Word: simenon
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...book every couple of years. Not Isaac Asimov. Back in 1938, the teenage author sold his first tale to Amazing Stories, a science-fiction magazine. Encouraged, he branched out from sci-fi to fields as varied as his interests: literary criticism, psychology, mathematics, mystery, poetry, humor, American history. Simenon may have written more thrillers, Chesterton more poetry and philosophy, Pulp Romance Writer Barbara Cartland more novels. But no single author has ever written more books about more subjects than Isaac Asimov...
...regarded as an impossibly fuzzy-minded romantic who was leading Algeria to economic chaos is now 61 and, by all accounts, the very model of a prosperous bourgeois. Housed in comfortable, well-staffed villas, he is provided with every comfort. The amenities include French newspapers and the latest Georges Simenon detective stories, as well as at least one movie a week (his favorite, which he has seen eight times: a Jean Gabin-Sophia Loren film called Le Verdict). To keep him from settling in anywhere, however, the Boumedienne regime changes his location from time to time, secretly and without warning...
...based on the adventures of Maigret; of cancer; in London. Davies' career began in a German prisoner-of-war camp during World War II, when he acted in troop shows. The BBC signed him in 1960 to play Maigret, the pipe-smoking French detective created by Novelist Georges Simenon. For his portrayal of Maigret, Davies was chosen British Actor of the Year...
...case soon began to look like one calling for the quirky talents of Simenon's Inspector Maigret. A month after the theft, Marcel Dassault, 84, unaccountably withdrew his formal complaint against De Vathaire. Dassault, who is famous for having developed his company's Mirage fighter planes, later appeared on French television with a somewhat unconvincing explanation of his action. He declared that "since there was no chance of recovering the money, and to please his parents, I dropped charges against my employee of 24 years' standing." Would he go so far as to rehire De Vathaire...
Through the entire book, there is the elusive suggestion of momentous questions, of Oedipal relations, of age, of the child's world, of death. We should take a clue from Gide: to be able to read Simenon with interest is to read between the lines, to make a creative extrapolation. By itself, Letter to My Mother is the maudlin nostalgia of an old man; however, with a bit of imagination on the reader's part, the roman policier mentality can be the catalyst to other, more serious reflections...