The Crimes Georges Simenon Declined to Investigate

New editions of his “hard” novels show an obsession with furtive desires and misdeeds—and an uncanny obliviousness to the horrors under his nose.

There have been few writers as prolifically désengagé as Georges Simenon, the author of nearly two hundred absorbing, intensely readable thrillers and detective novels under his own name and many dozens more not-so-readable novels and short stories under a variety of pseudonyms. Unlike the celebrated engagée writers of his generation (Camus, Sartre, and de Beauvoir), Simenon rarely composed a single novel or short story in order to elaborate on his political or philosophical beliefs (even if they often reflected a self-centered, right-leaning complacency). In fact, over decades of producing novels—often at the rate of eight to ten a year—it’s unclear if he even possessed any firm beliefs in anything but his art and his largely remorseless pursuit of physical comforts and pleasures.

Simenon, like many of his characters, lived an only superficially middle-class existence: writing in his office every morning (sometimes atop a houseboat), going downstairs to enjoy his wife’s freshly cooked meals, playing with his children—and then disappearing for a few hours every afternoon or evening to meet up with women in brothels or local bars. The middle-class life, he believed, was only pleasurable if you were constantly cheating on it; and to him, intimate pleasures were a lot more enjoyable if you kept them clandestine.

Simenon the man was, in fact, the very opposite of his most famous detective, the always-about-to-retire Jules Maigret, who was most happy in only a few places: at his job arresting murderers, on holiday (during which he often solved murders as well), pottering in his garden, eating at the table prepared by his wife—the formidable Madame Maigret—or escorting her arm-and-arm to local cinemas. One of the most unusual detectives in modern fiction, Maigret lacks the penetrating intellect or forensic skills of Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, and rarely needs to use pistols or fists on the various criminals he encounters, unlike hard-boiled contemporaries such as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Instead, Maigret’s entire “method” is to spend time in the homes of his suspects, drink beer and eat meals in their local cafés, and follow them (or have them followed) to see where they go and who they spend time with in the course of a normal day.

Although Simenon is best known for the Maigret novels, he was most proud of and creatively committed to his less popular “dur” novels, or “hard” novels, which he wrote over intensely brief periods of time, and only after a complete health exam and “all clear” had been delivered by his doctor. (He claimed that when he put himself in the minds of his often distraught characters, his heart and nerves suffered similar, health-challenging stress.) The hard novels are much darker than the Maigrets: After all, Maigret has a home to go to at the end of the day, and all the novels’ horrors are visited on the men and women he investigates. Meanwhile, the hard novels are not really mysteries; they are simply about people who commit crimes and can’t seem to hold themselves together, and while occasionally they are pursued or arrested, the detectives are fairly inconsequential. And it is these works, which Picador is now issuing in new translations, that show most clearly Simenon’s obsession with furtive desires and misdeeds to the exclusion of nearly everything else; in them we see a writer who could see in an ordinary person tremendous depths but at the same time finds almost nothing worth noting in the occupation of Paris—through which he lived more peacefully than most—the rise of fascism, and the conflagrations of World War II.

Born in Liège in 1903, Simenon spent the first part of his life exploring the two most obvious extremes of his nature—that of the middle-class conformist and that of a world-spanning explorer of continents, foreign cultures, and sexually available women. The son of middle-class Walloons, he grew up accustomed to sometimes excruciatingly dull rituals—family dinners and holidays, taking in lodgers, and office-bound occupations. Even........

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