rough side of the business: “He was never armed. The only gun he owned was in the drawer of his night table. As for fighting, he had too much of a horror of blows and of blood for that. He had fought but once in his his, when he was sixteen, and the blood running from his nose had made him sick.”

His brothers Gino and Tony, on the other hand, are suspected of being involved in a hit on a mob boss in Brooklyn. Which becomes a problem for Eddie when Gino shows up in Florida (note the parallel with The Bottom of the Bottle). He soon disappears again after realizing that Eddie is too afraid of his higher-ups to take a risk. Unfortunately, those higher-ups then enlist Eddie in tracking down his brothers.

Eddie knows that he’s playing the Judas goat. All he has to do is locate at least one of his brothers and then step out of the way and let the professionals do the rest: “It was routine. Long ago this kind of operation had been perfected like the rest, and by now they were performed according to an almost inalterable ritual. It was best to have executioners who, coming from elsewhere, were unknown in this area.” So, he does as he’s told, knowing he’ll be able to return to his quiet, comfortable life in Florida. Only without his soul: no one gets away with murder in a Simenon, even if by proxy.

The Brothers Rico was filmed in 1957, directed by Phil Karlson and starring Richard Conte as Eddie Rico.

• Feux rouges (1953); first published in English as The Hitchhiker (1957) and Red Lights (1967), translated by Norman Denny.

Red Lights is Simenon’s version of The Lost Weekend. Steve Hogan meets his wife for a couple of drinks before they hit the road one Friday evening, intending to pick up their kids from summer camp in New England. But it’s hot and rainy and the traffic is terrible and Steve just needs a drink or two more to get him through hours of sitting in traffic. And so he stops at a roadside bar.

The problem is, Steve is a blackout drunk. Or, as he puts it, “he goes into a tunnel”: “an expression of his own, for his private use, which he never used in talking to anyone else, least of all to his wife.” His wife refuses to go along and heads to take a Greyhound bus to the camp. Steve ignores her, walks into the bar, and the next morning, wakes up on the roadside in his car with a flat tire, his trunk rifled through, and a vague memory of having given a ride to an ex-con named Sid.

What’s worse, he has no idea where his wife is. And that’s where the nightmare really begins. Once again, Simenon looks behind the façade of the happy, normal American life:

For thirty-two years, nearly thirty-three, he had been an honest man; he had followed the tracks, as he had proclaimed last night with so much vehemence, being a good son, good student, employee, husband, father, and the owner of a house on Long Island; he had never broken any law, never been summoned before any court and every Sunday morning he had gone to church with his family. He was a happy man. He lacked nothing.

Then where did they come from, all those things he said when he’d had a drink too many and started by attacking Nancy before assailing society as a whole? They had to spring from somewhere. The same phenomenon occurred each time, and each time his rebellion followed exactly the same course.

For Simenon, a momentary lapse of judgment is never an isolated incident. There is always an underlying flaw, some fundamental character defect that just needs the right — or the wrong — set of circumstances to reveal its full capacity for destruction.

• Crime impuni (1954); first published in English as The Fugitive (1955), translated by Louise Varèse.

The Fugitive, which has also been published as Account Unsettled is only part romans Américains. The first half is set in Simenon’s native city of Liege in Belgium. Elie, a student rooming with Madame Lange and her daughter, becomes obsessed with revenge when a Romanian student named Michel Zograffi moves in and becomes the pampered pet of the household — and the daughter’s lover. Elie plots to murder the man and flees the city when he thinks he has. After years on the run, he makes his way to Bisbee, Arizona, where he runs the town’s best hotel as Mr. Craig. The plot hinges on the highly improbable coincidence that Michel (now Michael) Zograffi one day wanders in, bearing the scars of the murder attempt but now a wealthy investor come to bail out Bisbee.

The most plausible element of the story draws upon Simenon’s observations of the copper mining business in Bisbee, which then centered on the Copper Queen Mine. By the late 1940s, conventional tunnel mining was proving unproductive and open pit mining had not yet begun. Simenon postulated the collapse of the mine and the town:

It was as though the city were dying, the tip-trucks that at certain places ran along cables over the streets were now stationary near the pylons and the four tall oven chimneys at the far end of the valley no longer wore their crowns of greenish smoke.

It happened from one day to the next when the machines, which for twenty years had been boring into the red earth of the mountain, scooping out a gigantic crater, and uncovered a subterranean lake, the existence of which no one had suspected.

Bisbee was able to postpone its decline for a few decades by switching to open pit mining, but the city now relies more on tourism than industry to survive. As far as the book itself, however, I’d rate it the weakest of the lot, a story that might have fared better had Simenon left his characters on the other side of the Atlantic.

• L’Horloger d’Everton (1954); first published in English as The Watchmaker of Everton (1957) and The Clockmaker (1977), translated by Norman Denny.

In The Watchmaker of Everton, Simenon’s favored theme of guilt through inaction is played out in the form of a good father and a bad son. Dave Galloway, the quiet watch repairman of the title, a single father, learns that his son Ben and his girlfriend have stolen a car, and killed its driver, and run off into the night. When Ben is eventually caught and arrested several states away, he shows no remorse and no interest in talking to his father. Which, of course, leads the police — and Galloway’s neighbors — to wonder: how could a father not know he was raising a monster? “Do you know your son well, Mr. Galloway?” the police ask. Was he perhaps not quite the dutiful father everyone thought he was? And if so, what else might he be guilty of?

Galloway asks himself the same questions. Was this due, in part, to the fact that his own father had died when he was young, that he’d hated the stepfather his mother married? Did his flaws drive off Ben’s mother when the boy was just a toddler? The Watchmaker of Everton is an almost agonizing example of Simenon’s gift for pulling on one well-chosen loose thread.

Bertrand Tavernier filmed the novel as L’Horloger de Saint-Paul starring Philippe Noiret in 1974.

• La Boule noire (1955); first published in English as The Rules of the Game (1988), translated by Howard Curtis.

Walter Higgins, manager of the local supermarket in Williamson, Connecticut, father of four (with another on the way), school board treasurer and assistant secretary of the Rotary Club, finds his application to the local country club has been rejected — for the second time. Higgins understands the real message behind this decision: “They were telling him he wasn’t worthy of belonging to the community.” He begins to question everything around him, begins to speculate on silent conspiracies against him, on hushed conversations held behind his back.

And, of course, this being Simenon, there are reasons why Higgins might be insecure about his place in the community. Or rather, one reason: he was born poor. He grew up in a tenement, often having to fend for himself while his mother went out drinking. His real fear is that the country club men can smell the poverty he’d managed to escape.

Unlike P.M. Ashbridge or Eddie Rico, Walter Higgins doesn’t fall apart through this crisis. His resolution is more French than American: he falls into cynicism:

He didn’t have all the details worked out yet, but he was sure he was on the right track. The reason people thought he didn’t count was because he didn’t know the rules of the game. Yes, it was a game — like the games of his childhood. He hadn’t known that, maybe because he’d had to start too young, or too low, he, the son, as his mother said sarcastically, of Louisa and that scum Higgins.

But that wasn’t the main thing. What was important was to conform to the rules, certainly, but most of all, to know it was all a game.

• La main (1968); first published in English as The Man on the Bench in the Barn (1970), translated by Moura Budberg. Also published as The Hand (2016), translated by Linda Coverdale.

Written over a decade after Simenon left the U.S., The Man on the Bench in the Barn takes the theme of guilt by inertia of Belle and refines it down to a cold existential minimalism. Two couples get stuck in a blizzard near one of their houses. One of the men gets separated from the other three and doesn’t make it to the house. After some wait, the other husband — Donald Dodd (another lawyer (viz. P. M. Ashbridge), another artificial local (viz. Spencer Ashby)) — is sent to look for him. Already exhausted, he quickly gives up. But rather than simply return and admit his failure, he enters the barn near his house, where he sits for an hour or so, smoking.

“All the time I had been in the barn, on the red bench, I had chain-smoked, lighting one cigarette after another, dropping the butts
on the ground and stamping them out with my foot. I had smoked at least ten.” That’s it. That’s the sum of his crime. Except that when the storm abates and the authorities are notified, Dodd goes back to the barn and see that the cigarette butts are gone. Which can only mean one thing: his wife knows.

And that is all Simenon needs to let the unraveling begin. For Dodd has built around him the same façade that Maigret had detected in Arizona: “It made him think of too tidy a garment, too well washed and pressed.” In Dodd’s case — and he is only first-person narrator I’ve encountered in a Simenon — “The truth is that I wanted to have everything run smoothly and orderly around me.”

David Hare adapted The Man on the Bench in the Barn for the stage as The Red Barn in 2016.

The sum of Simenon’s Romans Américains, one could argue, is enough to earn him a place among the best American novelists of his generation. He could certainly claim to be — to steal something A. J. Liebling once said of himself — faster than anyone better and better than anyone faster. And we have to look back to Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter to find such bitter criticism of American mores and concepts of sin. It’s a shame that it’s a body of work still so incompletely represented in English.

Note: Simenon’s English language publishers have long been fond of bundling his books together. As a result, there are a number of compilations worth looking for if you’re interested in reading any of these novels:

  • Violent Ends, comprising Belle and The Brothers Rico. Hamish Hamilton, 1954.
  • Tidal Wave, comprising Belle, The Brothers Rico, and The Bottom of the Bottle. Doubleday, 1954.
  • Danger Ahead, comprising Red Lights and The Watchmaker of Everton. Hamish Hamilton, 1955.
  • An American Omnibus, comprising Belle, The Brothers Rico, The Hitchhiker, and The Watchmaker of Everton. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967.

The Wreck Out on the Highway: Novels and Auto Accidents

The wreckage of James Dean's Porsche, September 30, 1955
The wreckage of James Dean’s Porsche, near Cholame, California, September 30, 1955

It only takes a second. One moment, everything’s fine; the next, everything’s shattered. A friend of mine said her father once told her, handing over the keys to the family car, “When you get behind that wheel, you’ve put your finger on the trigger of a loaded gun.” For decades, “Road injury” has, according to the World Health Organization, been one of the top 10 causes of death worldwide. As irrational as America’s obsession with gun ownership is, the fact remains that most of us don’t own one and gun violence affects far fewer of our lives than death and injury from automobile accidents.

It’s the dramatic potential — and here the meaning of potential in mechanics is also relevant — in an automobile accident that has tended more than a few novelists to use it as a catalyst or centerpiece. It’s probably no coincidental that most of these novels appeared between the late 1940s and mid-1960s: these were the years when American cars were big, fast, and almost completely lacking in any safety measures aside from the driver’s attention and skill. Freeways hadn’t yet overtaken two-lane blacktop highways as the primary conduit for travel of any distance, and any kid with memories from those days will be able to recall wincing as soon as their dad started to move out to pass some truck or car driving too slow for his taste.

Covers of The Descent by Fritz Peters

One of the first of these novels was Fritz Peter’s The Descent (1952). Peters spent his teenage years living in the loose community of followers around the mystic George Gurdjieff, arriving not long after Gurdjieff suffered a near-fatal car accident outside Paris and often wheeling him around the grounds in those first months — one of the memories recounted in his Boyhood with Gurdjieff (1964). It’s not surprising, then, that his experiences with Gurdjieff and the philosopher’s interest in man’s ability to control his destiny led him to use a multi-car accident on a mountain highway in New Mexico as an instrument for illustrating how its outcome might or might not be affected by the actions or thoughts of its victims. Peters captured the disruptive effects of an accident:

Reality, the fundamental, basic reality of life, had been imposed upon everyone involved in the accident for at least a short time. The dreams, illusions and enchantments, the superficial aims and purposed, desires and wishes, of the victims and the spectators were stripped away by the shock, leaving only the human essentials. The veneer of civilization that passes for human dignity had — for a time — ceased to exist.

Peters takes a Ship of Fools/Grand Hotel approach, leading up to the event through the eyes of a dozen or more of the people involved — victims as well as those who have to clean up the mess. For some, the accident quickly becomes a faint memory or statistic, but for those responsible and injured — physically or emotionally — their lives “continue to reverberate to the consequences.”

Covers of The Accomplices by Georges Simenon

Joseph Lambert, the rich businessman who kills a busload of school children when he’s focusing on the hand up his mistress’s skirt than the one of the wheel of his Citroen in Georges Simenon’s The Accomplices (1955), has his own sense of predestination in the first moments after the impact:

It was brutal, instantaneous. And yet he was neither surprised nor resentful, as if he had always been expecting it. He realized in a flash, as soon as the horn started screaming behind him, that the catastrophe was inevitable and that it was his fault.

As Simenon was often wont to do, he takes morbid pleasure in compounding the sins involved in his hero’s downfall. Not just a hit-and-run accident, but adultery, corruption, cover-up, collusion, and good old-fashioned hypocrisy. The sinister possibilities of the situation, in the hands of a master of human fallibility, make The Accomplices one of Simenon’s all-time best romans dur.

Covers of Juice by Stephen Becker

In Juice (1958), on the other hand, Stephen Becker’s focus is less on the psyche and more on the system. When Joe Harrison, heading home after three martinis and feeling no pain, runs down and kills a pedestrian on his way home, the system of business and justice in Southern California kicks in. The head of a chain of newspapers and television stations, Joe is in too prominent a position for those with a stake in his reputation to sit idle. The chairman of his board steps in, hires an expensive Hollywood lawyer, and mounts a campaign of public and private persuasion — the “juice” of the title — to swing a verdict of innocence. Becker caves in to his sense of justice in the end, which prevents Juice from being quite as juicy as it could have been.

Covers of Be Silent Love by Fan Nichols

Fan Nichols is an unjustly neglected woman “hard case” novelist who had a unique take on a hit-and-run story in Be Silent Love (1960) (also known by its unsubtle pulp paperback title The Girl in the Death Seat). Here, the focus is on the passenger, not the driver or the victim. Riding alongside her married boyfriend on the way to their weekend hideaway along the Hudson, Kay Hubbard begins to realize that adultery isn’t the worst thing he’s capable of after he clips a teenager and decides to drive away, hoping that no one has seen the accident. For a while, she plays along — it was her car, after all — but gradually understands the inevitable domino effect of compounded lies.

Ironically, though, Nichol’s most convincing character is the boyfriend, David Drake, a mass market paperback version of Richard Yates’ Frank Wheeler from Revolutionary Road. On the one hand, he’s full of his own superiority, smugly satisfied that he has managed both to wed a Congressman’s daughter and to bed a gorgeous redheaded girlfriend. On the other, no matter how high up the ladder he might rise, he can never stop looking down in fear:

Everybody was jealous of his success and he had to fight for what he wanted; he had always had to fight everybody, the ones trying to pull him down, step on him, knife him, crush him, all the bottom dogs of the world after him, snapping at his heels to stop him from climbing a ladder they could never, never climb.

Unfortunately, to resolve the predicament she’s created, Nichols has to turn Drake into a psychokilling machine and plausibility flies out the door by the third or fourth murder-to-cover-up-the previous-murder. Well, at least the pages fly by.

Covers of Accident by Elizabeth Janeway

In Elizabeth Janeway’s The Accident (1964), the young spoiled son of a wealthy importer runs into a tree at 97 miles per hour. He walks away with a few scratches; his college friend in the passenger seat is disabled for life. The accident sparks a previously faint sense of conscience in the young man. His family, on the other hand, responds in a variety of unhelpful ways: denial (his mother); corruption (his father); abandonment (his father again). Janeway introduces the wreck into their lives like a tiny drop of acid on a set of poorly-finished welds, and soon the connections are all coming apart: the center cannot hold when there’s nothing there in the first place. The New York Times gave the book to Frederick C. Crews, hot off his moralistic bestseller, The Pooh Perplex, and his verdict was predictably castigating. He called The Accident a “very adult soap opera” and found it typical of the genre of soft-hearted liberal literature whose “distinctive aspect … is its morbid sympathy for human weakness; any weakness will do.” Janeway, whose Powers of the Weak cries out to be rediscovered as a guide to help us rebalance the allocation of power and navigate out of the mess America’s in, was anything but soft-hearted, but Crews wasn’t the first or last man with an agenda to employ something a woman had written as a soapbox to hector from.

Covers of The Pursuit of Happiness by Thomas Rogers

Though published just four years after The Accident, Thomas Rogers’ The Pursuit of Happiness (1968) in some ways seems the more dated book. There are more than a few parallels between the two novels. In both, the driver at fault is a college student and son of a wealthy family. Janeway’s Steven Benedict destroys the life of his friend; Rogers’ William Popper kills a black woman on the streets of Chicago while’s chatting away with his girlfriend. Both men take responsibility, if not immediately — Popper going to jail for manslaughter, though he eventually decides to escape to Mexico. Both families respond in a variety of ways — protective, abetive, supportive.

But The Pursuit of Happiness is very much a novel of its particular time: 1968. William Popper’s classmates would be marching against Mayor Richard Daley’s police a few months later and the living rooms of his parents and aunts and uncles would be filled with images of dead soldiers in Vietnam and race riots in Watts and Detroit. Rogers took his epigraph from the Nichomachean Ethics: “There is a general assumption that the manner of a man’s life is a clue to what he on reflection regards as the good — in other words, happiness.”

This book came out around the time that you could buy a poster with Charles Schultz’s Peanuts character Linus and the slogan, “Happiness is a Warm Blanket.” And that, in the end, appears to have been William Popper’s own definition. The book is unquestionably well-written, well-constructed. It’s a classic of a certain spare, dispassionate style of fiction. Marian Engel found it “a novel remarkably free of cant,” wrote that the book “gains its stature from its honesty, its truth to patterns of speech and feeling, its accurate and free rendering of the conundrums of human relationships”: “There is no clumsy exposition; there are no purple passages; nothing is particularly quotable.”

And this, I’d argue, is what ultimately undermines the book. William Popper is the epitome of the well-bred, well-educated, well-fed white American who wishes everyone well as long as there isn’t too much discomfort involved for himself. His answer to the American dream is to escape America — which leads me to agree with The New Statesman’s reviewer, Vernon Scannell: “Well, that’s all very fine, I suppose, if you are living on unearned income with a smashing bird in sunny Mexico, but it doesn’t help those millions doing time in the big gaol of the USA.” If the USA is something of a car wreck itself right now, running away from the scene might be an easy answer, but it’s probably not the right one.

The Rules of the Game, by Georges Simenon

Cover of UK paperback edition of 'The Rules of the Game'Ah, there’s nothing like a dose of Georges Simenon to remind us of the worms lurking just beneath the surface of normality. He really was a master of finding that loose thread that can unravel the whole fabric of one’s existence with a simple tug.

The Rules of the Game, one of the dozen of so novels set in the U. S. that he wrote during the ten years he lived there, is a perfect example. As the novel opens, Walter Higgins, manager of the local Fairfax supermarket in Williamson, Connecticut, father of four (with another on the way), school board treasurer and assistant secretary of the Rotary Club, finds out his application to the local country club has been rejected–for the second time.

“The application meant so much to him. It was important for his family’s place in Williamson society, in society in general.” He takes it hard. “I’ll kill them!” is his immediate, silent response. The rejection undermines his entire sense of self. “They were telling him he wasn’t worthy of belonging to the community,” he thinks. It strips away the facade of respectability he’d worked so hard to establish: “He was simply ashamed, as if he had found himself stark naked in the middle of the supermarket, among his employees and outraged customers.” “That was, in fact, a dream he had often had,” Simenon adds, tellingly.

He begins to question everything around him. He begins to speculate on silent conspiracies against him, on hushed conversations held behind his back. “Somewhere in Williamson, there was at least one person who must be chuckling contentedly at the thought of the clever trick he’d played on Higgins.” The fact that no one mentions the black-balling, that no one reacts or even seems to know of it, offers no reassurance. “It was almost as though everyone was deliberately behaving normally, giving him nothing to latch on to.”

Simenon then reveals just what Higgins has been trying for years to cover up. His mother, an alcoholic, is reporting missing from her rest home and then found dying in a gutter. He returns to his home town in New Jersey to retrieve her and is reminded of everything he’s worked to put behind him. The squalor of the tenement apartments he’d grown up in. The shiftlessness, drunken neighbors. The petty thieves, shirkers, and child-beaters. His own mother, reeling from binge to binge, often abandoning him to sleep alone, cold, and hungry. It’s as if the country club men of Williamson have always been able to smell the poverty he’d managed to escape.

It’s a nightmarish experience that drives the tee-totalling Higgins to drink and to a short breakdown. But he pulls himself up again and returns to the supermarket and his facade of fitting in. Now, however–in apt Simenon fashion–he no longer believes in what he is doing:

He didn’t have all the details worked out yet, but he was sure he was on the right track. The reason people thought he didn’t count was because he didn’t know the rules of the game. Yes, it was a game–like the games of his childhood. He hadn’t known that, maybe because he’d had to start too young, or too low, he, the son, as his mother said sarcastically, of Louisa and that scum Higgins.

But that wasn’t the main thing. What was important was to conform to the rules, certainly, but most of all, to know it was all a game. If you didn’t know that, you could make things impossible for other people.

This, to me, sums up what is so perfect about Simenon’s American novels: this is very much the American dream viewed through the eyes of a European. It’s not a dream of self-advancement, of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps: it’s a game. A slightly different game from the European game of success, with its older and more intricate rules of religion, property, nobility, and class, but a game nonetheless.

Simenon’s view is certainly cynical, but it has something of the attractive bitterness of a glass of Campari. I wouldn’t drink one every night, but these short, intense novels have that same effect of bringing your senses to attention.

Find a copy

The Rules of the Game, by Georges Simenon
Translated by Howard Curtis
New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1988

John Banville on “the Simenons”, from the L. A. Weekly

Covers from a collection of paperback Simenons

Source: “The Escape Artist: John Banville on Georges Simenon,” L. A. Weekly, 28 May 2008, http://www.laweekly.com/art+books/wls/the-escape-artist-john-banville-on-georges-simenon/18984/

A couple of weeks ago, the L. A. Weekly published a long piece by Irish novelist John Banville on the non-Maigret novels of Georges Simenon. Although best known for the 70-plus detective novels he wrote featuring the unflappable Inspector Maigret, Simenon published a nearly-equal number of masterful psychological dramas. These romans durs, or “hard” novels, are, in Banville’s estimation, “his finest work.”

Banville admits that when he first read one of Simenon’s novels, “I was really blown away by this extraordinary writer. I had never known this kind of thing was possible, to create such work in that kind of simple — well, apparently simple — direct style.” Nine of these novels have been reissued as part of the excellent NYRB Classics series. The typical roman dur is fast, intense, and brief–rarely more than 120 pages. The protagonist–almost always a man who has led a quiet, conventional life–is jolted out of his routine by an act of violence, a momentary lapse of judgment, a flash of passion, or an instant of craven selfishness or greed. A Dutch G.P. murders his wife; a Parisian fonctionnaire finds a briefcase full of cash on a train. A Belgian cafe owner finds himself separated from his family as they flee the blitzkrieg. Or, as in the opening lines of The Accomplices, a wealthy dairy owner causes a school bus to crash, killing and maiming the children inside:

It was brutal, instantaneous. And yet he was neither surprised nor resentful, as if he had always been expecting it. He realized in a flash, as soon as the horn started screaming behind him, that the catastrophe was inevitable and that it was his fault.

It was not an ordinary horn that was pursuing him with a kind of anger and terror, but a mournful, agonizing howl such as one hears in a port on a foggy night.

At the same time, he saw in his mirror the red and black bulk of a huge bus bearing down on him and the contracted face of a man with grizzled hair, and he realized that he was driving in the middle of the road.

It did not occur to him to free his hand which Edmonde continued to press between her thighs.

Here we have all the classic ingredients of a superb Simenon: a trick of fate, an already-guilty hero (his hand between his mistress’ thighs), and a sense “that the catastrophe was inevitable and that it was his fault.” Banville writes that, “Henri Cartier-Bresson used to speak of the ‘decisive moment’ when reality is caught in its unguarded essence, and it is on such moments that Simenon builds his fictions.”

For years now, I’ve been picking up Simenons when I find them in cheap paperback editions–which has become harder and harder. It rarely takes more than a night or two to finish them, but each is a headlong plunge into the dark side of otherwise ordinary characters. Andre Gide thought Simenon possessed enormous talent but frittered it away on these melodramas. “Gide,” writes Banville, “felt that he had not achieved his full potential as an artist, which may be true: If he had tackled his obsessiveness and found a way of slowing himself down, he might have written the leisurely and long-fermented work that Gide apparently expected of him.” But as Banville rightly concludes, “[T]hat book would not have been a ‘Simenon’, and it is in the ‘Simenons’,surely, that Simenon displayed his prodigious and protean genius.”

Some ‘Simenons’ to get started with

The Man Who Watched Trains Go By

In print from NYRB Classics. A self-satisfied middle manager suddenly discovers that his boss has driven the company into bankruptcy. And then ….

Monsieur Monde Vanishes

In print from NYRB Classics. One morning, Monsieur Monde, a comfortable Parisian business man, walks out of his house as his wife is sleeping … and vanishes. And then ….

The Venice Train

Still out of print. A man finds a suitcase full of money belonging to a mysterious stranger. And then ….

The Murderer

Still out of print. A Dutch G.P. plots and carries out the perfect murder of his aging wife and gets away with it. And then ….