#RivetingReviews: Max Easterman reviews SIMENON. THE MAN, THE BOOKS, THE FILMS by Barry Forshaw

Mention the name Georges Simenon and it will instantly flash up another name: Maigret. And there, for many of us, the story ends. The older generation will remember the superb BBC TV series with the eponymous inspector of police played by Rupert Davies – Simenon called him ‘the perfect Maigret’; but for a generation brought up on Ian Rankin’s Rebus (twenty-four novels) or on Nordic noir, such as Jo Nesbø’s Harry Hole (twelve novels) the sheer volume of Simenon’s Maigret stories, seventy-five in all, suggests something altogether extraordinary and special about this author. Add to that total a further 225 or so non-Maigret titles – many of them also crime novels – and well over a thousand short stories, written under more than twenty pseudonyms – and you begin to realise the measure of the man, and the size of the task Barry Forshaw has taken on in dealing with the prodigious literary output of a writer who is certainly the most successful ‘police procedural’ story-teller outside the English language.

Forshaw understandably and justifiably decided that a ‘straight’ biography was not the right way of teasing out the complexities and inconsistencies of Simenon’s character. Instead, he has approached the man and his oeuvre via a number of interviews with Simenon experts, and from several different standpoints, covering the writer himself, how other writers assess him, what translators feel about him and what publishers think of him. What emerges is, I think, a much more wide-ranging but also more comprehensible picture of the man described by André Gide as ‘The greatest French novelist of our times’. Only a third of this book, though, is devoted to analysis: the rest is a comprehensive list of Simenon’s novels and the radio / TV / film adaptations of them, much of which is based, as Forshaw acknowledges, on David Carter’s 2003 bibliography.

In the earlier sections of Forshaw’s analysis, it soon becomes clear that Simenon was in many ways as slippery as an eel. One of Forshaw’s interviewees, Mike Ashley, who has extensively researched Simenon comments: ‘the more you read about him the less you feel you know, other than that he was a damned good self-publicist, regardless of the truth.’ Early in his career he claimed, for example, to write sixty thousand-word and three twenty-thousand-word stories a month. As Ashley comments: ‘That’s 756 [stories] a year … and doesn’t allow for all his novels … I’m suspicious.’ A suspicion compounded by the fact that it’s unclear how many stories he wrote under pseudonym – and indeed under which pseudonym; a suspicion that also takes in some of his many other claims, such as to have had sex with ten thousand women. (His second wife suggested 1,200 was closer to the mark!)

But then, Jules Maigret is surely the only sleuth to be mentioned in the same breath as Sherlock Holmes and, as another interviewee, the literary critic Boyd Tonkin says, the Maigret stories are the world’s best-selling detective series, whilst Maigret is the exact antithesis of Holmes: ‘slow, placid … pipe-chomping … overcoated … [he] does not so much chase clues as decipher tortured minds.’ And thereby, the crime-writer Thomas Narcejac succinctly points out, hangs the fascination with the Parisian inspector: Simenon doesn’t try to fox the reader with twists, turns and red herrings, he doesn’t ‘load his narrative with hairs, specks of mud … or bloodstains … a clue, to him, is … a gesture, a word or a glance’, so the key for the reader is to recognise that small behavioural tic that reveals the culprit. That approach, says Narcejac, ‘takes it for granted that the crime might have been committed by the reader … by any normal man’. One of Simenon’s translators into English, the superb Ros Schwartz, concurs: ‘Simenon is intrigued by what motivates an ordinary person to commit a crime – what their tipping point is. It’s not about “whodunnit” but “why they dunnit”’

These interviews prove to be an invaluable way of making sense of Simenon’s vast creative output, and there’s much more in them than there’s space to discuss here: about, for instance, the places where the stories are set, Simenon’s attitudes to women and minorities – and the difficulties these sometimes create for contemporary translators and publishers. Sufficient to say, then, that the rest of the book describes, in short synopses, the plots of all his novels, with a brief critical appreciation of their success (or otherwise). This is a timely enterprise, as 2022 is the year Penguin Books have completed their re-issue and re-translations of the entire Maigret series, which began in 2013. They’re all there in this comprehensive survey, along with the many more Simenon wrote as he travelled the world – from Odessa to North America and eventually back to Switzerland. Whether you are already a ‘simenonite’ or not, thanks to Barry Forshaw’s exhaustive and excellent compendium, you will find enough stories to help you through what promises to be a dark and unpleasant winter.

Reviewed by Max Easterman

SIMENON. THE MAN, THE BOOKS, THE FILMS

By Barry Forshaw

Published by Oldcastle Books (2022)

September 2022 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

Max Easterman is a journalist – he spent 35 years as a senior broadcaster with the BBC – university lecturer, translator, media trainer with ‘Sounds Right’, jazz musician and writer.

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