Georges Simenon

"Dark, disturbing . . . Simenon discovered something fundamental about the soul." --The GuardianA string of murders has the small French town of La Rochelle in its grip. The victims, all elderly women, have been found strangled with cello string--in caf s, over card games, near the canal. As the winter rain gives cover to the killer stalking the streets with impunity, we watch as he deliberates over and justifies his heinous acts to himself, unaware that the quiet, unassuming tailor, Kachoudas, has discovered his secret. In this chilling game of cat and mouse we follow along in the steps of the killer, unsure if his crimes will be brought to light by the one man who knows his secret, or if Kachoudas will end up being the next of his victims in this masterful tale of murder and intrigue.

"I always have a Simenon close at hand. In my youth I adored his Maigret books; nowadays I prefer his 'hard novels, ' as he called them, in which his mastery of human psychology is laid plain." --Julian Barnes Georges Simenon's chilling portrayal of tragic love, persecution, and betrayal. One sensed in him neither flesh nor bone, nothing but soft, flaccid matter, so soft and so flaccid that his movements were hard to make out. Very red lips stood out from his orb-like face, as did the thin moustache that he curled with an iron but that looked as if it had been drawn on with India ink; on his cheekbones were the symmetrical pink dots of a doll's cheeks. People find Mr. Hire strange, disconcerting. The tenants he shares his building with try to avoid him. He is a Peeping Tom, a visitor of prostitutes, a dealer in unsavory literature. He is also the prime suspect for a brutal murder that he did not commit. Yet Mr. Hire's innocence will not stand in the way of those looking for a scapegoat as tragedy unfolds in this quietly devastating and deeply unnerving work from Georges Simenon.

"Both the Maigret books and his standalone romans durs . . . are a joy. What they have in common is crisp, economical prose, unexpected emotional depth and a strange sense of modernity." --Andrew TaylorNearly two years into his police retirement, Maigret has turned down all offers of private detective work--until, during a broiling hot August, the teenage daughter of a wealthy family is found drowned in the Seine. According to her grandmother, the imperious Bernadette Amorelle, it was neither an accident nor a suicide. The former inspector must, she insists, abandon his garden and accompany her to the affluent hamlet of Orsenne. Maigret is ill at ease in the cloistered milieu of manicured lawns, yachts, and swimming pools. Seeing the strained dynamic among the dead girl's relatives, his disquiet grows. Why is a sixteen-year-old boy, her cousin, kept locked up? And why does Bernadette loathe her son-in-law, a board director of all the family companies, with such passion? In this gothic-tinged Machiavellian tragedy, Maigret is unflinching in his quest for answers--even if they blacken his view of humanity more than he'd thought possible.

"Georges Simenon was the twentieth century's Balzac. But while Balzac spares us nothing of what he's learned, Simenon's genius is the art of reduction. He can teach you how to run a restaurant in a few sentences scattered throughout a novel and how to poison your spouse with even fewer lines." --Gary IndianaMaigret, now fifty-six and retired as detective chief inspector, is crossing the Atlantic for the first time. But this isn't a vacation: his traveling companion is law student Jean Maura, who believes his father is in trouble. The US-based millionaire's recent letters betray a fear of imminent death, and he's been disbursing his fortune in an eccentric manner. Then, as Maigret disembarks in blustery rain at the Statue of Liberty, Jean vanishes. Plunged alone into this brash city, the ex-inspector can only do what he does best: put his investigative mind to work. Moving between five-star hotels and dive bars, tailed by murderous gangsters and assisted by a mournful ex-clown and a mischievous FBI agent, Maigret unpins a long-buried grenade of secrets. A tautly electrifying thriller, this far-flung adventure for Maigret is also an eloquent portrait of mid-century New York, in all its dirt and glamour.

"The Blue Room is a wondrous achievement, brief, inexorable, pared to, and agonizingly close to, the bone, and utterly compelling; in short, a true and luminous work of art." --John Banville He felt no resentment toward Andr e for biting his lip. In the context of their lovemaking, it had its place. For Tony and Andr e, there are no rules when they meet in the blue room at the H tel des Voyageurs. Their adulterous affair is intoxicating, passionate--and dangerous. It soon turns into a nightmare from which there can be no escape. Heart-pounding and high-stakes, The Blue Room is a stylish and sensual psychological thriller that weaves a story of cruelty, reckless lust, and relentless guilt.

"Simenon has concentrated noir into a darkness as solid and heavy as the interior of a dwarf star." --William T. VollmannWhat happens to everyday morality in a time of political deceit and betrayal? In an unnamed city under military occupation, nineteen-year-old Frank--a low-level thug and thief--should be content enough with his warm home and full stomach, even against the dreariness of an endless winter. Instead, though, he's inexorably drawn to commit a string of brutal, senseless acts of violence. Set against the backdrop of a bleak, pitiless world, Georges Simenon's portrait of a killer is a peerless indictment and examination of the chilling banality of evil.

"Simenon was fascinated by peculiarities of human personality, which he described in elegant, simple prose . . . as pure as running water." --Roger Ebert It's the height of spring, and Maigret is grappling with doubly unfamiliar circumstances. He's in the surreal new village of Jeanneville, outside Paris, where an elderly bachelor has been shot dead in his home. Тhe prime witness, his twenty-four-year-old housekeeper, F licie, may well be among Maigret's most unnerving adversaries. Infuriatingly clever, singularly self-possessed, and overtly antagonistic, she is surely hiding something--but what? As their battle of wits pinballs the investigation between toy land-like Jeanneville and Paris's seedy Place Pigalle, Maigret wonders what preoccupies him more: catching the perpetrator of a brutal murder, or solving the psychological puzzle box of F licie? A diamond-sharp gem of crime fiction, F licie is Georges Simenon at his mischievous best.

"The most extraordinary fictive shaper in our time." --George Steiner Exiled to a sleepy town in western France, Maigret is relieved when he has to handle a challenging case. There's been a murder in a mussel farming village and its most respected resident, the former judge Monsieur Forlacroix, has tried to dispose of the body in the river. But why will no one admit to knowing the dead man? And what connects him to Forlacroix's pianist daughter, Lise, who is kept locked in her bedroom? With studied patience and an eye for subliminal clues, Maigret teases out the dark secrets that everyone in this insular community, it seems, has a motive to protect. A heady and atmospheric page-turner, The Judge's House is Georges Simenon at his suspenseful best.

"I want to know what goes on in people's minds. I suppose that's why I love Georges Simenon so much. He was such a master of the small domestic situation." --Ruth RendellTomorrow, at five in the afternoon, I will kill the clairvoyant. Signed, Picpus. This chilling message is seen scratched into a caf blotting pad, prompting Maigret to place eighty fortune tellers under police watch. If it's a hoax, he frets, he'll never hear the end of it. Then the call comes in: clairvoyant Mademoiselle Jeanne has been fatally stabbed. While she lies dying, a senile old man is locked in an adjacent room. Maigret feels acute sympathy for this disheveled, bewildered figure--but who is he really? And how did his fate get mixed up with an audacious enterprise of scammers and thieves? The rest of Paris may be lazing under the bright August sun, but Maigret won't rest until he solves this most labyrinthine of cases. With his deeply felt sense of the tragic, Georges Simenon composes a masterpiece of crime fiction in Signed, Picpus.

"Open any of his novels--from the outset, the magic operates: from the first paragraph you are caught in the jaws of a trap that will not release you until the full-stop at the end of the last page, and even then with the book closed, you remain dizzy and panting as you try to regain your footing in your little familiar world of which, during a reading, you suddenly glimpsed the vertiginous reverse." --Simon LeysIt's a rainy January, and Maigret has left Paris for the country on unofficial business--or, as he reflects, a stupid escapade. The examining magistrate's brother-in-law is rumored to have killed his daughter's lover, and Maigret is tasked with clearing the man's name. Arriving in gloomy Saint-Aubin, Maigret meets with strangely little cooperation, both from the accused and from the ill-disposed townspeople. And why is Justin Cavre, aka "Cadaver," a despised ex-police inspector turned private eye, throwing obstacles in his path? As Maigret makes the rounds of this marshy backwater, he sees past all the obfuscation to expose a truth even more sordid than he first intuited. Featuring a cast of small-town characters with morals as gray as Saint-Aubin's swirling fog, Inspector Cadaver is a haunting and compulsive installment in Georges Simenon's masterful Maigret series.

"I've read a lot of Simenon, who's a favorite writer of mine." --Sigrid Nunez In a run-down Paris suburb, housebound widow Juliette Boynet is strangled. For Inspector Maigret, this murder hits home more than most: he's well acquainted with Juliette's live-in carer, her selfless niece C cile. For months, the frightened young woman has complained of an unseen nocturnal intruder. And less than twenty-four hours after her aunt's murder, C cile is also found dead. She didn't have an overactive imagination after all, Maigret reflects guiltily. Focusing his investigation on C cile and Juliette's apartment building, with its eccentric concierge and motley assortment of tenants, Maigret ponders how the two murders are linked. Does the wealthy Juliette's criminal activity hold the answer? Did an heir kill for an inheritance? Or is the truth stranger than even Maigret can foresee? With deft care, Maigret untwists an astonishing tale of greed and treachery in C cile Is Dead.

"Simenon could produce endless variations, as similar and as different as Shakespeare's sonnets or Monet's haystacks." --Adam Kirsch When the glamorous wife of an American industrialist is murdered at a luxury Paris hotel, her past life as a nightclub dancer is the key to finding the killer. As Maigret traces surprising connections between the dead woman and the hotel's belowstairs staff, a story of unrequited love, self-reinvention, and blackmail emerges--with one tragic, luckless suspect at the center. Yet as Maigret knows, even the most compelling evidence isn't infallible. Might a murkier, more disquieting truth lie behind the apparent facts of the matter? A riveting mystery and a startling journey into the darker corners of human nature, The Cellars of the Majestic showcases the full range of Georges Simenon's uncanny psychological insight.

A gripping novel that sees Maigret brought out of his peaceful retirement. When Maigret's police officer nephew is framed for a gangland murder, the former chief inspector must swap his countryside retirement for his old stomping ground: Paris's seamy underworld. Fueled by regular tipples and his omnipresent pipe, he goes up against a criminal enterprise whose leader, a police informant, considers himself untouchable. Can Maigret's forensic but off-the-books investigation save his nephew from prison--and uphold his own legacy as a peerless maverick for justice?

Sun, sand, the C te d'Azur--and a mysterious dead man with multiple hidden lives. Who was Mr. Brown? And why does the mystery of his life preoccupy Maigret so? Georges Simenon's Maigret arrives in Antibes on the French Riviera tasked with discreetly solving the murder of one Mr. Brown, stabbed in the back as he returned to the house of his mistress and her mother. As Maigret investigates, he finds himself drawn to the seedy dive bar frequented by the late Mr. Brown, and strangely absorbed in his ruminations on the many secret lives of this cipher of a man. Is Maigret simply distracted by the sun, surf, and vacationers, or is there something else about the case that is preoccupying him? And is it keeping him from seeing the truth in this tale of murder on the C te d'Azur?

When a drowned man comes back to life, Georges Simenon's detective must figure out who might have wanted him dead--before they try again. Emile Ducrau, the kingpin of a small town on the outskirts of Paris, is stabbed and left for dead in the harbor one night. When he's pulled from the water and miraculously revived, he enlists the help of Maigret to figure out who was behind the attempted murder. As Maigret sorts through the complex web of deceit, abuse, money, and power that darken Emile's many dealings in the town, he must also deal with the specter of his own looming retirement. But even as Maigret navigates the domineering Ducrau's attempts to control his investigation, and contemplates his offer of a job, he's jolted out of his reverie by two more deaths and must solve the case before the killer can strike again.

'Remarkable' New York Times'[Simenon is] a bit of a master' Cillian MurphyAn acerbic tale of marital warfare and emotional estrangement, in a brilliant new translationIn the oppressive silence of the sitting room, the woman finally smoothed out the paper and, without putting on her glasses, read the two words her husband had written:The cat. Amidst the din of their Parisian neighbourhood, Émile and Marguerite live in total silence. After a hasty marriage in their sixties, their uneasy peace was shattered when Émile’s beloved cat mysteriously disappeared and was later found dead. Branding his wife the culprit, Émile’s retaliation against Marguerite’s cherished parrot sparked a silent battle of wills. Now they live parallel lives, communicating only through spiteful notes, mocking glances and mute accusations. As their suspicion and resentment mount, this bitter game of psychological warfare becomes a twisted necessity, binding them together in a relentless cycle of torment from which there can only be one escape. First published in 1967, The Cat is a masterful exploration of marital discord, loneliness and the absurdity of human relationships, painting a vivid portrait of two souls trapped in quiet desperation.

A moody, rain-swept mystery from Georges Simenon that unfolds in a border town haunted by floods and deep secrets. In The Flemish House, Maigret arrives in the rainy, flood-prone town of Givet on the Belgian border to solve the case of a missing young woman. He has been hired by the wealthy Peeters family, who are suspected of being responsible, to clear their name. As he plumbs the mysteries, prejudices, and hidden dramas of this town caught between two worlds, he has to decide whether there was foul play involved in the vanishing of the young woman, or if she has simply been chased away by the oppressive air of this benighted and fraught no-man's-land. As he investigates, he finds himself becoming increasingly fascinated by Anna Peeters, the daughter of the family, who, stoic and unemotional, seems to be the linchpin in the strange compact that keeps the family together.