Georges Joseph Christian Simenon (; 12/13 February 1903 – 4 September 1989) was a Belgian writer who created the fictional detective Jules Maigret. One of the most prolific and successful authors of the 20th century, he published around 400 novels (including 192 under his own name), 21 volumes of memoirs and many short stories, selling over 500 million copies.
Apart from his detective fiction, he achieved critical acclaim for his literary novels, which he called romans durs (hard novels). Among his literary admirers were Max Jacob, François Mauriac and André Gide. Gide wrote, "I consider Simenon a great novelist, perhaps the greatest, and the most genuine novelist that we have had in contemporary French literature."
Born and raised in Liège, Belgium, Simenon lived for extended periods in France (1922–1945), the United States (1946–1955) and finally Switzerland (1957–1989). Much of his work is semi-autobiographical, inspired by his childhood and youth in Liège, extensive travels in Europe and the world, wartime experiences, troubled marriages, and numerous love affairs.
Critics such as John Banville have praised Simenon's novels for their psychological insights and vivid evocation of time and place. Among his most notable works are The Saint-Fiacre Affair (1932), Monsieur Hire's Engagement (1933), Act of Passion (1947), The Snow Was Dirty (1948) and The Cat (1967).
Early life and education
Simenon was born at 26 Rue Léopold (Liège) (now number 24) to Désiré Simenon and Henriette Brüll. Désiré Simenon worked in an accounting office at an insurance company and had married Henriette in April 1902. Simenon was born either at 11.30 pm on Thursday 12 February 1903 (according to the birth certificate) or just after midnight on Friday 13th (the date possibly being falsified on the certificate due to superstition).
The Simenon family was of Walloon and Flemish ancestry, settling in the Belgian Limburg in the seventeenth century. His mother's family was of Flemish, Dutch and German descent. One of his mother's most notorious ancestors was Gabriel Brühl, a criminal who preyed on Limburg from the 1720s until he was hanged in 1743. Later Simenon would use Brühl as one of his many pen names.
In April 1905, two years after Simenon's birth, the family moved to 3 rue Pasteur (now 25 rue Georges Simenon) in Liège's neighbourhood. Simenon's brother Christian was born in September 1906 and eventually became their mother's favourite child, which Simenon resented. The young Simenon, however, idolised his father and later claimed to have partly modelled Maigret's temperament on him.
At the age of three, Simenon learned to read at the Ecole Guardienne run by the Sisters of Notre Dame. Then, between 1908 and 1914, he attended the Institut Saint-André, run by the Christian Brothers.
In 1911 the Simenons moved to 53 rue de la Loi, where they took in lodgers, many of them students from Eastern Europe, Jews and political refugees. This gave the young Simenon an introduction to the wider world, which was later reflected his novels, notably Pedigree (published 1948) and Le Locataire (The Lodger) (1938).
Following the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, Liège was occupied by the German army. Henriette took in German officers as lodgers, much to Désiré's disapproval. Simenon later said that the war years provided some of the happiest times of his life. They were also memorable for a child because "my father cheated, my mother cheated, everyone cheated."
In October 1914 Simenon began his studies at the Collège Saint-Louis, a Jesuit high school. After a year he switched to Collège St Servais, where he studied for three years. He excelled at French, but his marks in other subjects declined. He read widely in the Russian, French and English classics, frequently played truant, and turned to petty theft in order to buy pastries and other war-time luxuries.
In 1917 the Simenon family moved to a former post-office building in the rue des Maraîchers. Using his father's heart condition as a pretext, Simenon left school in June 1918 without taking his end-of-year exams. After brief periods working in a pâtisserie and a bookshop, Simenon found himself unemployed when the war ended in November 1918. He witnessed scenes of violent retribution against residents of Liège accused of collaboration, which stayed with him for the rest of his life. He described these scenes in Pedigree and Les trois crimes de mes amis (My Friends' Three Crimes) (1938).
Early career, 1919–1922 In January 1919 the 15-year-old Simenon took a job as a junior reporter at the Gazette de Liège, a right-wing Catholic newspaper edited by Joseph Demarteau.Becker, Lucille Frackman. "Georges Simenon (1903-1989)." In: Amoia, Alba della Fazia and Bettina Liebowitz Knapp. Multicultural Writers from Antiquity to 1945: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002. , 9780313306877. p. 378 . Within a few months he was promoted to crime reporting, signing his articles "Georges Sim". By April he was given his own opinion and gossip column, which he signed "Monsieur Le Coq". He was also assigned interviews with leading international figures such as Hirohito, Crown Prince of Japan, and French war hero Marshal Foch. In 1920-21 he enrolled on a course in forensic science at the University of Liège in order to improve his knowledge of the latest police methods.
In May 1920 Simenon began publishing short fiction in the Gazette. In September he completed his first novel, Au Pont des Arches, which he self-published in 1921. He wrote two other novels while working at the Gazette, but these were never published.
In June 1919 Simenon had been introduced into a group of young artists and bohemians that called itself "La Caque" (herring barrel). The group met at night to drink, discuss art and philosophy, and experiment with drugs such as morphine and cocaine. In early 1922 one of the members of the group, Joseph Kleine, hanged himself at the doors of the St Pholien church of Liège after a night of excess with La Caque. Simenon was one of the last people to see Kleine alive and was deeply affected by his suicide, later referring to the incident in Les trois crimes de mes amis and Le pendu de St Pholien (The Hanged Man of Saint Pholien) (1931).
Through La Caque, Simenon met a young painter, Régine Renchon, and in early 1921 they began a relationship. They soon became engaged and agreed that Simenon should complete his year of compulsory military service before they married.
Simenon's father died in November 1921, an event that Simenon called "the most important day in a man's life." Soon after, he began his military service. After a brief posting with the allied occupation forces in Germany, he was transferred to the cavalry barracks in Liège and was soon given permission to resume writing for the Gazette.
When Simenon's military service ended in December 1922, he resigned from the Gazette and moved to Paris to establish a base for himself and his future wife, Régine, whom he preferred to call Tigy.
France, 1922–1945
Literary apprenticeship, 19221928 Now in Paris, Simenon found a menial job with a far-right political group headed by the writer Binet-Valmer. In March 1923 he returned to Liège to marry Régine. Although neither Simenon nor Régine were religious, they were married in a Catholic church to please Simenon's mother, who was devout.
The newly-weds moved to Paris where Régine tried to establish herself as a painter while Simenon resumed work for Binet-Valmer and sent articles to the Revue Sincère of Brussels for which he was the Paris correspondent. He also wrote short stories for popular magazines, but sales were sporadic.
In the summer of 1923, Simenon was engaged by the Marquis de Tracy as his private secretary, which obliged him to spend nine months of the year at the aristocrat's various rural properties. Régine soon moved to a village near the Marquis's principal estate at Paray-le-Frésil, near Moulins.
While working for the Marquis, Simenon began submitting stories to Le Matin whose literary editor was Colette. Colette advised him to make his work "less literary" which Simenon took to mean that he should use simple descriptions and a limited stock of common words. Simenon followed her advice and within a year became one of the paper's regular contributors.
Now with a steady income from his writing, Simenon left the Marquis' employ in 1924 and returned to Paris where he and Régine found an apartment in the fashionable Place des Vosges. Simenon was writing and selling short stories at the rate of 80 typed pages a day, and now turned his hand to pulp novels. His first, Le roman d'une dactylo (The Story of a Typist) was quickly sold and two more appeared in 1924 under the pseudonyms "Jean du Perry" and "Georges Simm". From 1921 to 1934 he wrote 358 novels and short stories under 17 pen names.Becker, Lucille Frackman. "Georges Simenon (1903-1989)." In: Amoia, Alba della Fazia and Bettina Liebowitz Knapp. Multicultural Writers from Antiquity to 1945: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002. , 9780313306877. p. 379 .
In the summer of 1925, the Simenons took a holiday in Normandy where they met Henriette Liberge, the 18-year-old daughter of a fisherman. Régine offered her a job as their housekeeper in Paris and the young woman accepted. Simenon began calling her "Boule", and she was to become his lover and part of the Simenon household under that name for the next 39 years.
Simenon began an affair with Josephine Baker in 1926 or 1927, and became her part-time assistant and editor of Josephine Baker's Magazine.Marnham (1994). pp. 122-24 However, the Simenons were tiring of their hectic life in Paris, and in April 1928 they set out with Boule for a six-month tour of the rivers and canals of France in a small boat, the Ginette. Without the distractions provided by Josephine Baker, Simenon's tally of published popular novels increased from 11 in 1927 to 44 in 1928.
Birth and retirement of Maigret, 19291939 In the spring of 1929, the Simenons and Boule set off for a tour of northern France, Belgium and Holland in a larger, custom-built boat, the Ostrogoth. Simenon had begun contributing detective stories to a new magazine called Détective and continued to publish popular novels, mainly with the publishers Fayard.During his northern tour, Simenon wrote three popular novels featuring a police inspector named Maigret, but only one, Train de nuit (Night Train) was accepted by Fayard. Simenon began working on the latter novel (or possibly its successor Pietr-le-Letton (Pietr the Latvian)) in September 1929 when the Ostrogoth was undergoing repairs in the Dutch city of Delfzijl.
On his return to Paris in April 1930, Simenon completed Pietr-le-Letton, the first novel in which inspector Maigret of the Paris mobile crime brigade was a fully developed character. The novel was serialised in Fayard's magazine Ric et Rac later that year, and was the first fictional work to appear under Simenon's real name.
The first Maigret novels were launched in book form by Fayard in February 1931 at the fancy dress bal anthropométrique which had a police and criminals theme. The launching party was widely reported and the novels received positive reviews. Simenon wrote 19 Maigret novels by the end of 1933, and the series eventually sold 500 million copies.
In April 1932, the Simenons and Boule moved to La Rochelle on the west coast of France. Soon after, they left for Africa where Simenon visited his brother, who was a colonial administrator in the Belgian Congo. Simenon also visited other African colonies and wrote a series of articles highly critical of colonialism. He drew on his African experience in novels such as Le Coup de lune (Tropic Moon) (1933) and 450 à l'ombre (Aboard the Aquitaine) (1936).