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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

The second Maigret title, published in 1931, Le Pendu de St Pholien (Maigret and the Hundred Gibbets), is about the death of Kleine. In other words, no sooner had Inspector Maigret been created than Simenon despatched him to Belgium to investigate the mysterious death of a young art student, a death that had actually taken place nine years earlier. Three months after that book was published one of the author’s real-life ghosts came to life and killed. Deblauwe murdered his rival, and Simenon’s friend Guillaume, like Maigret in Le Pendu de St Pholien, travelled to Liège to the district of Simenon’s childhood, in search of the killer. Life, having inspired art, had started to repeat it.

In the autumn of 1932, with Deblauwe safely under lock and key awaiting trial, Simenon wrote L’Ane rouge, a novel describing his own youthful days in Liège as a reporter and some of the adventures he had shared with Deblauwe. And just after that novel was published another phantom, in the shape of the grotesque vicieux Hyacinthe Danse, sprang out of the woodwork and killed three people, one of them known to Simenon. At his trial Danse was defended, by chance or otherwise, by yet another of the author’s friends. By the time Danse received hard labour for life Simenon had given up writing Maigrets. Two years later, in January 1937, he wrote Three Crimes, the story of Kleine, Deblauwe and Danse. By then he was a wealthy man with a serious reputation and he was well into the period of prescription, when any police inquiries into the unintentional role he himself may have played in the death of Kleine would have been barred under Belgian law by the passage of time.

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