SIMENON SIMENON "REPORT". MAIGRET'S ROOM

London Review of Book - 04/06/2020 - John Lanchester -  Nobody​ is sure how many books Georges Simenon wrote. All sources give different totals. He himself didn’t know, indeed he couldn’t remember all of them. He had many pseudonyms, dating back to the time when he was starting out as a hyper-prolific hack in his Belgian youth. To complicate things further, many of his books were published serially and are of a length somewhere between longish short story and shortish novella, so people of good faith can disagree about whether they count as books. In any case, we can agree that he wrote an almost inconceivable number of novels and stories: more than four hundred, according to his current English publisher, Penguin. Simenon’s colossal output includes the 75 Maigret novels, dozens and dozens of shilling shockers in a variety of genres, a number of outright masterpieces in his ‘romans durs’, and many autobiographical books of an even-tempered but strangely sinister candour. His career divides with convenient clarity into fifths. The early part was the hackwork, including all the books he couldn’t remember in later life. His first novel, Au Pont des Arches , came out in 1921, when he was 18. It’s never been translated, but according to Simenon’s excellent biographer Patrick Marnham it’s a would-be humorous story about his home town, Liège, ‘partly set in a chemist’s shop which specialised in laxatives for pigeons’. Over the next few years, under a variety of pseudonyms, he wrote 150 or so pulp books, mainly of novella length, from titillating near porn to thrillers to Westerns. This early work was undertaken as a conscious project to learn his craft and make money in the process...>>>