Georges Simenon's Books

Biography

Georges Simenon was born in Liege on Friday 13th March 1903. One of his mother’s first acts was to change his birth certificate, claiming he was born on Thursday the 12th instead. So began a fraught relationship. Simenon’s father died whilst Georges was a teenager; he had a heart problem that he hid from his wife. In her ignorance, she constantly harangued him for being lazy. When Georges’s younger brother died, his mother complained, “Why did it have to be him? Why couldn’t it have been you?”

On her death, Simenon wrote the novel, Letter to my Mother.

“As you are well aware, we never loved each other in your lifetime. Both of us pretended.”

Gazette de Liege

Simenon didn’t finish school. Instead, at fifteen, he took a job as a reporter on the Gazette de Liege, covering human interest stories. Here he learnt about the seamier side of city life.

His first book, Au Pont des Arches, was a short humorous novel about Liege customs. From that inauspicious start, he became one of the most prolific and popular crime writers of the 20th century, rivalling Agatha Christie.

Prolific Author

Of his 500-plus novels and short stories, Simenon is best known for Commissaire Maigret of the Paris Brigade Criminelle. Maigret was a bit of a plodder, but he had the unerring ability to put himself into the shoes of his victims and suspects. Of these stories, many argue that My Friend Maigret is the best. Simenon also wrote numerous ‘romans durs’ (hard or harrowing novels). These often centred around human loss and obsession. The Stain on the Snow tells the disturbing tale of Frank, a nineteen-year-old pimp, murderer and thief.

The undercurrent of many of Georges Simenon’s books is human psychology, emotion and behaviour. Simenon wrote from experience. He was a profoundly obsessive man.

He had a self-imposed time limit when writing a novel. He would spend eight days composing the story and three editing it. In the 1930s, Joseph Kessel’s new book was announced with great fanfare, “His first novel in three years.” Simenon responded with adverts touting “The first Simenon for eight days”.

Compulsive Behaviour

His compulsions didn’t just apply to his writing style; Simenon had an incredibly well-stocked wardrobe boasting more than 60 pairs of handmade shoes. Louis Vuitton listed Simenon as one of his best customers. As well as shoes Simenon had a collection of 300 pipes and lived in over 30 different houses. He told one interviewer that he would often wonder, “why am I here?” and move on.

Perhaps his most bizarre compulsion was philandering, as well as two wives and several mistresses, he claimed to have slept with over 10,000 women. His second wife cut him down to size; she maintained that the total was probably closer to 1,200. As Mark Lawson nicely put it in the Guardian — “it’s clear he used prostitutes at the rate Parisians get through Gitanes”.

Simenon died in Lausanne in 1989. Right to the end, he indulged his fascination with attitudes and behaviours.

“My best friends are not writers but psychiatrists from around Lausanne. We talk about motivations.” (New York Times)

I suspect there was a reasonably sized queue of ‘friends’ lined up just waiting to talk to him.