Birthday: Perhaps only Inspector Maigret understood Simenon in whole.

Georges Joseph Christian Simenon (1903-1989)
Author

He liked writing and sex and as much of both as possible. At 74, Simenon claimed he had had sex with ten thousand women; he published over five hundred novels (358 between 1921 and 1934 alone, under seventeen pseudonyms), and thousands of short stories, essays, and newspaper pieces. He’d get an idea for a book, and spend several months composing a list of characters- their descriptions, where they lived, even their telephone numbers. Then he’d sit down to write, producing sixty to eighty pages a day. A novel in ten days was the result. When he died in 1989, Helen Wolff, his American publisher, estimated that his backlog would keep them busy putting out four books a year well into the 21st century.

Born in Liege, in Belgium, Simenon was the eldest child of lower-middle-class parents. A brother, who arrived in 1906, immediately became his mother’s favorite, to Georges’ chagrin. She was a devout Catholic and superstitious enough that, after Georges was born on a Friday the 13th, she registered his birth as having occurred on the 12th. The arrival of a more normal boy may have soothed her fevered imagination. Human nature can be weird.

At fifteen, he dropped out of school and took a job with a newspaper. Stuck on the human interest beat, he still managed to pile up the beginnings of his great store of lore of the streets and the people he found there. He developed the skills of writing, and editing, on the fly, and produced 150 article for the paper before moving on to a magazine. There, in three years, he turned out over eight hundred pieces. Pen names became a necessity: otherwise, he would have seemed the entire staff in some issues.

In 1921, Simenon produced his first novel. Inspector Maigret, his most famous creation, appeared in 1930, in the first of 75 novels and 28 short stories over the next five years. No noir tough guy like the heroes in Mickey Spillane and Raymond Chandler, no human-computer like Holmes, no police proceduralist, Maigret was a sort of city version of Miss Marple. He watched he listened, he asked questions, and he sat back to think- ideally, with a glass of good red wine. In time, his vast understanding of human nature would provide him the answer. When it came to Paris, he had the memory of a London cabbie: you can follow his stories through the streets like a guidebook.

Simenon maintained there were no criminals, just human beings. Some of Maigret’s crooks got away; others, the detective regretting having to arrest. It was the way life was, he shrugged.

The author’s other strength lay in what became known as his “psychological novels”- tightly-written, in a spare, almost laconic style, they plumbed why people do what they do, and the consequences that follow. One of his most famous stories, “The Cat,” deals with an elderly couple long since frozen into a marriage of mutual loathing so severe they only communicate in writing. When, at last, the wife dies, the husband finds life unsustainable without his love/hate relationship and soon kills himself.

Sex and complicated domestic lives animated his thrillers. He was his own best research subject, living through countless affairs- he had a thing for having a compliant wife and housekeeper under the same roof- and was constantly on the move, moving through some thirty residences in France, America and Switzerland. He traveled endlessly.

He could be remarkably amoral: scholars still debate whether, remaining in France during World War II, he was a collaborator or just an opportunist. It didn’t help when it came out he’d spent the war years negotiating German film and print rights for his work, or that, at war’s end, he skipped out for a ten-year stay in America. A French tribunal found him guilty of bad taste in 1950 and barred him from publishing for five years, but the sentence was never made public and had little effect.

Like most writers who bought typewriter ribbon by the mile, Simenon’s work is uneven, and his critical reputation suffered over time. His best works have emerged, however as a substantial body of original, and excellent writing that holds up well over time.

Simenon retired in 1973, and died in 1989. “I adore life and don’t fear death,” he said. “I just prefer to die as late as possible.” He was 86.

Though he left in 1922, returning only once, a year later, to go through the motions of a Catholic wedding to please his mother, Belgium turned him into a coin and a stamp for his centenary. Though its most famous writer, he is only ranked the 17th-best by Belgians. Human nature. What can you say?


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