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 detective novels featuring Inspector Maigret.

Georges Simenon was born in Liège on Feb. 13, 1903. An able pupil, he was determined to become a writer at the age of 11 and left school 4 years later. In 1919 he began working as a reporter for a Liège newspaper and after military service published his first novel under the pen name of Georges Sim. Between 1921 and 1934 he wrote nearly 200 novels, which he published under more than a dozen pseudonyms. Simenon moved to Paris in 1924, and in 1930 he began the famous Maigret series of detective novels, which he published under his own name. Through the dozens of novels in which he appears...