In 1986 my suggestion to fellow-members of the CWA Committee that we institute a signal honour, tantamount to the MWA Grandmaster, was greeted with acclaim. The Chairman, L**y A*****a F****r, asked my nomination.
"Simenon, the greatest living crime writer."
"But, John, he isn't English!"
As I sat in stunned silence, Eric Ambler's name was put forward, and the Chairman, Ambler and I duly appeared in the BBC-TV Tribute. (Since then Diamond Dagger has degenerated into an annual handout on the basis of Buggins' Turn).
I think that one of the best ways to learn a foreign language is to read detective stories (or magazines like Nouveau Detective), and I myself have read many Simenons in French. I wrote to the Master asking if he parodied Maigret in Les Memoires De Maigret. He was shocked and denied it. I persisted gently. He wrote back that I was right - as his mother was coming to Connecticut he had written the book in five days instead of the usual ten. He signed my copy accordingly.
This present biography is in faultless English, not always the case with translations. It is well-illustrated with new family photographs, and Assouline has corresponded or spoken with almost everybody Simenon knew throughout his long life - even his ex-mistress and members of the French Resistance. He gives a lucid, precise analysis of Simenon's methods of working, his psychology, how he names his characters, the basis of the action and the dichotomy between his 'hard' novels and his Maigrets. The score of autobiographical volumes, the restlessness that drove him to new homes every five years, and of course his life and family are all surveyed in great and fascinating depth.
There is no doubt Simenon was a remarkable man and outstanding prolific author - 192 novels under his own name, around 190 under various noms de plume, the autobiographies and hundreds of articles. He is shown as a brilliant businessman, negotiating with publishers, changing them ruthlessly when he felt they failed him, retaining author's rights for the first time, unique in self-promotion and fully conversant with publishing techniques. In interviews, like Hitchcock, he gave journalists just what he wanted them to write, contradicting himself when he felt it right. Just as Jane Austen never mentioned the Napoleonic Wars raging round her as she wrote her novels, so Simenon refused to let the War interfere with his work. Churchill was right when he said intellectuals could do more for the world in their own spheres than by playing soldiers, so Simenon's wartime output included much of his greatest work to the readers' benefit. As happens with the leading men and women, the jealous 'petty men' creeping round the legs of the Colossus seek to snatch money or throw mud. Some Frenchmen told the Wehrmacht he was a Jew. Five year s after the War others tried to trap him as a collaborator. Fellow townsmen of his birthplace Liège sued him for 'depicting' them in his novels. The Catholic priests at the Academy welcomed him back whilst pestering his mother to insist Simenon give them cash as he was rich and they were poor! Fortunately he refused, for once the Jesuit claims of education were nonplussed.
His strong, twisted, bitter mother was the first of his women to confound his life. The generous cheques he gave her she hoarded and years later thrust them back. When his brother, a traitor, was killed in the foreign legion, she said it was a pity Georges hadn't died instead. Simenon's second wife started trying to dominate him, drank heavily, caused rows and wrote vicious books against him. His neurotic daughter committed suicide at twenty-five. Yet despite all this he continued to write prodigiously - so much that the Nobel judges refused him the Prize, the Academy rejected his admission - and even the residents in Connecticut turned against him because he didn't join in town activities and they thought he was watching them to put into books. They should have thought themselves lucky!
GS could be awkward in matters large and small. He refused to wear the traditional uniform when admitted to the Belgian Academy of arts and letters. His life had to be planned daily to the minute and the inch. His insatiable appetite , especially in bordellos, is depicted without unnecessary detail; the loyal early mistress Boule is interviewed dispassionately. Simenon was obviously autocratic - but how else could he keep up such a phenomenal output ?
The many TV series are discussed, but only Rupert Davies is mentioned, not illustrated, for England, not Basil Sydney or Michael Gambon. There is a voluminous Filmography doubly useful with Steinbrunner-Penzler's Encyclopedia so out of date.
If you really want to understand, and be inspired by, the modus operandi of a magnificent crime writer then this volume is a compulsory set book for all students.
