The Mysterious Case of Inspector Maigret
The great French writers of the last century tend to evoke, in recollection, a single hue, a color tone that resonates from their work into our imaginations. Proust is all violet, the twilight mood of symbolism matched with the early-evening skies under which Swann pursues Odette. Camus is the whitened sand and unclouded blue sky of his native Algeria. Colette’s writing seems golden, filled with the afternoon light of the Palais Royale. (The movie “Gigi” is not really that far off, in its M-G-M Technicolor scheme, from the palette of her writing.)
Georges Simenon, the matchless French crime novelist and the author of the Inspector Maigret series—which has been completely retranslated and issued in a paperback edition from Penguin—takes gray as his distinct and constant color. No one has ever made more of a grisaille of ambiguity, ambivalence, and uncertainty, or positioned it more tenderly against a Paris rendered not in the (very misleading) light of Impressionist dapple but in the actuality of its dull winter days: “The neighborhood had put on its unsettling night-time face, with shadowy figures hugging the buildings, women motionless at the kerb and murky lighting in the bars that made them look like fish tanks.” Everywhere Simenon takes us is a gray-toned world. His early novel “The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien,” from 1931, begins in a Dutch train station: “It was five in the afternoon, and night was falling. The lamps had been lighted, but through the windows one could still see both German and Dutch railway and customs officials pacing along the platform, stamping their feet for warmth in the grey dusk.” Later:
Simenon was conscious of his grayness as a moral mood, something created inside modern minds, present even in an all-night Greenwich Village luncheonette, as in his “Three Bedrooms in Manhattan” (1946), a non-Maigret novel: “Why, despite the blinding brightness, did everything look gray? It was as if the painfully sharp lights were helpless to dispel all the darkness the people had brought in from the night outside.” Fluent in English, and resident for some years in Connecticut, he must have been well aware of the bilingual pun deposited in his hero’s name: Inspector May Gray.
His Maigret books, especially, make an art of half-lit evocation within a tightly circumscribed world set on the Right Bank of Paris. In fact, when I first read him, as a kid learning French—and Simenon’s novels are perfect for that purpose, being simple enough to be more or less fully grasped, and good enough to be worth the effort—I assumed that Simenon himself was, like his hero, living an enclosed existence somewhere in the Marais. I pictured him looking down, beetle-browed, from his typewriter at the Parisian scene below as he passed from black coffee to a single glass of Armagnac in the evening.
Not a bit of it. Writers often live at right angles to their fictional worlds, and no more colorful life is imaginable than Simenon’s. His place in French culture is closer to P. G. Wodehouse’s in English culture than it is to Agatha Christie’s; like Wodehouse, he was a superior stylist who happened to favor a repetitive genre format, rotating the same set of characters again and again. And just as Wodehouse, the most ecstatic of sentence-makers, was by reputation the dullest fellow alive, so Simenon, bard of the French middle-class bureaucratic virtues—stolidity, reliability, with a sharp edge of insight running through—was the least bourgeois man you’d ever meet. Where Maigret is stodgily and permanently lodged with Madame Maigret within “a network of narrow, busy streets bounded by Boulevard Voltaire on one side and Boulevard Richard-Lenoir on the other,” his creator was a vagabond who lived in more than thirty houses during his life. A voluble and indiscreet memoirist, he boasted of having had ten thousand lovers, starting at the age of twelve: some professionals, many volunteers. “I was . . . hungry for all the women I crossed paths with,” he confessed, “whose undulating derrières were enough to give me almost painful erections. How many times have I satiated that hunger with young girls older than me on the threshold of a house, on some dark street?” Married twice, he was a lover of Josephine Baker’s, and was darkly rumored to have had an incestuous liaison with his daughter.
Ten thousand lovers—and five hundred books! Set against Simenon’s rate of production, Graham Greene seems lazy, Dickens a tortured aesthete, Walter Scott sadly blocked. Simenon was unafraid to expound on his writing, but his self-accounting is, his biographers tell us, to be picked up with tongs. Then again, everything authors say about their work is a lie, or, at best, a misdirection. Simenon explained his fecundity as arising from ruthless minimalism, a stripping away of the effects of prose that left him with a supple and always applicable instrument. In a famous Paris Review interview, from 1955, he insisted that he excised anything “literary” from his work, including adjectives and adverbs. Yet descriptive modifiers are everywhere in his work. Pick up one of his books at random and you get sentences like “The lethargic blonde cashier stared at Maigret with mounting curiosity.” What is absent is the kind of breezy, genial belletristic running commentary on the events being narrated. He sits very much on the far side of the great break in prose that began with Flaubert and eventually transformed all modernist styles in French and English writing after the First World War, turning the mannered simplification of fin-de-siècle prose into something tough and tensile. Before the nineteen-twenties, that sentence would have read, “The lethargic blonde cashier, of a kind you find in every bar of this sort, usually a former dancer, stared at Maigret with the mounting curiosity that his bulk and position as a police inspector always attracted.” As with Simenon’s contemporary James M. Cain, in America, the events and their depiction become the same thing, and the commentary happens only in the reader’s mind, or in the inspector’s remarks. Maigret sometimes comments on the action, but we rarely go inside his head to find out what he thinks. We hear him as the world does.
In one of Simenon’s masterpieces, “Maigret and the Headless Corpse”—it’s from 1955, and he’s particularly good in the nineteen-fifties—the first forty pages are spent in a Frederick Wiseman-like documentary study of Maigret’s day. There’s no differentiation between the melodramatic and the mundane: the discovery of an arm and then a torso in the Canal Saint-Martin is interspersed with Maigret weaving in and out of bistros and brasseries as he makes guesses at the meaning of the discovered corpse, leading to a cold, blunt, and near-monosyllabic exchange with the owner of a bistro, in which she impassively volunteers that she has had many lovers in the back room. Simenon’s subject is how people who are pushed to the edge push themselves over it; the force of the sleuthing is that of psychoanalysis, not police interrogation. Maigret knows that people want to tell their stories, and, if prompted, will. Listening, not inquiring, is the detective’s gift; inner life, in these mysteries, manifests only as fragmented speech. Given that premise, the novel’s pages could be filmed without a single elision, so blankly empirical is the whole. Although the tautly minimal surface breaks from time to time into a narrator’s interjections—understandable given the speed with which he wrote—the prose is, for the most part, purely photographic: “A young girl lay on a Louis XVI bed. She was in an almost seated position, because she had lifted herself on one elbow, and in the movement she had made to look towards the door, a swollen, heavy breast had escaped from her nightdress.”
More than fifty feature films were made of his novels when he was alive (including Julien Duvivier’s celebrated 1946 noir “Panique”); Gérard Depardieu plays the inspector in a film from this year. Simenon was a prophet of and a participant in the style of French New Wave cinema, but his writing also presaged aspects of the nouveau roman, of Robbe-Grillet’s faith in describing only the surface of events. (It’s a practice still visible in the work of the fine French writer Annie Ernaux.)
Simenon’s early experience with the surface-haunted, what-where-when habits of the yeoman newspaper reporter must have influenced him. Simenon was born in 1903 in the French-speaking Belgian city of Liège, where his father, an accountant, worked in an insurer’s office, and where, at fifteen, Georges quit school and started working for a local newspaper, covering “fait divers.” Soon, he was writing about crime, and growing acquainted with the more sordid side of city life. Yet, later in his career, when Simenon spoke of his style, he generally avoided crediting newspaper work or the shaping practice of motion pictures. Instead, he loftily gave credit to Gogol and Cézanne—Gogol for the surreal edge of dark fable and Cézanne for the weighty individual stroke, the repetitive rhythm. (Hemingway, another newspaperman reluctant to seem so, credited Cézanne with the birth of his own style.) Declaring himself not at all arty, Simenon then piled on arty antecedents as much as any avant-gardist. He was, in this way, a trickster: when it came to the trappings of art, he feigned innocence or guilt, just as he wished.
Writing about Simenon is tricky, too, simply because the extent of his work—and the relatively small variations in tone within it—makes any one novel at once representative of the whole and too small a slice to offer as truly exemplary. The next book of the five hundred might be a halftone different. Still, he divided his own enormous œuvre into two broad kinds: the swiftly dispatched works of entertainment—a Maigret novel was typically written in two weeks—and the romans durs, the “hard books,” often set outside Paris and meant as works of more self-conscious art.
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The Maigret books, seventy-five in all, seem the likeliest to live. The Penguin edition of the complete Maigret valiantly aims to update previously uneven translations through the skillful efforts of such worthies as David Bellos, Linda Coverdale, and Howard Curtis. Translating Simenon is thorny: as simple as his style is in certain ways, it is also delicate in tone, and can, rendered too literally, mislead as to its purpose. In Shaun Whiteside’s retranslated version of “Maigret and the Killer” (originally published in 1969), the inspector’s interview with a witness, the proprietor of a shop his wife frequents, concludes:
In truth, the original is more off-hand in tone and in spirit, something more like: “Nothing else?” “No, that’s it.” “Thanks, Gino.” “How’s Mrs. Maigret?” Spoken bourgeois French usually being more precise and formal than American English, it demands that the translator reproduce the dignities without giving an incorrect impression of formality, as happened when Hemingway insisted on rendering the familiar second person in Spanish as “thou.” Offering the more formal tone of French small talk without making it sound too mannered is an art, mostly well executed in these new translations.
The Maigret we first meet, in a 1931 novel titled “Pietr the Latvian,” remains essentially unchanged over the next forty years. There are some gradations. Early on, he is a more modern detective, ostentatiously using the new technologies of teletype and identification. But even in this first Maigret novel it’s clear that he views the apparatus of scientific detection as trivial:
His perpetual search for that crack in the wall anchors his character over the decades; he is ponderous, pipe-smoking, devoted to his wife, and resident in the quartier populaire of the Eleventh Arrondissement, on the Rue Richard Lenoir. (At one point, he lived on the Place des Vosges, in the Fourth, back when that beautiful square was still part of a run-down and largely Jewish quarter.) An inspector in the Police Judiciaire, with headquarters on the Quai des Orfèvres, he has generally polite and formal relations with his underlings, and wary relations with the complicated bureaucracy of French justice, where the judges are also the district attorneys running the investigations, so that Maigret variously works with, for, and against them.
Four iconic generations of literary detectives passed through crime fiction during those decades, from the early thirties to the early seventies, when Simenon was writing his books. There was the Sherlock Holmes type, still dominant in the thirties, with all those eccentric, brainy, slightly comic puzzle solvers: Hercule Poirot, Nero Wolfe, Peter Wimsey, and so on. (A French variant was Arsène Lupin, a gentleman thief, whose creator actually borrowed the character of Holmes on occasion, violating copyright law as he did.) Then came the hardboiled kind, with Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade establishing it in the nineteen-thirties and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe giving it poetry in the forties. In the fifties and sixties, Ross Macdonald and John D. MacDonald introduced the philosophical, brooding, and discursive “therapeutic” detective, with Lew Archer in Los Angeles and Travis McGee in Florida. Finally, there’s the police-procedural detective: Evan Hunter’s Eighty-seventh Precinct is more memorable as a collective institution than is any one detective within it.
The magic of Maigret is that, in the course of the twentieth century, he superintends and effectively incorporates all these kinds. He has been called “the French Sherlock Holmes,” and Arthur Conan Doyle’s easily caricatured manner is right there, what with Maigret’s pipe and his own Watson in the ever-present Madame Maigret. In a classic detective story, the investigator’s second has to represent values that the detective both sees through and safeguards. Watson is the perfect embodiment of the Victorian soldierly virtues that Holmes defends, while Holmes himself engages in cocaine and irony. Madame Maigret, in turn, is the very type of the French bourgeoise chatelaine, whom Maigret both protects and patronizes.
But he is also hardboiled in ways that the Holmesian heroes certainly are not. James M. Cain influenced Simenon and he influenced Cain back, favoring tales unflinching in their often grim violence, and tending toward mindless labyrinths of crime leading to existential vanishing points. At the same time, Maigret is very much a philosophical, as opposed to deductive, detective, given to meaty psychological generalizations of the kind favored by Macdonald and MacDonald: “Maigret had often tried to get other people, including men of experience, to admit that those who fall, especially those who have a morbid determination to descend ever lower and take pleasure in disgracing themselves, are almost always idealists.” Conan Doyle invents the type, Hammett hard-boils it, Macdonald and MacDonald deepen it, but it is Simenon who humanizes it.
And, then, Maigret is so French! The British playwright David Hare, who adapted a Maigret book for the stage, insists that Simenon—being Belgian-born and so an outsider—disdained the usual French prattle about gastronomy, and therefore cared little for the subject. Hare misses the point, which is that it may be de trop to talk about these things all the time but it is essential to experience them. So, within a handful of pages in “Maigret and the Killer,” we are offered a bœuf gros sel, cognac, champagne, and Madame Maigret’s mackerel with white wine and mustard, and soon afterward we meet an andouillette. A little later, there is a poignant passage on snails. None of it is underlined or important in itself; it is part of the unconscious sensual intelligence of French life. The casual intrusion of food is a constant leitmotif of the books. In “The Headless Corpse,” an important line of inquiry is opened when Maigret realizes that the vin de region served at a shabby bistro is unusually good. At Maigret’s favorite brasserie, on the Place Dauphine, we learn that “among the smells still hovering in the air, there were two that dominated the others: Pernod, around the bar, and coq au vin wafting in from the kitchen.”
The most profoundly French thing about Maigret is that he is a salaried government employee and proud to be so. The books are filled with procedural matters—confronted with a wave of rapes, Maigret sighs primarily because he does not have enough officers to placate the press without weakening the service—but, against the usual run of the American police procedural, it is never the system itself that is annoying, only those who would undermine it. Where the amateur detective of the Sherlock Holmes kind acts as a consultant to the wealthy, and has contempt for the Scotland Yard policemen, Maigret is a pure fonctionnaire. And where in an American procedural the higher-ups are exasperated by the hero’s independence (“I’m telling you for the last time: clean up your act! There’s no place for cowboys in this department!”), in Simenon the underlings exasperate the Inspector with their servile inefficiency. At one point, Maigret shakes his head at the less successful policemen under his direction: “By dint of walking around Paris, they acquire the posture of butlers and café waiters who stand up all day. They almost assume the same dull colour as the impoverished areas that they patrol.”
Maigret is not openly reverential toward the French state, but he works comfortably within its envelope, like a priest within the Catholic Church in eighteenth-century Italy, where the state is the Church—the only credible source of order. (The investigating magistrates usually come from a higher educational caste than Maigret, but they respect his professionalism.) This difference between American and French attitudes toward the state appears on every page of the Maigret books. In a recent James Patterson procedural, half the Chicago police force turns out to be murderously corrupt. This doesn’t happen in Simenon. The heart is double; French institutions are not.
At the same time, Inspector Maigret is the anti-Inspector Javert, one of the least implacable policemen on record. In “The Hanged Man,” Maigret’s fourth outing, he traces a series of bizarre and seemingly random acts to a circle of philosophical nihilists. (“A few of us were off in a corner, talking about some Kantian theory or other,” one explains.) But they have now become earnest bourgeoisie, with wives and children and mortgages, and Maigret pardons them by his inaction. Justice is more entangled than it may seem. In “The Headless Corpse,” the inspector muses:
Simenon’s paradox of the prisoner parallels Camus’s contemporaneous idea of the implicit collaboration of criminality and justice: the first is a private existential act, the second is a public contractual one. Murderers want to be found out as sinners want to confess; the religious function of confession and sacramental forgiveness has simply been passed to the organs of the state.
The idea that justice is often best served by being withheld is a very French one, almost designed to infuriate Americans, who wonder at the lack of indignation about this collaborator or that philandering cabinet minister. Sanctimony and self-righteousness, favored American traits, are disfavored in Simenon’s world. “You’re going to fry for it, doll!” the noirish detective says to the femme fatale, and we are meant to feel that justice has been served. No moment of that kind occurs in Simenon. A central theme of his novels, gaining salience in the nineteen-fifties, is that justice is sought but served only with a shrug, if at all.
Behind this French ambiguity about sin in the fifties is surely the fact of French collaboration with evil in the forties—in which Simenon participated, albeit on a low level. Under the Vichy regime, he sold the rights to some of his books to a Nazi-approved German film company, and, like many French writers during the war, he tried to carry on as though little had changed. He also managed a refugee center for displaced Belgians, and apparently did it well. But he was no resister, and the leftist French writers’ union took a dim view of his generally placid war, sending the Simenon family scurrying, in 1945, to Canada and the United States. (Eventually, like Charlie Chaplin, he settled in Switzerland.) Simenon never wrote directly about France during the war; the novels of the period are set in a “timeless” Paris, but long afterward he did write a fine novel entitled “Maigret in Vichy” (1968), in which the town appears not as the center of the Pétain government but only as the old spa city it had been before. (Maigret goes there, in the watchful company of Madame Maigret, for a cure.) Nonetheless, a note of defeated France—the France of endless compromise—fills the book’s slow-paced chronicle: Maigret spends the early part of the book walking round and round a music pavilion, staring at an elegant and solitary woman who later turns up dead. Beneath the standard Simenon devices, one senses an allegory of exhaustion and guilt. The good inspector is doomed to walk a Dantean circle, right in the center of the capital of collaboration.
Starting in the early nineteen-sixties, Simenon interrupted his usual novel-writing schedule to produce a series of memoirs, including the compelling “When I Was Old.” In addition to all the women, he also owned up to lifelong alcoholism and, yes, writer’s block, among other improbable sins. The question arises of how Simenon’s literary penchant for forgiveness relates to his own extravagant confessions. Now, sex with ten thousand women, whether claimed by Wilt Chamberlain or Simenon, is a proverbial expression, like the tumor as large as a grapefruit or the city rat as big as a cat—an exclamation of surprising scale rather than a measurement to be relied upon. A rough back-of-the-cahier calculation suggests that this would have meant something like one new liaison a day during the three decades of his prime, holidays included. (I don’t doubt the Frenchman’s appetite but do doubt his readiness to work on Christmas.) But let’s say: lots of women. Is there a connection between the mania of Simenon’s appetites, at least as they looked in his mental mirror, and his relentless productivity as a writer? Do writers who write a lot also do everything else a lot? Balzac, George Sand, William Carlos Williams, and H. G. Wells join Simenon in the much-sex / many-pages column of the ledger. In the other column are Trollope, who was far from a philanderer, and Wodehouse, who, with a single, long marriage, hardly seemed the type, either.
Still, when one reads a hyperproductive writer one can be sure one is in the presence of some kind of voluptuary. Most writers don’t actually like the act of writing, finding it tiring, depressing, or, most often, disappointing. For a few, writing is less labor than it is an exhilarating drug that can’t be taken too often. The football coach John Madden said once that being good at blocking in football is mostly just liking to block, meaning that the bruising and pain of it has to become a pleasure. Writing that much and that steadily is, similarly, mostly just liking to do it. Though Simenon claimed, unconvincingly, that he had difficulty in writing, in the next breath he admitted how much he loved all the appurtenances of writing: notebooks and pencils and papers, the thrill of the blank page, the feeling of being complacently superior to the rest of creation, wiser and more serene, when you begin. For such happy, addicted writers, fertility is less a function of energy than of dissipation: they’re doing what feels best.
All hyperproductive writers run the risk of repetition, of falling into a stylized world. Writers like Thornton Wilder, who come out with one book every ten years or so, rarely repeat themselves, and don’t always write the same book. But then they mostly don’t write any book at all. The reason Wodehouse and Simenon stand out is that their sense of style is strong enough to withstand the stylization. Still, there’s something limiting about the restricted locale the Maigret books inhabit. Like a travelling theatrical troupe that can’t afford more than a couple of sets, many of the novels bounce predictably from one place to another and back again.
Yet, if his settings sometimes seem scant, his characters do not. Simenon is an authentic humanist. The word in France has a slightly different meaning from what it may have here—there it is largely left-wing, and historically refers to not being allied with the Catholic Church. (The leading Communist paper is called L’Humanité.) But in French, too, it implies an acceptance of humanity on its own terms, and a value placed on the individuality of every individual. The weakness of humanism is the Gallic shrug that lets everything pass as too complex for judgment; its strength is its assertion of the plurality of human experience which cautions us from judging others too easily.
Judge not that ye be not judged: the Christian doctrine contains both an implicit ethos of sentencing and an explicit claim of permanent mercy. Self-forgiveness comes too soon; the accusation of others comes too quickly. Between those two truths lie the Maigret mysteries. In “The Headless Corpse,” the secret of the broken body turns out to involve a troubled rich girl who defied her father by running off with his manservant and, decades later, finds herself immured in that Paris bistro. What looks at first like a cold-blooded murder is revealed to be a hot-blooded and excusable act of protective passion on the part of a middle-aged lover, and the pathos comes from the woman’s “animal in its burrow” desire to remain in her humble place rather than accept a large inheritance and venture out into the world. The dénouement is handled in some ways too briskly and conveniently, with a well-drawn provincial lawyer who comes to Paris only to explain the backstory. (The mechanics of Simenon’s mysteries can be slipshod.) And yet the pomposity and the sybaritism of the lawyer as he leads Maigret on a walk across the darkened lamplit boulevards from one late-night dive in Paris to another lend a human note to what would otherwise be a plot device. Besides, Maigret, we’re given to believe, already knows the basic story. Confronting the woman, he speaks without accusation:
That is always the way with Simenon. There is never an “Aha!” moment, only an “Ah!” one. In a genre all about solutions and clarity, he found equivocation and doubt. He entirely understood the symbolic power of his own chiaroscuro. He once tossed off a brilliant aperçu on Rembrandt. “His chiaroscuro is already a critique of pure reason,” he wrote in “When I Was Old.” In Rembrandt’s paintings, he noted, “man no longer has definite outlines.” So it is with Simenon: reason asserts its power, then resigns its place. The reward is watching blacks turn to grays, in small developments of understanding. “More light!” Goethe called out famously as he died. Simenon’s cry is sadder: We know what light we need, and we know we’ll never get it. We settle for just enough light to see the streets by. ♦
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