The Belgian novelist Georges Simenon (1903-1989), who wrote in French, was one of the most productive and popular writers of the twentieth century. Author of more than 500 novels, translated into dozens of languages, he was most famous for his...

André Gide considered Georges Simenon to be one of the finest novelists of the century. He even went so far in 1939 as to state (as quoted in Cahiers de la Petite Dame, volume 4, 1977, p. 263) that he was "le plus grand peut-être et le...

THE YEAR 2003 marks the centenary of the birth of Georges Simenon (1903-89), one of the most prolific French-language novelists of the twentieth century. Sponsored by the city of Liege, Belgium, and the University of Liege, a year-long series of exhibits, conferences, films,...

SIMENON. By Pierre Assouline. Knopf; 464 pages; $32.50. Chatto & Windus; K20 MUCH of what has been written about the life of Georges Simenon is, Pierre Assouline notes, invention; entertaining invention, if that is a justification, but nevertheless mostly lies. Simenon need...

Magdalen Nabb, a British author who wrote crime novels about a quirky Italian investigator, has died, her publishing house said Tuesday. She was 60.Nabb died of a stroke Saturday in Florence, Italy, where she had lived and worked since 1975, said Diogenes Verlag AG, her...

Burr BaldwinLOS ANGELES (AP) _ Burr Baldwin, who played in two Rose Bowls and was the first UCLA football player to be named a consensus All-American, has died. He was 85.Baldwin died Monday night at his Bakersfield home of complications from cancer, said his son,...

The detective novel was to change … in the wake of the disillusionment with science that followed World War I. At the same time, faith in reason was diminishing as Freud gave primacy to the irrational forces of the unconscious. New methods of investigation that relied on instinct, intuition, and empathy replaced rational deduction. Simenon's Maigret, who has been called the Bergson of the detective novel, illustrates this change in emphasis. Maigret's role, unlike that of Holmes, is not...

Simenon's hero, Maigret, is a man's man. He is literally the champion of men, to the exclusion of women. Women play two parts in Simenon's world: la maman or la putain, the mother or the whore. Simenon's men are engaged in a fearsome struggle to assert themselves; the adversary is nearly always a woman. The typical Simenon novel recounts a man's attempt to escape the bad mother, the whore, who invades the masculine sanctuary and incites him invariably to crime, and to find...

One cannot understand Simenon's work without considering his personality. In one sense it is true to say that what we are is what we do, but in another sense what we are is what we desire, and often Simenon's desires seem the opposite of what he has done. His life is full of self-imposed restrictions but what he wants … is the total liberty of a man without possessions, typically a tramp sleeping under a bridge in Paris. Such a tramp would be a truly superior man…. Simenon'...