Word: simenon
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...GEORGES SIMENON...
...characters is important to Higgins; thus the feeling that they "happen to commit" their actions, or his statement two weeks ago on Chicago radio that he "wrote this book to find out what happened to the characters I introduced on page one." Suddenly Higgins is the American Simenon, starting from a set of tensions, writing with no end in sight--and writing at a deadly pace (ten days for the first draft of A City on a Hill, compared to the eleven days Simenon spends on slightly shorter books). His trick is that he writes almost nothing but dialogue. Long...
Freeling pleaded extenuating circumstances-his own need for a change of character and scene. Faithful Freeling readers who, since Love in Amsterdam (1963), have stoutly prized Van der Valk even above Simenon's Inspector Maigret, ground their teeth and waited...
...most part Shenker is content to remain in the province of words--an area he knows like the back of his hand. He seems equally at home conversing with Nabokov and Asimov, I.F. Stone and I.B. Singer, Georges Simenon and Alain Robbe-Grillet. Perhaps he is most comfortable with writers like S.J. Perelman (the subject of three separate interviews) and Brigid Brophy, who share his penchant for groan-inducing puns and shameless plays on words. Parelman, Shenker tells us, has a myna bird, "scion of an ancient mynasty,...and wherever Perelman goes the bird is sure to go; it followed...
...with Simenon's Inspector Maigret, exposure to Van der Valk is likely to prove infectious. Even when the story seems to unwind in slow motion, Van der Valk's reflective concern for the role of character in crime makes the trip worthwhile. The prizewinning Criminal Conversation (1966), for instance, presents an Amsterdam society doctor, highly intelligent but neurotic and febrile, who is unprovably guilty of murder. In a long series of informal conversations, Van der Valk, in effect, kills the man with kindness and understanding, finally inveigling him into admitting his crime by laying bare the poverty...