The death of Kleine seriously disturbed Simenon. It left him with a feeling of responsibility that lasted for many years and in Three Crimes he wrote, ‘In the last resort wasn’t it us who killed him?’ Simenon revealed that on the night before Kleine’s death the pair of them had spent the evening together, drinking, and that Simenon had carried his friend home because Kleine was too drunk to walk. But although he was, by his own later admission, the last person known to have seen Kleine alive he never seems to have mentioned this to the police. And he never commented on the fact that, as the Gazette’s anonymous reporter, he had listed the death as suicide even before police inquiries were complete. If the real-life Kleine died not from murder or suicide, but as the result of an accident following a practical joke, the first suspect would surely not have been either the drug dealer or one of Simenon’s friends, but the 19-year-old police reporter in person?
In Le Pendu de St Pholien, written before Deblauwe’s crime, when Maigret investigates the events surrounding the death of the fictional Kleine (known as ‘Klein’) he identifies the criminals but — although there is a month left before prescription comes into force — takes no action, choosing instead to leave them in peace to get on with their family lives in Liège. But in La Tête d’un homme, finished after Deblauwe’s crime, fictional life has become tougher. This is one of the few Maigrets in which the murderer is executed. Maigret has to accompany him to the scaffold.
Simenon’s achievement in creating a ‘Hound of Heaven’ detective, tirelessly tracking the author through his own imaginary world, may have been sparked by guilt over the death of Kleine. If there is a connection, it is buried too deep for the reader to see. But Three Crimes does shed some light on the sources of Simenon’s creation and helps to explain his lifelong sympathy for criminals, their victims and the excluded, the people he had grown up with and whom he always called ‘les petites gens’.
The creator of Maigret never won the Nobel Prize, somewhat to his own surprise, but his work drew high praise from T. S. Eliot, André Gide, Robert Brasillach, Charlie Chaplin, Somerset Maugham, Henry Miller and Patricia Highsmith, among many others. And his literary reputation did not prevent him from going on to sell 300 million copies of his 193 titles before his death in Lausanne in 1989, a world away from the values and hardships of Liège after the Great War.
Patrick Marnham’s biography of Georges Simenon, The Man Who Wasn’t Maigret, is published by Bloomsbury.
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