Georges Simenon

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Simenon, Georges

(zhôrzh sēmənôN`), 1903–89, Belgian novelist. One of the most prolific of modern authors, he is best known for the more than 75 stories he wrote featuring the intuitive French police detective Inspector Maigret. He also wrote more than 110 psychological novels, which he called romans durs (hard novels), including The House by the Canal (1933), Dirty Snow (1948), The Door (1962), and The Cat (1976), as well as many articles, short stories, and novellas.

Bibliography

See his autobiographical novel, Pedigree (1948, tr. 1963, 2010) and his Intimate Memoirs (1981, tr. 1984); study by L. Becker (1977); biographies by F. Bresler (1985) and P. Assouline (1998).

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Simenon, Georges

Born Feb. 13, 1903, in Liège, Belgium. French writer. Member of the Royal Academy of French Language and Literature (Brussels) since 1951.

Simenon began publishing in 1919. His novel The Strange Case of Peter the Lett (1931) was the first in a series of now world-famous detective novels and novellas centered on the police inspector Maigret. In these works, including Maigret Travels (1958; Russian translation, 1967) and Maigret and the Tramp (1963; Russian translation, 1966), attention is devoted not so much to the crimes themselves as to investigation of human character and of the causes of the crimes. Simenon depicts the tragic fate of people in the contemporary bourgeois world, their isolation, and their painful efforts to find a way out of their predicament; he also portrays the disintegration of the bourgeois family. These themes are found in the sociopsychological novels Four Days of a Poor Man (1949; Russian translation, 1968), The President (1958; Russian translation, I960), and The Prison (1968; Russian translation, 1968) and in Simenon’s 200th novel, the anniversary work There Are Still Hazelnut Trees (1969). Simenon has also written the autobiographical I Remember (1945), Pedigree (1948), and Letter to My Mother (1974).

WORKS

Oeuvres complètes [Romans et nouvelles], vols. 1-40. Edited by G. Sigaux. [Lausanne-Paris, 1967–70.] (In progress.)
Oeuvres complètes [Maigret], vols. I-XXV. Edited by G. Sigaux. Lausanne-Paris, 1967–70. (In progress.)
Quant j’étais vieux [vols. 1–3]. Paris [1970–72].
In Russian translation:
Zheltyipes [Romany]. Moscow, 1960.
Neizvestnye ν dome: Povesti i rasskazy. Moscow, 1966.
Pervoe delo Megre. (B-kaprikliuchenii, vol. 12.) Moscow, 1968.

REFERENCES

Shraiber, E. “Zh. Simenon i ego ‘trudnye’ romany.” Neva, 1968, no. 10.
Modestova, N. A. Komissar Megre i ego avtor. [Kiev] 1973.
Lacassin, F., and G. Sigaux. Simenon. Paris [1973]. (Contains bibliography.)
Menguy, C. Bibliographie des éditions originales de Georges Simenon. [Brussels] 1967.

I. S. KOVALEVA

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References in periodicals archive ?

Her decision to take student boarders into the Simenon home as a way of supplementing her husband's meager earnings effectively reduced Desire to the status of an inmate whose needs became secondary to those of the paying boarders and awakened a deep resentment in Georges Simenon against his mother, even though he profited from the presence of the foreign students in the Simenon home, learned their language, and used them as the basis of characters in his novels (Bresler 18-20; Assouline 10-11).

Detective and priest: the paradoxes of Simenon's Maigret

Despite Georges Simenon's Maigret novels, the most popular detective novelist in France is Agatha Christie.

The armchair detectives

In addition the company has also revealed that it is hoping to expand its literary estates division, which includes novels by Agatha Christie, Georges Simenon's Maigret novels and Raymond Chandler's Marlowe mysteries, The Guardian reported.

3i to acquire Chorion

These authors may not rate the same name recognition as earlier "exiles" here--say, Hesse, Joyce, Thomas Mann, Shelley, Byron, Nabokov, Georges Simenon, or Patricia Highsmith.

EXILE

I celebrate Shippey's attention to the work while asking that Tolkien stand beside such humbler mythmakers as Edgar Rice Burroughs and Georges Simenon.

J.R.R. TOLKIEN: AUTHOR OF THE CENTURY

He offers up artist Rene Magritte, poet/dramatist Maurice Maeterlinck, authors Georges Simenon and Maguerite Yourcenar, King Leopold II, and several more obscure compatriots.

The Factory of Facts

It is as if Davis, who has rendered into English the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Georges Simenon, Michel Foucault and others, has brought to her own stories the sensitive, vigilant eye of the translator.

Almost No Memory

He has worked with writers as varied as Georges Simenon and Cocteau and composers such as Sauguet, Messaien, and Marius Constant.

Songs of Roland

In France, Georges Simenon created Inspector Jules Maigret, one of the best-known detectives since Sherlock Holmes.

detective story

The first series reflected its wide-reaching approach to the UK's arts scene with programmes on artist David Hockney, comedian Ken Dodd, the Carry On films, Maigret creator Georges Simenon and American comedy star Woody Allen.

A show with so much art and soul... MOVIES, MUSIC AND MAESTROS - WE LOOK BACK ON 40 YEARS OF THE SOUTH BANK SHOW