Three years later, having published 19 Maigret titles, Simenon put the fictional inspector into extended retirement and announced that he would embark on a third career, as a writer of romans durs, or ‘psychological’ novels. He declared that in developing the skills he had learned while creating Maigret he would win the Nobel Prize. Over the next nine years he published 45 romans durs as well as the book that now appears in English for the first time as Three Crimes, written in Paris in January 1937 and originally entitled Les trois crimes de mes amis. Three Crimes has always been described as a novel but it is in fact a ‘memoir’, a fragment of autobiography in which the author has not bothered to invent any new characters, or even change their names.
Simenon was unusual among crime writers in that he knew the criminal world from the inside. As he once said, ‘I was born in the dark and in the rain, and I got away. The crimes I write about are the crimes I would have committed if I had not got away...’ He was thinking of his childhood in Liège during and after the Great War when he saw how defeat, occupation, fear and hardship had corrupted normal standards. When the war ended Simenon was briefly drawn into that demi-monde and ten years later, shortly after launching his Maigrets, it came back to haunt him. He learnt that two men he had known in Liège were to be tried for murder.
The title of Three Crimes, as the translator David Carter points out in his introduction, is misleading. There were in fact five crimes, including four murders; of the murders, one was committed by a friend, the others were the work of a man Simenon knew well but never liked. But the first suspicious death described in Three Crimes did not involve either of these two men, it involved Simenon himself. In 1922, Joseph Kleine, a failed art student and a drug addict, was living in extreme poverty in the student quarter of Liège. Early one winter morning his body was found attached by the neck to the handle of a church door. He had spent the previous evening drinking with Simenon. At that time, Simenon, aged 19, was employed on the Gazette de Liège as a junior reporter. His duties included the daily round of police stations writing up crime reports and he wrote an unsigned report on the death of Kleine. The eventual verdict was suicide, although it seems more likely that Kleine had been murdered by his drug dealer; in any event the police did not waste much time inquiring.
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