5/01/05 –

In the spring of 1932, Simenon moved into "La Richardière", a residence first mentioned in the seventeenth century, in the countryside at Marsilly (Charente-Inférieure — now Charente-Maritime), but not far from the sea, some seven kilometres north of La Rochelle. Renting this establishment, he installed running water, electricity and furnishings suitable for himself, his wife Tigy, and their maid and cook, Boule. This became his base for nearly the next three years and it was here that he wrote a dozen novels.
In April 1932 the first novel that he wrote at "La Richardière" was Liberty-Bar.
This Maigret novel is set along the French Riviera, in Antibes, Cap d’Antibes, Juan-les-Pins and Cannes (all in the département of Alpes-Maritimes). Simenon had stayed in the villa des Roches Grises in Cap d’Antibes from November 1931 until February 1932 and so came to know this area well.

Map of Antibes. Guide Michelin, France, 1934. Maigret travels to this town by train where he is met by a local police Inspector and conveyed from the station (la Gare) to the Place Macé (numbered 1 on the map — this square is now the Place Général de Gaulle). (click to enlarge)

Map indicating the proximity of Antibes, Juan-les-Pins and Cap d’Antibes. Michelin, France, 1962. From November 1931 until February 1932 Simenon was staying in a rented villa along the Boulevard James-Wyllie, (numbered 13 on the map) in Cap d’Antibes. (click to enlarge)

Map of Cannes. Guide Michelin, France, 1934. Cannes is eleven kilometres westward along the coast from Antibes. The Boulevard de la Croisette, which runs along the seafront, is numbered 28. The Casino Municipal is marked with the letter B and just to the west of it is the harbour where the yachts are moored. (click to enlarge)

To date there is only one translation of this novel, that by Geoffrey Sainsbury, and as usual with this translator his English text is wayward in some passages in comparison with Simenon’s French text.

This is Georges Simenon’s seventeenth Maigret novel. This "run" of Maigret novels is only broken by two others, Le Passager du "Polarlys" (The Mystery of the Polarlys), written in the summer of 1930, and Le Relais d’Alsace (The Man from Everywhere), written in July 1931.

Having spent nearly six years writing many pulp novels and a host of short stories under pseudonyms, sometime at the beginning of 1930 he felt that he was ready to write the more "literary" type of novel under his own name, but he was cautious. He was wary of making too much of a sudden change, so he developed the genre that he knew from his research would prove acceptable to the reading public. Some of his pulp fiction involved detectives, so he drew on certain characters that appear in a few of these earlier novels, hence Maigret, and now with him as colleagues, part of his team, Lucas and Torrence, and from time to time Coméliau, an Examining Magistrate, all based in Paris.
After writing Liberty-Bar, it is obvious that Simenon now felt ready to embark on other novels, which some commentators have described as "the novels of destiny" or "the psychological novels", as of the next nine novels he produces, only two involve Maigret.