Maigret's Jurisdiction

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REVIEWS

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Maigret’s Jurisdiction by Elliott Colla February 15th, 2015 (HTTP://LAREVIEWOFBOOKS.ORG/ABOUT(HTTP://LAREVIEWOFBOOKS.ORG/MEMBERSHIP/) LARB/) (HTTPS://LAREVIEWOFBOOKS.ORG/GENRE/LARB(HTTP://LAREVIEWOFBOOKS.ORG/TOMSRADIO-HOUR) (HTTPS://LAREVIEWOFBOOKS.ORG/QJ/) BOOK-CLUB/) (HTTP://LAREVIEWOFBOOKS.ORG/AV/) (HTTP://BLOG.LAREVIEWOFBOOKS.ORG/) (HTTP://LAREVIEWOFBOOKS.ORG/ABOUT(HTTP://LAREVIEWOFBOOKS.ORG/ABOUTLARB/AUTHORS/) (HTTP://LAREVIEWOFBOOKS.ORG/ABOUTLARB/CONTRIBUTORS/) LARB/GENRES/)

TAG G E D AUT H OR S

Georges Simenon

THESE MIGHT BE Jules Maigret’s best years ever. It is not hard to picture the sardonic hero of Georges Simenon’s best-selling novels smiling down on us from policier heaven. And why wouldn’t he? Contemporary American mass culture is awash with procedurals, and Maigret’s jurisdiction now covers the entire world.

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Police stories are so ubiquitous today that it is hard to remember back to when detectives tended not to be police. It’s even harder to imagine that the police hero had to be invented in the first place. But that is more or less what Simenon did back in 1930 when he created the jaded, savvy Maigret, dressed always in an overcoat, his pipe in one hand, a beer in the other, and his wife half-forgotten at home. Seventy-five titles and 80 years later, Maigret’s literary DNA pervades crime fiction from Paris to Hollywood. Maigret’s descendants are by now a motley squad spanning from the 87th Precinct of Ed McBain to the LAPD of Dragnet and James Ellroy. From Ian Rankin’s Rebus to Henning Mankell’s Wallander — from The Wire to CSI, from Dexter to True Detective — the precincts of our imagination are staffed with Maigret’s heirs. Maigret is only now beginning to appear systematically in English, for the first time since his birth in 1930. A new generation of readers will thus discover the magic of the Maigret formula. Of course, “discover” is an odd word to use when talking about Simenon; he was hardly forgotten. Decades ago, each translation of a Maigret title became a bestseller in the United Kingdom and the United States. Between 1930 and his death in 1989, Simenon wrote more than 200 novels (under various names) and sold over 700 million books. Most of these sales were in the Inspector Maigret series. Only a handful of writers — including Shakespeare and Agatha Christie — have “sold” more than Simenon. But as these English translations fell in and out of print (http://www.trussel.com/maig/penguin/penguin.htm), the name Simenon became little more than a talisman for American audiences. We knew of Simenon, but would be excused for not having read much by him. As Simenon’s massive library began to enter the public domain more than a decade ago, we have lost that excuse. With the 2003 centenary of Simenon’s birth, NYRB Classics commissioned 11 new and revised translations of Simenon’s celebrated romans durs (https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/paperback-writers-georges-simenon). And now, since 2013, Penguin Books has committed itself to bringing out the 75 books of the Maigret series in an orderly fashion. All of these numbers had been published before in translations, although most of them only haphazardly and often in odd “omnibus” formats. But now they will be available, for the first time in their entirety, and with smooth new English translations that do credit to the originals’ silky economy of language. Maigret might enjoy this, but Simenon might not. The Belgian author had a vexed relationship with the Maigret series. On the one hand, Maigret made him that rarest of things — a genuinely rich writer. On the other hand, the Maigret series ensured that his literary reputation would forever after be based on market, rather than aesthetic, values. Maybe now critics will give Maigret his due. Maybe all those sprawling crime television series of the last 15 years have taught us that some literary titles are to be treated not as individual, stand-alone works but as fragments

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