Crime fans know and love Simenon’s Maigret stories, and British readers are increasingly becoming familiar with his romans durs, his ‘hard novels’. These are not necessarily
The term ‘roman dur’, which was used by Georges Simenon himself to refer to all those novels that he regarded as his specifically literary works, is difficult to render precise
As is the case with many of Georges Simenon’s books, this is a novella rather than a novel, but as is also the case with Simenon, he packs as much into these 178 pages as many ot
Georges Simenon inspired many writers of psychological crime, such as Patricia Highsmith (as she once told me at a publisher’s launch party in London – Simenon’s name caused
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
Georges Simenon is considered by many to be one of the greatest writers in French of the twentieth century; The People Opposite is one of his earliest literary novels and was writt
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 surprisi
I suspect that many, if not most, British readers will be more familiar with Georges Simenon as the author of the detective novels featuring the Parisian police commissaire Jules M
Penguin’s Georges Simenon reissue programme put crime aficionados in their debt with such titles as The Man who Watched Trains Go By. P.D. James called Simenon a writer who, more
Crime in translation may be achieving massive breakthroughs in the twenty-first century, but long before this trend, one writer was a standard bearer for the field. George Joseph C
