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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

While Deblauwe was awaiting trial, another of Simenon’s Liège circle, Hyacinthe Danse, an older man he described as ‘un vicieux’ (a pervert — he was in fact a paedophile, a blackmailer and pimp), butchered his mistress and his mother with a hammer in a village outside Paris and then fled to Belgium to escape French justice. Belgium had no death penalty so, in order to save himself from extradition, Danse carried out a third murder in Liège and gave himself up to the police. By committing the third murder in Belgium he ensured that, as a Belgian citizen, he would be tried for all three killings in Belgium, so saving himself from the French guillotine.

Danse selected his third victim with some care. He called on one of his old schoolteachers, a Jesuit priest who had also taught Simenon. Danse accepted a glass of beer, made his confession to the priest and then shot him three times, after which he took a taxi to the criminal court. Danse’s tactics worked. He was tried in Liège in December 1934 and was defended by another of Simenon’s friends, a prominent Paris barrister, Maître Maurice Garçon. He received a life sentence for his three murders. Danse had no money and Maître Garçon did not come cheap, particularly if he had to travel to Belgium.

Three Crimes is a flawed book, written in a jerky, awkward manner and studded with vacuous rhetorical questions, quite untypical of the author’s usual style. The cumbersome prose may be explained by the fact that Simenon was unused to writing autobiography, or by the fact that he was still trying to make sense of the news that two of his youthful friends had been convicted of murder. But when the book is placed in the chronology of Simenon’s professional life it raises intriguing questions. Why did the ambitious author publish this confessional account, drawing attention to his friendship with two men convicted of murder, when he was battling to establish a reputation as a Nobel Prize-winner? Where did he ‘find’ Inspector Maigret? And why, having brought him triumphantly to life, did he abruptly abandon the Maigret series for eight years? Is there a direct link between the brutal and sordid crimes that Simenon thought so significant, and his own writing?