The Man Who Wasn't Maigret: A Portrait of Georges Simenon

Great Book Have Read most Of Georges Simenon's Books Wanted To Read about The Author Very Pleased With Book & Seller

What can be said of a man who claimed to have slept with 10,000 women? who kept his wife, son and two mistresses under one roof? who hated his mother and slapped around his second wife? Simenon lived and breathed to write, and he wrote with astonishing rapidity, producing 76 Maigret titles, 117 novels and many volumes of memoirs. Where were all the plots, characters, locales and insights to come from, if not from his life? Patrick Marnham's biography is a fascinating read, and makes us feel that perhaps Simenon had to be as wicked as he was to be the tremendous writer that he was. Marnham does a sensitive job of tracing the influences of two world wars, two occupations and two post-war purges on Simenon, the man and the writer. I especially enjoyed reading about Simenon's work methods - how, for example, he'd write his psychological novels in a kind of trance. How Maigret was born in a fog of schnapps. And how Simenon limited his literary vocabulary to 2,000 words, so as not to break his concentration by consulting the dictionary.