Georges Simenon

in full
Georges-Joseph-Christian Simenon
born Feb.
13, 1903, Liège, Belg.
died Sept. 4, 1989, Lausanne, Switz.
Belgian-French novelist whose prolific
output surpassed that of any of his
contemporaries and who was perhaps the most
widely published author of the 20th century.
Simenon
began working on a local newspaper at age
16, and at 19 he went to Paris determined to
be a successful writer. Typing some 80 pages
each day, he wrote, between 1923 and 1933,
more than 200 books of pulp fiction under 16
different pseudonyms, the sales of which
soon made him a millionaire. The first novel
to appear under his own name was
Pietr-le-Letton (1929; The Strange Case of
Peter the Lett), in which he introduced the
imperturbable, pipe-smoking Parisian police
inspector Jules Maigret to fiction. Simenon
went on to write 83 more detective novels
featuring Inspector Maigret, as well as 136
psychological novels. His total literary
output consisted of about 425 books that
were translated into some 50 languages and
sold more than 600 million copies worldwide.
Many of his works were the basis of feature
films or made-for-television movies. In
addition to novels, he wrote three
autobiographical works—Pedigrée (1948),
Quand j’étais vieux (1970; When I Was Old),
and Mémoires intimes (1981; Intimate
Memoirs), the last after the suicide of his
only daughter—and a critically well-received
trilogy of novellas about Africa, selections
of which were published in English as
African Trio (1979).
Despite
these other works, Simenon remains
inextricably linked with Inspector Maigret,
who is one of the best-known characters in
detective fiction. Unlike those fictional
detectives who rely on their immense
deductive powers or on police procedure,
Maigret solves murders using mainly his
psychological intuition and a patiently
sought, compassionate understanding of the
perpetrator’s motives and emotional
composition. Simenon’s central theme is the
essential humanity of even the isolated,
abnormal individual and the sorrow at the
root of the human condition. Employing a
style of rigorous simplicity, he evokes a
prevailing atmosphere of neurotic tensions
with sharp economy.
Simenon,
who traveled to more than 30 countries,
lived in the United States for more than a
decade, starting in 1945; he later lived in
France and Switzerland. At the age of 70 he
stopped writing novels, though he continued
to write nonfiction.