A salute to Georges Simenon

One hundred years ago an 11-year-old boy called Georges Simenon was getting accustomed to the presence of the German army in Liège. Together with his mother and his younger brother he had been forced to hide in the cellar of their terraced house on the island of Outremeuse to avoid the firing squads. The Belgian fortress outside the city had resisted for longer than expected and had inflicted casualties on the invading army. The Uhlan lancers were so angry that 200 of the Simenons’ neighbours were lined up and shot. Once Belgian resistance had ended, the occupation of Liège became a quieter affair. For a while Madame Simenon even took in German soldiers as lodgers. Years later Georges recalled his youthful surprise at the number of German officers who wore corsets.

The name of Simenon will always be associated with his most celebrated creation — the pipe-smoking, hard-drinking Parisian detective Inspector Jules Maigret, and by the end of this year Penguin Classics will have republished the first 14 Maigret titles written between 1931 and 1932, as well as two of the 117 romans durs, the ‘straight’ or ‘dark’ novels that Simenon himself considered to be his finest work. This is welcome news, particularly since Penguin has commissioned new translations. Considering that the existing translations of Simenon include work by Antonia White, Moura Budberg, Nigel Ryan, Paul Auster, Robert Baldick, Julian McLaren-Ross, Isabel Quigley and Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, it will be interesting to see how the new versions compare.

Perhaps because of Maigret, Simenon is still frequently described as French. He himself once invented a family connection with an imaginary Napoleonic soldier who had apparently limped into the city on the retreat from Moscow. In fact he was born into a solidly rooted Belgian family, part Walloon and part Flemish. He never identified a family conflict in those terms, but he made a very clear distinction between the French-speaking Simenons, exemplified by his father, Désiré, who he depicted as an upright, bold, straightforward man, and his mother Henriette Brull, whom he described as one of ‘a tormented race’.