By James Aitchison

Arguably, there has never been an author like him.  He wrote more than 400 novels — many in a matter of days — as well as 21 volumes of memoirs and countless short stories.  His sales topped 500 million copies in his lifetime. 

By 1966, at the age of 63, he was the world’s best-selling living author.  Incredibly, he abandoned the usual author’s royalty — 10% of sales — and instead was happy to receive a high, one-off advance payment for each new book.  He said the amount of effort and money taken to supervise the traditional royalty payment system was too exhausting!

With honours such as President of the Mystery Writers of America, an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honour, who exactly was Simenon?

For one thing, he wasn’t French.  Georges Joseph Christian Simenon was born in Liège, Belgium, which was occupied by the German Army during the First World War.  After the war, Simenon witnessed violent retribution against local collaborators, scenes which he later used in novels.

At fifteen, Simenon left school and became a junior reporter at a local newspaper.  In 1922 he moved to Paris.  Within two years, he was writing and selling short stories at the rate of 80 typed pages a day.  Next, he turned his hand to novels — what he called “his pulps” — writing under such pseudonyms as Jean du Perry and Georges Simm.  From 1921 to 1934 he used a total of 17 pen names while writing 358 novels and short stories.

Meanwhile, Simenon had married in 1923.  Two years later, a fisherman’s teenaged daughter became his lover and part of the Simenon household for the next 39 years.  He also had an affair with the famous American exotic dancer Josephine Baker, who scandalised Paris by dancing at the Folies Bergère in nothing more than pearls and a string of bananas!

Ultimately, such a hectic life took its toll and the three Simenons, minus Miss Baker, boarded a small boat, the Ginette, and explored the rivers and canals of France.  With fewer distractions, Simenon’s output increased from 11 popular novels in 1927 to 44 in 1928.

It was on this boat that Simenon’s literary career changed.

As he describes it, “Commissaire Maigret emerged through a haze of winter mist and schnapps.”

Simenon’s French detective Maigret would make his fortune and become one of literature’s towering achievements.

The invention of Maigret liberated its author.  Each Maigret novel was soon earning more than any five “pulps”.  Maigret’s success meant Simenon could still write his novels at the same speed, but only required four or five “pulps” a year instead of 24 to 40.  However, while he maintained his production speed, he could afford to reduce his production rate.

As Simenon explained, “It sounds silly, but I used to count automatically, pulp novels eighty pages a day, detective stories forty pages a day, in two sessions.  And I used to tell myself that when I had no need to write more than twenty pages a day I would be a king.”

He also spent time with the French police, absorbing methodology and atmosphere, and could conjure up Maigret’s realistic office complete with a cast-iron stove.

By the end of 1933, Simenon had written 19 Maigret novels.  By 1953, his new Maigret titles were selling over a half a million copies in France alone, with world sales running at 3 million a year.  Eventually he sold 500 million copies, with Maigret morphing into many different TV series.  Most recently, Rowan Atkinson (Mr Bean) portrayed the French detective. 

At the feet of the master…

Simenon formed some very fixed ideas about fiction.  For starters, a good novel cannot be too short.  “A book should be like a play.  You do not return to a play every night for a week and you should not have to do so with a book.”  Moreover, Simenon believed that if a reader has enjoyed a short novel he is left feeling unsatisfied, wanting more, as opposed to a reader of a long novel who has been sated by that particular author’s imaginary world.  That sentiment would put Simenon at odds with today’s market.  Nowadays, novels of 90,000-plus words are the norm!

He also restricted himself to a vocabulary of about 2,000 words.  The last thing he wanted was to send a reader to a dictionary — or himself for that matter, because he wrote at white-hot speed.

He was keen not to become self-consciously “literary” in style.  Like Hemingway, he detested “adjectives, adverbs, and every word which is there just to make an effect.  Every sentence which is there just for the sentence, you know, you have a beautiful sentence — cut it.  Every time I find such a thing in one of my novels it is to be cut.”

A reporter once described Simenon’s study in America: “The room reflects its owner: cheerful, efficient, hospitable, controlled.  On its walls are books of law and medicine, two fields in which he has made himself an expert; the telephone directories from many parts of the world to which he turns in naming his characters; the map of a town where he has just set his forty-ninth Maigret novel; and the calendar on which he has X-ed out in heavy crayon the days spent writing the Maigret — one day to a chapter  —and the three days spent revising it.”

Simenon declared, “I think that if a man has the urge to be an artist, it is because he needs to find himself. Every writer tries to find himself through his characters, through all his writing.”

Simenon’s advice to beginning writers: “Writing is considered a profession, and I don’t think it is a profession.  I think that everyone who does not need to be a writer, who thinks he can do something else, ought to do something else.  Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don’t think an artist can ever be happy.”

….

Simenon’s romantic liaisons continued.  In February 1973, now living with yet another new companion, he announced his retirement.  He produced no more new fiction from that date but dictated 21 volumes of memoirs.  He was distraught when his daughter Marie-Jo suicided in Paris at the age of 25.  He died in 1989, following a fall.

While some critics made fun of the speed at which he wrote, Simenon’s Maigret stories are short books characterised by simple style and deliberately restricted vocabulary.  Simenon stated his novels were designed “to be read by people of average education in a single sitting.”  However, critics agreed that Maigret novels were innovative: the detective didn’t hunt for clues, but rather immersed himself in the life and environment of the victim and suspected criminal.  Maigret sought to understand not judge the criminal.

His other novels, (his romans durs) were psychological thrillers in which he “explored the darkest corners of the human mind.”  Many contained typical Simenon themes: the street life of Paris, prostitution, the drudgery of domestic servants, police corruption and the hope of escape.

Simenon has the last word.  He defined the novel as “a passion which completely possesses and enslaves the writer and permits him to exorcise his demons by giving them form and casting them out into the world…”

Amen to that!