The Thammasat University Library has acquired a new book that should be useful for students interested in European literature, France, Belgium, criminology, detective fiction, and related fields.

Investigating Simenon: Patriarchy, Sex and Politics in the Fiction is by Dr. Russell Campbell, an adjunct professor of film at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

The TU Library collection owns many other books by and about Simenon.

Georges Simenon was a Belgian writer. He published nearly 500 novels, several of which featured the fictional police detective Jules Maigret.

Simenon was born in Liège, a French-speaking city in the east of Belgium.

Simenon was noted as a prolific writers of the twentieth century. He was capable of writing up to 80 pages daily, and sometimes finished a short novel within one week. His books have sold many millions of copies.

Although Jules Maigret may seem like an ordinary police officer, who liked to eat a lot and smoke a pipe, he also has some strong empathetic feelings about the people he meets during his work. This sometimes helps him to solve cases.

Here are some observations by Simenon about his books and writing in general:

• Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don’t think an artist can ever be happy.  
• We are all potentially characters in a novel–with the difference that characters in a novel really get to live their lives to the full.  
• The poor are used to stifling any expression of their despair, because they must get on with life, with work, with the demands made of them day after day, hour after hour. –  Maigret and the Hundred Gibbets
• I would like to carve my novel in a piece of wood. My characters—I would like to have them heavier, more three-dimensional … My characters have a profession, have characteristics; you know their age, their family situation, and everything. But I try to make each one of those characters heavy, like a statue, and to be the brother of everybody in the world. 
• The inspector knew the mentality of malefactors, criminals and crooks. He knew that you always find some kind of passion at the root of it. –  The Late Monsieur Gallet
• Human tragedies are always simple when we reconsider them in retrospect. – Maigret and the Old People
• He distrusted ideas, as they were always too rigid to reflect reality, which, as he knew from experience, was very fluid. – Maigret and the Lazy Burglar
• At five-thirty the rain began to fall in great, heavy drops which bounced off the pavement before they spread out into black spots. At the same time thunder rumbled from the direction of Charenton and an eddy of wind lifted the dust, carried away the hats of passers-by who took to their heels and who, after a few confused moments, were all in the shelter of doorways or under the awnings of cafe terraces.
• Street peddlers of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine scurried about with an apron or a sack over their heads, pushing their carts as they tried to run. Rivulets already began to flow along the two sides of the street, the gutters sang, and on every floor you could see people hurriedly closing their windows. – The Burial of Mr. Bouvet
• The weather was so contrary and fierce that the rain wasn’t mere rain or the wind freezing wind – this was a conspiracy of the elements. –  Maigret is Afraid
• “Why, despite the blinding brightness, did everything look gray? It was as if the painfully sharp lights were helpless to dispel all the darkness the people had brought in from the night outside. –  Three Bedrooms in Manhattan
• “Maigret had often tried to get other people, including men of experience, to admit that those who fall, especially those who have a morbid determination to descend ever lower, are almost always idealists. –  Maigret and the Headless Corpse
• You came to France to find out about our methods, and you will have observed that we don’t have any. –  My Friend Maigret
• That feeling about trains, for instance. Of course he had long outgrown the boyish glamour of the steam-engine. Yet there was something that had an appeal for him in trains, especially in night-trains, which always put queer, vaguely improper notions in his head – though he would have been hard put to it to define them. Also he had an impression that those who leave by night-trains leave forever – an impression heightened the previous night by his glimpse of those Italians piled into their carriage like emigrants. –  The Man Who Watched Trains Go By
• We have a tendency to imagine people the way we would like them to be. –  Maigret Hesitates
• It seemed to him that he was compelled, by virtue of his wretched calling, to live the lives of a whole lot of other people, instead of quietly getting on with his own. 
• The committed man, whatever he is, makes me afraid, makes me bristle. I wonder if he is sincere. And, if he appears to me to be so, I wonder if he is intelligent. – When I Was Old
• Maigret never took notes. If he had a propelling pencil in his hand and a paper in front of him, it was only to make doodles that had no connection with the case. – The Judge’s House
• Inside every wrong-doer and crook there lives a human being. In addition, of course, there is an opponent in a game, and it’s the player that the police are inclined to see. As a rule, that’s what they go after. – Pietr the Latvian
• Everyone is afraid. We help young children overcome their fears with fairy tales, and then as soon as they get to school they are scared of showing their parents a school report with bad marks in it. Fear of water. Fear of fire. Fear of animals, fear of the dark. Fear, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, of making wrong choices and ruining your life. – Maigret’s Patience
• Civilized men fear wild creatures, especially wild creatures of their own kind who remind them of life in the primeval forests of past ages. – Maigret and his Dead Man
• You expect all kinds of things, but what real life throws up is always more bizarre. – The Judge’s House
• INTERVIEWER: What do you mean by “too literary”? What do you cut out, certain kinds of words?

SIMENON: Adjectives, adverbs, and every word which is there just to make an effect. Every sentence which is there just for the sentence. You know, you have a beautiful sentence—cut it. Every time I find such a thing in one of my novels it is to be cut. 

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)