Georges Simenon
Georges Joseph Christian Simenon (1903-1989) was a Belgian writer who wrote in French. He was extraordinarily prolific, publishing over 500 novels and numerous shorter works. He is best known and mostly represented here by his novels featuring the detective Jules Maigret.
Between 1931 and 1972, Simenon published 75 novels and 28 short stories featuring Commissaire Maigret. In doing so he created one of the great detective personas, worthy of Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple, Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe and Travis McGee. Compared to such colleagues, Maigret is almost nondescript — he is gruff, patient, scrupulously fair, quiet, persistent, thoughtful, non-demonstrative. He has no real eccentricities, no flourishes, no quirks, no attitude other than determining what happened and who was responsible. And yet, his world and his existence in it is compelling, even addictive. Whatever issues his creator may have had with truth and good behavior, Maigret is dedicated to them in all their relative messy relationships with people and their stories and their lives.
The books do not have to be read in any particular order. Once you sample one, however, and want to try some more (inevitably), you may want to read a stretch of them in the order in which they were written. Sometimes the only clues to the passing of time in our “real” world are the technological changes mentioned in the novels. Maigret — ageless, steadfast — remains the same.
The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien
The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien
"One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century . . . Simenon was unequaled at making us look inside, though the ability was masked by his brilliance at absorbing us obsessively in his stories." --The Guardian
Inspector Maigret finds himself tangled up in a dreadful death, in Georges Simenon's haunting tale about the lengths to which people will go to escape from guilt
While in Brussels on police business, Inspector Jules Maigret witnesses a strange act: a scruffy-looking man counts out a large amount of currency and mails it to a Paris address. His instincts tell him there is more to this moment than meets the eye, and following an impulse, Maigret boards the man's train, following him to Germany via Amsterdam. But in the course of his investigation, something goes horribly awry, and the man ends up dead.
Maigret is devastated by the inadvertent role he played, but his own remorse is overshadowed by the discovery of the sordid events that drove the desperate man to the edge. In The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien, Georges Simenon examines the terrible weight guilt can place on a man's conscience and the tragedies that can result when that weight gets to be too heavy to bear.