Maigret Forum

Also, TV episode 29, Cremer, Madame Quatre et ses enfants has the English title "Mrs. Four and her children". Did I miss the English title?

Norm Mikalac

Les petits cochons sans queue [The little pigs without tails], Nov. 28, 1946, Bradenton Beach (Florida). We note that Maigret doesn't appear in this story, which gives its name to the title of the volume... the title was probably chosen for marketing purposes, as the book was included in Presses de la Cité's "collection Maigret", and using the Chief Inspector's name no doubt contributed to sales...

Madame Quatre et ses enfants [Mme Quatre and her children], January 1945, Les Sables-d'Olonne, a story without Maigret.

ST

The Two-Penny Bar a review by Andrew Walser

The detective novel relies on a few simple assumptions:

1. That the individual may attain truth by his own efforts;
2. That such truth comes through the powers of observation and the exercise of logic;
3. That logic and empirical evidence have an authority that transcends the authority based on tradition and force;
4. That this new authority moves the world in the direction of justice.

Are the Maigret novels an embodiment of this Enlightenment myth, or are they a critique? Perhaps a bit of each. This becomes clear in The Two-Penny Bar, a 1932 novel in which the Inspector tries to identify a murderer hidden, six years after the fact, in a group of friends who meet every Sunday at a makeshift tavern near the Seine. We see right away that Maigret does not really resemble a Dupin or a Sherlock Holmes. He works by intuition rather than by logic, waiting for “that nibble, that little shift, the ‘click’ that told him he was on to something” – a flash of intuition triggered not by evidence, but by the “mildness of the evening” or the way a “little white house” looks at dusk.

When analytic logic necessarily takes over – when the givens of the case begin to constrain Maigret’s imagination – he tends to feel let down, “as if he thought it was all falling into place rather too easily.” He wants to prolong the state of not yet knowing indefinitely, to be an inquisitive stranger in a “little world which some event had shaken up.”

As for justice, Maigret seems to prefer criminals to his colleagues. The events in The Two-Penny Bar stem from his visits to a condemned man, Lenoir, whose common sense, confidence, and lack of self-pity have made the Inspector “[take] something of a shine to him.” When the young man mentions that he saw a body dumped in the Seine years earlier, and muses that “There are others who deserve this,” Maigret takes up the case out of curiosity and something like loyalty. Justice appears in his considerations, if at all, mostly in the way he resents – just as Lenoir does – the way the rich and respectable enjoy an unearned freedom from consequences.

For Maigret, detective work is a “bolt-hole,” a place where he can hide from the mundane. Fortunately, he has made his desire to retreat useful to the larger society, just as Simenon made a similar need to escape – to create entire worlds out of guidebooks and maps – useful to millions of readers. Yet such isolation does take its toll. At the end of The Two-Penny Bar, the Inspector feels a “dull, grey despair” – one that only dispels when he makes it to the country and the presence of Madame Maigret.

Simenon, Georges. The Two-Penny Bar. trans. David Watson. London: Penguin, 2014.

Regards,
Bill Alder

In other words, has this magnificent web site keyed each 2013-2016 Penguin Maigret to all or most previous English titles?

Thank you and best wishes.
Don Buck
Orford NH

ST

Guy

"Using sparse typography, paired with Gruyaert's back catalogue of photographs, the intention was not to closely reflect a particular storyline, but rather evoke the atmosphere of Maigret and Simenon's writing."
3-years.blogspot.com.au

The Guardian newspaper has an interesting article with commentary by picture editor Samantha Johnson on the Penguin covers.
www.theguardian.com

and there's more from the same at www.creativereview.co.uk

Ward Saylor

The new Penguin edition, The Hand, will coincide with a new play by renowned dramatist David Hare based on the book and opening at the National Theatre in London on 6 October with the title The Red Barn. John Simenon will be joining David Hare at the theatre to discuss the play and Simenon's legacy on 7 November.

As a footnote, the translation that appeared in the Penguin Omnibus was by Moura Budberg, surely the most exotic of Simenon's many translators. Described in press reports as "a glamorous tsarist beauty" suspected of spying for both Russia and Great Britain, her lovers included Maxim Gorky and H G Wells. To cap it all, she was the great great aunt of former leader of Britain's Liberal Democrat party, Nick Clegg.

Richard Thomas

"The Red Barn" at the National Theatre
more...
more...

Vladimir

Maigret et la grande perche

Le Revolver de Maigret

Maigret, Lognon et les gangsters

David

The Dancer at the Gai-Moulin a review by Andrew Walser

Maigret is not exactly a round character. He does not “change” or “grow” the way creative writing teachers insist a compelling character must; he never has an epiphany, and the experiences he has in one book are usually utterly forgotten by the time we get to the next. No, Maigret is always self-identical, in the manner of heroes and villains or gods and monsters. Always the same pipe, always the same hat, always the same impassive and imperturbable manner. An actor who plays him – whether he is Jean Gabin, Michael Gambon, Bruno Cremer, or Rowan Atkinson – may be tempted to slip into these traits as if he were donning a cape to play Dracula.

In The Dancer at the Gai-Moulin, the minimal development of Maigret – or what we might now redescribe as the efficiency of his characterization – is used to striking effect. For much of the book, Maigret is conspicuously absent. Yet we know he is near. He must be the stranger in the “bowler hat” who enters the nightclub in the opening scene; he must be the “man with the broad shoulders” who appears so often – and so hauntingly – on the periphery of events. Unnamed and unrecognized, Maigret is the mystery here. Even the Belgian police begin to suspect he may be guilty of the murder at the Gai-Moulin, and the papers in Liege all wonder: “Where is the man with broad shoulders?” What was he doing at the club that night? Why does he not come forward?

In the near-absence of Maigret, the book zeroes in on two teenagers, Delfosse and Chabot, who, robbing the club after closing time, are stunned to find a corpse in the middle of the dance floor. We immediately empathize more with the younger of the two, Chabot, and see in his relation to the older boy a familiar dynamic, reminiscent of Leopold and Loeb or, much later, Harris and Klebold – one in which a strong psychopath dominates and leads astray his weaker companion. Chabot senses that, by hiding in the cellar of the Gai-Moulin, he and Delfosse have crossed a terrifying line. He is horrified by a life so sordid, so dangerous, so low. The dread and guilt he feels make him too nauseated to eat his mother’s cooking, and he is still juvenile enough to imagine his pursuer as an “unknown man pacing the street, just in front of the school he had attended as a child.”

When he does appear, Maigret functions as a kind of deus ex machina – or, more accurately, an auctor ex machina. A plot always seems to move by its own volition in the early stages, but as things come closer to resolution – as the strands of narrative converge, and the themes begin to bend toward a desired outcome – the writer’s hand inevitably becomes more visible. Here the process is done mostly in fun, as we (and the Belgian police) learn just how much Maigret really intervened in the case: “‘Yes, all right, I cheated! I didn’t tell you at once all I knew.’” Even the title of the book is a piece of legerdemain, since the Adele in The Dancer at the Gai-Moulin is considerably less important than the Adele in The Grand Banks Café.

The eventual salvation of Chabot involves two ironies. The first is his posting in the Congo – a location that would have been well known to European readers of the time as a criminal enterprise in its own right, the site of unspeakable atrocities under King Leopold II and the Congo Free State. If Delfosse was a bad influence, surely a corporation only a generation from genocide is even worse.

The second concerns the source of much of the public’s knowledge of those atrocities – a bestselling book called The Crime of the Congo.

Its author? Arthur Conan Doyle.

Simenon, Georges. The Dancer at the Gai-Moulin. trans. Siân Reynolds. London: Penguin, 2014.

6/19/16 – LONDON, June 18 (UPI) -- Britain's ITV network says it has ordered two more Maigret television films starring Rowan Atkinson.

Atkinson will reprise his role of French fictional detective Jules Maigret in the small-screen mysteries, which are set in 1950s Paris and based on Georges Simenon's novels.

The next installments in the franchise -- Night at the Crossroads and Maigret in Montmartre -- will be shot this fall and winter...

UPI - By Karen Butler | June 18, 2016 at 10:51 AM

6/20/16 – C21 Media - By Andrew Dickens - 6-20-2016 -
ITV detects more Maigret

In Germany the series is a success, that's why there will be DVD Vol. 5 as well (from 22nd of July). 45 episodes out of 52 have survived in the ZDF archives, plus "Maigret und die alte Dame" ("The Old Lady"), which lacks good picture quality and is time coded throughout the film. The whole collection will look like this, but unfortunately can be heard in German only: www.pidax-film.de

Kind regards
Berthold

Rowan Atkinson on why the French detective Maigret has been his biggest challenge yet
by Robert Wainwright,
The Sydney Morning Herald, June 6, 2016.

Atkinson has just returned from Budapest where the streets of Paris in the 1950s were recreated for the two films – Maigret Sets a Trap and Maigret's Dead Man. Viewers can expect something "quite distinct, dark and seedy", definitely not Agatha Christie, he adds.

David

[No, Alberte was played by Rébecca Potok.]

Gwynne Seward

The Grand Banks Café a review by Andrew Walser

Simenon wrote the early Maigrets at an astonishing clip, and by the ninth book – published, like the first eight, in 1931 – he has already begun to revisit familiar scenes and themes. In The Grand Banks Café, the investigation once again centers on a café, as in The Yellow Dog, while the mystery once again involves fishermen and Fécamp, as in Pietr the Latvian. Such repetitions should not be taken as a sign of literary exhaustion. Like Shakespeare – another popular artist who combined great productivity and high literary quality – Simenon is confident that each return will also be a first visit, with new motives to plumb and new vantages to explore.

The Grand Banks serves the sailors who work fishing for cod off the coast of Newfoundland. The milieu is overwhelmingly male, and misfortune and death are constant threats. Yet, even in this environment, the murder of the captain of the Océan seems extraordinary, an indication that something uncanny must have happened on the trawler’s last voyage. When the ship’s bookkeeper, a young man named Pierre Le Clinche, is charged with the crime, the air of dread in the town only intensifies.

Maigret enters a case marked by sex, secrecy, and “rage.” The constellation first appears when the café’s landlord shows the Inspector a photograph he found in Le Clinche’s room – a picture of a woman, voluptuous and attractive, but with her head “scribbled all over in red ink.” The image suggests both erotic obsession and misogynistic fury: “The pen had bitten into the paper. There were so many criss-crossed lines that not a single square millimetre had been left visible.” The desire to possess and the desire to destroy are disturbingly proximate.

They will remain close throughout the novel. Pierre’s fiancée Marie – a charmingly Gallic Nancy Drew – starts her own investigation and discovers, underneath the bed in the Captain’s cabin, a hiding place, with the words “Gaston – Octave – Pierre – Hen . . .” etched obsessively into the wall, a kind of clandestine sexual inventory. The etcher’s name is Adèle, and even the Inspector finds her “seductive, desirable in the full bloom of her animal presence, magnificent in her sensuality.” She is the most obvious cause of the discord on the ship – the reason

three men [the Captain, Pierre, and the mechanic Laberge] had circled for days, for weeks on end, far away in the middle of the ocean, while other crewmen in the engine room and in the foredeck dimly sensed that a tragedy was unfolding . . . and talked of the evil eye and madness.

The tendency to make women the focus of all desire, as well as the corresponding tendency to blame women for the uncontrollability of that desire, is a constant over three thousand years of Western literature. (Perhaps I should say Western culture – and not just Western.) Simenon seems aware that this is a masculine rationalization. He makes sure that the underlying crime – the one of which the Captain’s murder was a mere symptom – has little to do with anyone’s “animal presence,” no matter what the sailors believe.

In the end, the revelation of Le Clinche’s desire to hear Adèle call him “my big boy” comes across almost as a mockery of Freud – one as outrageous as that scene in Blue Velvet where Dennis Hopper and Isabella Rossellini reenact the family triangle with the aid of a blue robe, amyl nitrate, and scissors. Simenon is not as dark and strange as David Lynch, but he has the same keen sense of the secrets buried beneath the normal, and of how their uncovering is a surprise each time it recurs.

Simenon, Georges. The Grand Banks Café. trans. David Coward. London: Penguin, 2014.