Maigret Forum

Antwerp, Begium 9/3/2018 - 10/6/2018

website (in Dutch)

translation from the website by Dirk:

Harry Gruyaert (Antwerpen, 1941) is one of the most famous Belgian photographers. With this retrospective exposition the FOMU (Museum of Photography) draws a rich and surprising image of his work. Gruyaert is one of the pioneers of colour photography and since 1982 member of the famous Magnum agency…..

The masterful use of color photography - with his beloved Kodachrome film - is Gruyaerts trademark. However, the exhibition at FOMU also shows its versatility and focuses on a few seldom seen sides of its career: early black and white work, a fashion campaign for Hermès, covers of Penguin pocket editions of Georges Simenon, a tribute to film maker Michelangelo Antonioni, family photos and diverse assignment photography.

Dirk

To most Europeans, the name phonetically (K or) Cray-Mer would be spelt Germanically as Kramer rather than as Cremer. Kramer is a surname frequently found in Germany.

This webpage, on a site for which, of course, I cannot vouch and itself admits that it is ageing, helps:

Part of the text:

This unusual and interesting name has Flemish origins and is an example of a name introduced into England by French and Flemish Huguenots seeking refuge from religious persecution on the continent during the latter half of the 16th Century and again during the late 17th Century. ‘Cremer’ is a variant of the German ‘Kramer’ and is an occupational name for a shopkeeper or tradesman or one who travelled through the countryside buying butter, hens and eggs which he carried to the market.

Again, an extract from the text:

Bruno Cremer was born in Saint-Mandé, Val-de-Marne, in the eastern suburbs of Paris, France. His mother, a musician, was of Belgian Flemish origin and his father was a businessman from Lille who, though born French, had taken out Belgian nationality after the French armed forces refused to accept him for service in the First World War. Bruno himself opted for French nationality when he reached the age of 18. His childhood was largely spent in Paris.

His parents’ roots were in that international triangle where the boundaries of religion, politics and nations often overlapped and came into conflict (before the EU), stretching between French Flanders (Lille), The Netherlands (Maastricht), Germany (Aachen) and embracing the whole of what are now Belgium and Luxembourg. Once the Cremer family was firmly in France, it is understandable that an acute accent was added, for it is that which makes Crémer phonetically almost identical to Kramer at the same time making it look familiar in French.

This is all just background: how the actor’s surname was actually spelt will have been what his birth certificate or any later document changing that said it was. It may, one conjectures, have had the accent added when he opted to be French, not Belgian, at 18. Lamentably, the relative inability of non-Francophones to appreciate accents may have clouded the issue ever since.

There are four little observations to make:

1. At some point in its journey from High German to Low German to Flemish, Krämer lost its umlaut but kept its pronunciation. Without it, it would in German phonetically be Krarmer.
2. There are divergent views in France on which accent is applicable on the middle e of all the words with the stem crem..., créme in common usage, but crème according to authority, the Academie Française.
3. And, though a word with the same ending is not now used, it is very clear that the stem crem... gave Bruno’s surname the same meaning in French as it had in its German linguistic roots. The trade in dairy products was clearly already a single market.
4. And it is fitting that Simenon, from Liège / Luik had a similarly heterogeneous background, with German in his mother’s ancestry.

with best wishes to all,
James Mackay

Although I haven't been able to find an "official" version, I tend to favor (in spite of everything, even Wikipedia!) the version with the accent, based on the covers of the author's autobiography, on which his name is Crémer. If we can assume that the author himself approved these covers, he must therefore have approved of the spelling…

Murielle

I am particularly impressed by your attention to detail on the site, which is why I am sending you this message. In your section Maigret Films & TV the name of the actor Bruno Cremer is spelt with an acute accent (Crémer). In fact there is no accent in his name.

Good luck with your site and keep up the excellent work!

Best regards,
James Nicholson

Thanks, James!

Steve Cribari

Liberty Bar a review by Andrew Walser

The pace at which Simenon wrote his novels – particularly the early Maigrets – insures that themes in them will emerge as much from unconscious processes as from intention and craft. This is why interpretations of the books must content themselves with strands that do not tie neatly into an overall pattern, and that sometimes trail off into inconsistency or inconsequence. Yet it would be a mistake to think of the novels as slipshod. They are better understood as a variety of realism, one that coherently develops the idea that reality can never be shapely or self-consistent.

I am keeping this willful inconsistency in mind when I call Liberty Bar a rumination about selves – about the way the passage of time changes one self into another, and the way potential selves exist within each person, and die off, one by one, when the conditions for their emergence no longer exist.

In the early chapters of Liberty Bar, Maigret is sent to Antibes to solve the murder of William Brown – and to solve it, his superiors say, with “no drama.” The refrain returns to Maigret’s mind again and again throughout the book, like an insipid pop hook that has taken one’s consciousness captive. After interrogating two of the suspects, he is surprised to find himself somewhat disheartened – almost personally affronted – by how the victim spent his final years.

Why should that matter to Maigret? The answer is obvious. Looking at a portrait of Brown, at the “exaggeratedly calm gaze” and “good natured but ironic curl of the lips,” Maigret has to admit: “[T]here was something about his general bearing, his expression, that reminded Maigret of himself.” The narrative reinforces this sense of identification, telling us that Maigret enters the dead man’s villa like “an owner returning home,” sits in his favorite armchair, and receives a box of his cigars as a gift. On his way out of the villa, he even grabs Brown’s raincoat by mistake. At the eponymous bar, Jaja, the owner, says:

“You remind me of William... That’s where he sat... He too put his pipe down next to his plate when he ate... He had your shoulders... Do you know you look like him?”

Thus, Maigret sees Brown as a second self – or, better yet, as one of those potential selves, somehow released from his interior into the visible world. This is why he is so disturbed by the dreary domesticity into which the dead man seems to have retired: “ʻHow on Earth did a fellow like Brown spend ten years with these two women?’” Could such a dismal fate await Inspector Maigret? ...

complete review

Quelle folie, je me demande, est celle de Lise en La Maison du Juge?

I wonder what Lise's madness could be, in La Maison du Juge?

Robert Lantz

The Quai des Orfèvres with the Seine very high...

Jérôme

Night at the Crossroads: location Luc Secret original French

I can add some infomation to supplement Murielle's text, Maigret and the mysteries of the crossroads...

In Pierre Assouline's biography of Simenon, we find this about Jean Renoir's film, La nuit du carrefour:

"The interiors were shot in a studio in Billancourt, outside Paris, the exteriors at the intersection of Routes 1 and 309, in La Croix-Verte, [by Bouffémont]. Simenon was careful to show personal interest in the proceedings, visiting the set many times between January and March 1932. Marcel Lucien, the director of photography, submerged the images in a thick fog. The atomosphere was truly sinister, and the overall effect had a rare poetry.

A month before the commercial release, Simenon was invited to a small private screening. When the lights came on, he could not contain his emotion. Eyes wet, he put his arm around Pierre Renoir, not sure whether he was embracing the actor or the inspector." (tr. Jon Rothschild, Simenon: A biography, pp 106-108)*

complete article

1/18/18 – It is becoming more and more probable that BBC does not have Maigret with Rupert Davies any longer.

Vladimir.

1/7/18 – A comment I had in the TV pages of the Sunday Times Culture section (January 7th 2018):

Anthony Green

1/1/18 – Thanks, Andrew!

Just for fun, I tried "Bergerac" in the Search form at the top of the page - and got 122 results! The Maigret-of-the-Month was #1, of course, but also this interesting #2 from 14 years ago (Dec. 29, 2003):

Comparison of Piron, Forest, Alavoine / Maigret handbook pages

(translations of)
the respective sections on
"The Madman of Bergerac" (Le Fou de Bergerac)

Maurice Piron's L'Univers de Simenon
Jean Forest's Les Archives Maigret
Bernard Alavoine's Les enquêtes de Maigret

ST

The Madman of Bergerac a review by Andrew Walser

By the end of the first chapter of The Madman of Bergerac, Inspector Maigret has already spent a sleepless night on a crowded train, jumped off in pursuit of his nervous cabinmate, received a gunshot wound in the left shoulder, and lost consciousness in a forest outside town. He has wakened to find himself in a hospital bed, surrounded by hostile interrogators and mistaken for a murderer. It will take some time before the skeptical prosecutor will admit “that Maigret was indeed Maigret and not the madman of Bergerac!”

Despite these dramatic beginnings, the rest of the novel is marked by near-stasis, an immobility caused by both Maigret’s confinement and the provinciality of life in Bergerac. Yet Simenon manages to energize the plot anyway. How? Through what one might call a structuralist motor, one that works by setting two opposing principles in simultaneous motion.

The first principle is Anti-Enlightenment – a worldview that emphasizes irrationality, uncertainty, and disorder. The Madman of Bergerac replaces the typical mystery’s stable core with a narrative in which (to repurpose both Marx and Marshall Berman) all that is solid melts into air. Instead of formal investigation, we get accident: “It all came about by pure chance!” Instead of comprehensible motives, we get behavior that baffles even the actor, with the Inspector as perplexed as we are about “what instinct had prompted him to jump off the train while his luggage continued on its way to Villefranche-en-Dordogne.” Instead of evidence, we get unbridgeable gaps in knowledge – signs that lie just outside the “halo of moonlight,” memories that collapse into one another. Every detail – bushy eyebrows, a pair of socks, a particular hat – could point to Maigret’s assailant, or to someone glimpsed during his delirium, or to nothing at all. The clues, in other words, seem to be originating within the seeker – a situation that raises the possibility, fatal to the Enlightenment myth, that we are not so much discerning patterns in the world as imposing patterns on the world. (For more on the mystery as the embodiment of the Enlightenment ethos, see my review of The Two-Penny Bar.)

A case so resistant to comprehension inevitably acquires a “nightmare” quality, which may explain why Simenon uses the word three times in the first chapter. The atmosphere of irreality grows especially dense in a strange, striking passage in which Maigret dreams he is a “gleaming black animal,” fat as a seal and awkward as a beached whale, sinking second by second into wet sand. The dream obviously refers to the Inspector’s physical condition – “Why was he so stiff? Had he been wounded by a hunter?” – but also seems to me a figure for a detective out of his depth, mired in a world in which reason and observation no longer take him where he wants to go...

complete review

A quite different question is whether this well-done movie was also a well-done Maigret movie? Here I'm not so excited. One thing we know about Maigret is that he had a 'bulky' figure. Atkinson is a skinny fellow, not exactly how I'd expect Maigret to look. But than, I measure all actors playing Maigret by the Gambon standard, so none of them will fully measure up.

And I'd like to question Atkinson's choice of this particular story for his movie. What is so special, so outstanding about this story? If he asked me, I could give him one good reason not to use this story. It paints people from specific ethnic backgrounds in a bad light. Maybe it was okay in 1948 when France and Czechoslovakia were separated by the 'iron curtain', but it seems a little defamatory when GB, France, and CZ are all EU friends (never mind Brexit)...

Cheers,
Vladimir

And so we can often find traits in a character of a person who had actually lived. For more on this subject see Michel Carly's book, Simenon et les femmes, which gives many examples of real people who inspired certain characters, (such as the Crosbys in La tête d'un homme).

With regard to Maigret himself, we know that he was inspired by several people Simenon knew... In addition to Guillaume, there was also Massu, and another policeman Simenon would have met when he was in Liège. And Maigret also contains characteristics of Simenon's father and grandfather…

Murielle

I feel that the appearance, attitudes and mannerisms bestowed by Simenon on such characters must owe much to people encountered by Simenon. It would be interesting to indulge in a little speculation about their identity.

William Russell

Maigret podróżuje (Maigret voyage) (November)

Maigret się bawi (Maigret s'amuse) (July)

Przemyslaw

William cites the quote near the end of Ch. 8, where Maigret confronts Van Damme, saying that if it were about Klein's death in February... if in fact it had been a murder, rather than a suicide... the statute of limitations would expire in three months.

But Van Damme had only asked Maigret to wait a month... so it was about something that had happened two months earlier... And it was this issue of the statute of limitations that led to the eventual revelation of the reason for Klein's suicide... the muder by the group of Willy Mortier in that December ten years earlier.

Indeed, prescription, "statute of limitations," is mentioned twice more before the end of the novel...

Toward the end of Ch. 9, Maigrets says, "Il y aura dix ans dans un mois... Dans un mois, il y aura prescription..." [It will be ten years ago in a month. In a month the statute of limitations will expire...]

And near the end of the last chapter, Ch. 11, Van Damme essentially repearts, "Car, dans un mois, pas même, dans vingt-six jours, il y aura prescription..." [For in a month, not even, in twenty-six days, the statute of limitations will expire...]

So while Lahlum's summary doesn't fit perfectly, it seems pretty clear that this was the novel he intended: "Statute of limitations" was a significant element in the solution of the case... and the first murder led to two more deaths — though not murders — one of them related to the time limit...

ST

"...il n'y aurait prescription qu'en février, soit dix ans après...
[...the statute of limitations would expire in February, 10 years later...]
(Tout Maigret 1, èdition Omnibus, 2007, p 439.)

William Russell

In the Maigrets, there's the murder of Nina Lassave in Maigret et l'homme tout seul, and that of old Willems in Maigret et le clochard. We can also consider Darchambaux's murder of his aunt in Le charretier de la Providence, which had an indirect influence on his murders of Mary and Willy Marco. But since Darchambaux had been convicted of the first murder and had served his sentence, it really can't be considered a statute of limitations issue...

For this theme of a murder provoked by the statute of limitations, I can suggest Le pendu de Saint-Pholien, in which, in fact, it is mentioned with regard to the murder of Willy Mortier. However, can it really be said that that provoked new murders? Not exactly, considering that Jeunet was a suicide, and that Maigret evaded Van Damme's attempt…

As for me, I can't think of any others, but perhaps someone among the Simenon specialists in the romans durs can suggest something…

Murielle

"...I recently read a novel by the great Belgian-French crime writer Simenon in which the limitation period for an old murder suddenly spawned several new murders..." (p. 158)

Regards.
Jérôme

      A Maigret Christmas
      Seven small Crosses in a notebook
      The little restaurant near place des Ternes

This is a new translation by David Coward. It is indicated as a translation of Un Noël de Maigret by Presses de la Cité 1951.

Regards
Jérôme

Which title is omited as book title plus eight others is still quoted?

Regards
Martin Cooke