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Georges Simenon's work shows the influence of Freeman Wills Crofts.
His Inspector Maigret is a policeman, just like Crofts' Inspector
French. Both officers solve crimes by patient, routine investigation,
realistically depicted in step by step fashion by their authors.
Maigret walking down a suburban street at the opening of his first
published case, M. Gallet décédé (Maigret
Stonewalled) (1931), reminds one of French sleuthing on suburban
streets in The Box Office Murders (1929). Both do a lot
of traveling, going to different cities. Both writers have an
international orientation, with their characters coming from all
over Europe, and their detectives solving international crimes.
Both are nationally based, French in Scotland Yard, Maigret with
the Sûreté, and both interface with a lot of local
police officers. Both study physical clues, and make deductions
from evidence left behind at crime scenes. Both detectives are
married, and discuss their work with their patient wives. Both
have to use considerable tact to deal with difficult suspects.
While Simenon's works reflect Crofts' in their detective work,
characters, and social background, their plotting technique does
not completely follow the standard interests of the British realists.
There is little emphasis on alibis, or on the "breakdown
of identity" used to create them - although Simenon characters
often have more than one identity, often to aid in their criminal
activities. Science and engineering play a smaller role in the
Simenon stories than in Crofts, although there is the murdered
man's interest in mechanical gizmos in M. Gallet décédé.
Simenon will later introduce a doctor detective, Jean Dollent,
in the book The Little Doctor (collected 1943). Physician
detectives are part of the traditions of the realist school. The
careful account of Simenon's characters' financial status and
activities, also reminds one of such British realist writers as
Crofts and, especially, Henry Wade. Simenon's characters are often
middle class, just as in the realists. Crofts included a portrait
of adultery in The Cask; Simenon has may unhappy couples
in his novels. Simenon's non-mystery works in which guilty people
are psychologically pursued by their crimes perhaps owe something
to the inverted detective stories of which the British realists
were so fond. The gloomy, downbeat tone of some of Simenon's work
also reflects the tragic tone of much British realist writing.
Many of Maigret's interviews with suspects are essentially psychological
portraits of the characters in the book. This technique is very
popular in modern mystery fiction, especially private eye tales,
and one associates it with Raymond Chandler,
and even more with Chandler's follower Ross MacDonald. But here
it is in Simenon, in a fully developed form in the first Maigret
novel M. Gallet décédé (1931), long
before either Chandler or MacDonald. This gives this Simenon book
a peculiarly modern flavor. Many of the chapters seem more like
the detective fiction of the 1990's than of the 1930's.
The many complex, original criminal schemes in Simenon's tales
remind one of the similar criminal operations in Crofts books
like The Pit-Prop Syndicate (1922) and The Box Office
Murders (1929). Simenon's plotting style often involves two
separate plots. The first is a scheme by some crook; the second
is a counterscheme developed by a second crook in response to
the first. The detective and the reader only see a confused trail
of evidence left by the two schemes. Their job is to try to see
into the two level scheme behind it. Sometimes this works brilliantly,
as in "Death in a Department Store". (This story has
also been anthologized by Ellery Queen
as "The Slipper Fiend".) But all too often, it results
in a non fair play mystery. It is hard to see how any reader could
deduce the real nature of the plot and counterplot from the clues
given. They are just too complex, and largely hidden from the
reader, with only a handful of scattered clues suggesting what
is really going on. And M. Gallet décédé,
while it starts out with some vivid writing, eventually devolves
into a series of tangled coincidences.
La Nuit du carrefour (Maigret at the Crossroads)
(1931) is one of Simenon's most Croftsian works. Maigret eventually
uncovers a criminal scheme similar to those Crofts wrote about
in The Pit-Prop Syndicate and The Box Office Murders.
As in Crofts, this scheme is more oriented to fraud than murder:
it's a commercial enterprise. And as in Crofts, it centers around
a technological location. What seems less Croftsian is the extraordinarily
creepy atmosphere of the opening sections (Chapters 1 - 6). Reading
these chapters made me extremely nervous. I have no idea of how
Simenon achieves this effect, because there is nothing overtly
sinister going on. There are no supernatural events à la
John Dickson Carr, and no conventional
suspense technique or events. There is just an apparently normal
middle class suburb. But the reader constantly waits for some
totally ominous catastrophe to erupt. The sheer placidity of everything
is frightening. Maigret himself seems to do no real detection,
but rather to just stand around and observe the suspects. His
lack of action engenders a helpless feeling in the reader. So
do the hints that something monstrous or abnormal is going on
at the house of The Three Widows in the tale. Paradoxically, when
the solution finally comes, it is far less frightening than the
body of the story. It deals with mere criminality, something that
seems far more familiar to the reader than the nameless dread
which dominates most of the novel. Also, here Maigret finally
takes action and does things.
The great director Jean Renoir filmed La Nuit du carrefour
the next year (1932), in collaboration with Simenon as a scriptwriter.
I have never had a chance to see this film. Andrew Sarris thought
it was botched, Jean-Luc Godard thought it the greatest French
detective film, and André Bazin ignored it entirely in
his book on Renoir. One could see why it would appeal to Renoir:
the character of Else and her relations to the men in the tale
recall Renoir's previous film, La Chienne (1931). Also,
the story involves a complex cat's cradle of relationships among
the characters, looking forward to Renoir's Toni (1934)
and The Rules of the Game (1939).
The film director Akira Kurosawa was a big fan of Simenon, and
he reportedly wrote his detective movie Stray Dog (1949)
first as a novel, before shooting it as a film. Kurosawa's detectives
are policemen, like Maigret, who engage in realistic, ploddingly
detailed police work. Like Simenon, and the British realists before
him, Kurosawa explores a great many locations, in this case, the
poorer districts of Tokyo. The extreme heat, which constantly
afflicts the characters, also is present in such Simenon novels
as M. Gallet décédé, where it affects
his heavily built Maigret perhaps more than it would Kurosawa's
athletic star Toshiro Mifune.
Simenon was born Georges Sim, but eventually changed his name
for literary purposes. This is an odd coincidence, in that three
detective writers all have similar names. The hard-boiled writer
whose pseudonym was Paul Cain was born
George Sims, and there is also the Doyle follower George R. Sims
in the 1890's.
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