A salute to Georges Simenon

One hundred years ago an 11-year-old boy called Georges Simenon was getting accustomed to the presence of the German army in Liège. Together with his mother and his younger brother he had been forced to hide in the cellar of their terraced house on the island of Outremeuse to avoid the firing squads. The Belgian fortress outside the city had resisted for longer than expected and had inflicted casualties on the invading army. The Uhlan lancers were so angry that 200 of the Simenons’ neighbours were lined up and shot. Once Belgian resistance had ended, the occupation of Liège became a quieter affair. For a while Madame Simenon even took in German soldiers as lodgers. Years later Georges recalled his youthful surprise at the number of German officers who wore corsets.

The name of Simenon will always be associated with his most celebrated creation — the pipe-smoking, hard-drinking Parisian detective Inspector Jules Maigret, and by the end of this year Penguin Classics will have republished the first 14 Maigret titles written between 1931 and 1932, as well as two of the 117 romans durs, the ‘straight’ or ‘dark’ novels that Simenon himself considered to be his finest work.