Just when Simenon aficionados were adding to their shelves the last couple of volumes of Penguin’s very welcome new translations of all the Maigret novels, there comes a surprising and equally welcome codicil. Death Threats and Other Stories is a new selection of stories featuring Simenon’s doughty French copper, and the key selling point here is that three of the stories are being published in English for the very first time. The subjects include an internecine conflict in a Parisian family, a possible murder in a hotel in Cannes, and an explosive three-way relationship in a bucolic Loire setting. With translations by the ever-reliable Ros Schwartz, this is a collection to be cherished, and I was glad to see my old literary editor from The Independent, Boyd Tonkin, adduced to sell the collection: ‘Not just the world’s bestselling detective series,’ Boyd says, ‘but an imperishable literary legend … Maigret exposes secrets and crime not by forensic wizardry, but by the melded powers of therapist, philosopher and confessor.’ Trust Mr Tonkin to come up with such a penetrating aperçu for the appeal of Maigret.
Simenon inspired many writers of psychological crime, such as Patricia Highsmith; she once told me at a publisher’s launch party in London that Simenon’s name caused her to brighten up in a way that my mention of Hitchcock’s film of her first book, Strangers on a Train, had not. Simenon’s life, though, was deliberately enshrouded in mystery. Behind the closed doors of one room in his Swiss Château, he would surround himself with fetishes. Entering an almost trancelike state, he would write compulsively, usually completing an entire book in five, nine or eleven days. The late additions to Penguin’s current Simenon initiative in Death Threats and Other Stories demonstrate how consistent and reliable his literary abilities were.
Reviewed by Barry Forshaw
DEATH THREATS AND OTHER STORIES
by Georges Simenon
Translated from French by Ros Schwartz
Published by Penguin Classics (2021)
October 2021 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.
Barry Forshaw’s books include Crime Fiction: A Reader’s Guide, the Keating Award-winning Brit Noir and Euro Noir. Other work: Nordic Noir, Death in a Cold Climate, Sex and Film and the British Crime Writing encyclopedia (also a Keating Award winner). He edits Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk).
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