Clemency suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value reader offers and events

Click here for the latest Spectator Wine Offers

Three Crimes

Back in the dark and the rain

Georges Simenon
Hesperus, pp.130pp, ££7.99,

Patrick Marnham

Wednesday, 11th July 2007

Three Crimes
by Georges Simenon,
translated by David Carter

The second killing described in Three Crimes was the work of Frédéric Deblauwe, one of those who had failed to ‘get away’ from Simenon’s sordid post-war world. Deblauwe, once a talented journalist and magazine editor, had been a colleague of Simenon’s on the police beat in Liège, but he had gone downhill, turning to blackmail and then to pimping. In July 1931, having moved to Paris, he murdered a rival pimp in a small hotel in the red-light district near the Gare du Nord. Simenon, who had not seen him for many years, was at that time staying in a similar hotel in a different part of Paris, writing his ninth Maigret, La Tête d’un homme. Deblauwe’s crime was reported in the newspapers and Simenon read the report.

The detective assigned to the Deblauwe case was Inspector Guillaume. He had been invited to the Maigret ball in Montparnasse and he remained a friend and technical adviser to Simenon. Inspector Guillaume travelled to Liège to search the fugitive’s house, a house that Simenon knew well, but he eventually arrested Deblauwe in France in August 1932. Deblauwe, displaying ingenuity worthy of a Simenon plot, had been hiding in a French prison, after getting himself arrested under a false name on some minor charge. In October 1933, Deblauwe was tried and convicted in Paris for murder. He had planned the crime in cold blood, he and his victim were competing for the same prostitute, but the girl in question appeared as a witness on Deblauwe’s behalf and his defence of crime passionnel was successful, so he received a life sentence rather than the guillotine. Simenon thought of going to his trial and sitting in the press box, where he would have watched the man who had sat by his side in so many press boxes at other men’s trials ten years earlier, but then he thought it might disconcert Deblauwe who was ‘fighting for his life’.

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comment | Apollo Art Books