Word: simenon
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...thriller specialist, though still no match for Simenon or Erie Stanley Gardner, Marquand has suffered a marked loss of innocence since prewar days. In Mr. Moto's Three Aces the publishers have revived some old Moto yarns in which the mastermind outwits Chinese bandits, Russian gunmen, murderous extremists from his own country, and invariably becomes involved with a well-intentioned but hopelessly naive young American who blunders through the labyrinth of Asiatic intrigue. But Stopover: Tokyo is a brand-new Moto novel, and the change is significant: no longer need Mr. Moto patiently explain to the young American what...
INSPECTOR MAIGRET AND THE DEAD GIRL, by Georges Simenon (192 pp.; Crime Club; $2.75). The battered body of a young virgin, dressed in a cheap, rented evening gown, is found on a dark Paris street. That is all the inspector knows when he begins to collect the clues to an obscure, unhappy life. Until the last few wildly improbable pages it is medium-good Simenon, as fascinating as a real-life case because of painstaking police detail...
...this sounds like the stuff of any one of a hundred novels at the local lending library. But Simenon does not see Steve just as a man in a grey flannel suit. Rather, he is the unwilling wearer of a hair shirt imposed on him by a world he never made and is too weak to remake. Soon enough Steve gets a little outside ordinary life. On an auto trip to Maine with Nancy to pick up their children at camp, he gets drunk and Nancy leaves him to go on by bus. When Steve picks up a hunted criminal...
...Years. Like all simenons. these novels were written at incredible speed and sometimes show it. Simenon's working method is simple. He writes a chapter a day for ten or eleven days, and then he has a novel. He has written one in as little as 25 hours, gets edgy if it takes as long as two weeks. He seldom has a plot or a story in mind when he starts, but his thinking keeps up with the machine-gun speed of his typewriter once he begins. Disparagingly he has said: "I write fast because I do not have...
...serious critic has declared: "In a hundred years' time Simenon will probably be called one of the most far-sighted writers of our age." Simenon. however, lives and writes according to the advice he once handed to his sons: "Live joyously and be very careful not to take yourselves too seriously...