Word: maigret
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Belgian-born Georges Simenon is a great tattletale. His endless series of novels now total about 500, include a mound of pulpy romances, scores of Inspector Maigret mysteries, and dozens of gritty, graceful character studies such as The Premier and The Train. These were first published separately in France some years ago. Both are typical, tidy iterations of an old Simenon thesis: escape in any real sense is impossible...
...Paris pulps at the rate of 80 pages a day. In less than four years he knocked out "more than 300" (he soon lost count) novels and novelettes, and once actually splattered off a quite readable novel in 25 hours. At 25, he dropped his 17 pseudonyms, invented Inspector Maigret, and wrote the first of "more than 60" detective novels that have made him the most famous of French whodunists. In his 30s he began to write an occasional straight novel (The Snow Is Black, The Bells of Bicêtre), and he wrote them with such fierce finesse that...
...writer who is not yet widely known. Fleming and le Carré, of course, are old-gat. So are Britain's Len Deighton (The Ipcress File) and John Creasey (Death of an Assassin), whose books have been made into movies. Georges Simenon, the prolific French author whose Inspector Maigret has solved more than 60 book-length cases to date, has yet to win a mass following in the U.S., despite his fine ear for Gallic nuance and a geographer's eye for locale. One enterprising reader, 1965 Harvard Graduate Roy Cobb, recently rediscovered Sax Rohmer, whose Fu Manchu...
Best known for murder mysteries, Author Simenon here goes straight, trading in his Inspector Maigret for a new hero, Publisher René Maugras-and the similarity of names is the tip-off to the author's basically unchanging fascination with death and the tangles of men's motives. The death in question is Maugras' own, narrowly missed when he suffers a serious stroke: as the novel opens, he is coming to for the first time, unable to speak or move. Step by difficult step, he recovers; in the months of enforced idleness he ponders his career...
...best of families, and Arturo's family is plainly not the best. His mother died when he was born, and his father (Reginald Kernan) is a showy-shabby bird of passage who comes home to roost a couple of times a year. The boy (Vanni de Maigret), who is 15, lives all alone in a crumbling villa on a small Italian island, and in his innocence and need for an ideal imagines his old man as a far-wandering Odysseus, as a god whose advent must continually be implored. But when the god descends he scarcely condescends to notice...