Word: maigret
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...emotional gap is virtually infinite. Take, for example, the reliable litmus of crime. As two new films demonstrate, the accounts of evildoer and pursuant vary enormously with the turf. The favored French mode is the grittily realistic roman policier, in which the detective, like Simenon's Inspector Maigret, is presumed human, hence flawed. In England both criminal and captor implicitly play the gentlemanly hare-and-hounds game-a legacy of what W.H. Auden called the "guilty vicarage" tradition...
...thieves who in August 1963 made off with more than $7,000,000 from a Glasgow-to-London mail train. Closing that case was the capstone of a 34-year career in which Butler, according to admiring colleagues, combined the intellect of Sherlock Holmes with the persistence of Inspector Maigret...
Canny in Court. By the end of last year, Gardner's 140 books had sold a total of 170 million copies in the U.S. Among fellow mystery writers, only Georges Simenon, the Belgian creator of the Inspector Maigret stories, surpassed Gardner in output or ranks with him in sales...
NEITHER Franglais nor Esperanto, the words "maigret" and "simenon" are nevertheless working their way into many of the world's vocabularies. Properly, a maigret is a detective story whose hero is a Parisian police inspector by that name, but so many maigrets have been published that the word is now used to describe mystery stories in general. In a stricter sense, a simenon is any novel except a maigret by Maigret's progenitor, Belgian-born Author Georges Simenon, 66. Simenon has produced a total of 74 maigrets and 126 simenons, which have appeared in 43 languages. Last week...
...turned out 40 books in one year. Simenon's yearly harvest is now four, and he uses an IBM electric typewriter in place of the pencils that once lasted only three lines each before they became blunted and were tossed away. Puffing constantly on a pipe (like Maigret), Simenon begins a book by christening its characters (from a slew of international telephone books he keeps on hand for the purpose) and providing each with detailed dossiers. Maigret, for instance, is heavyset, patient as Job and frequently compassionate toward the murderers he catches. Then, in what he calls his "state...