A short life of the author
Georges Simenon (1903–1989) was born on 13 February 1903 in Liège, Belgium. He began writing at sixteen, publishing hundreds of pulp novels under pseudonyms before creating Inspector Maigret in 1931. He lived in France, the United States, and Switzerland.
Life and Career
The Maigret series — beginning with Pietr-le-Letton (The Strange Case of Peter the Lett, 1931) — follows Commissaire Jules Maigret of the Paris Police Judiciaire. Maigret solves crimes through patience, observation, and empathy rather than deduction. He enters the world of the suspect, absorbs the atmosphere of the milieu, and waits for understanding to emerge. The series ran until 1972.
Simenon’s “hard novels” (romans durs) — including The Man Who Watched Trains Go By (1938), Dirty Snow (1948), and The President (1958) — are psychological studies of ordinary people driven to extremity. They are as important as the Maigret books and closer to mainstream literary fiction.
Simenon claimed to have written some of his novels in as few as eleven days. He published over four hundred books under his own name and pseudonyms. André Gide called him “perhaps the greatest novelist of all in French literature.”
Major Works and Themes
Simenon wrote about the dark side of ordinary life: the tensions beneath bourgeois respectability, the psychology of crime, the loneliness of provincial existence. His prose is spare, atmospheric, and psychologically exact.
Key Works
- Dirty Snow (1948)
- The Maigret novels (1931–1972)
Collecting Simenon
French originals (Fayard, Gallimard, Presses de la Cité) are the primary collected form. The NYRB Classics translations have introduced his non-Maigret novels to English readers. First editions of early Maigrets bring $100–$500 depending on condition. The sheer volume of his output makes comprehensive collecting impractical.