Back in the dark and the rain

In 1931, a Belgian pulp-fiction writer living in Paris and churning out four titles a month using various noms de plume decided to publish a series of detective stories under his own name. His publisher had to ask him what his real name was;everyone in Paris knew him as ‘Sim’. Georges Simenon, as he identified himself, proved to have a flair for publicity: he had already made a small fortune from his pulp fiction and he could afford to launch the new series with an all-night party in a club in Montparnasse. The vulgarity of this gesture was mocked in Le Canard enchainé but the party — attended by gossip columnists, senior police officers, professional strippers, hundreds of gatecrashers and le tout Paris — was a riot and the detective stories, about a fictional police inspector named Jules Maigret, were an immediate success.

Three years later, having published 19 Maigret titles, Simenon put the fictional inspector into extended retirement and announced that he would embark on a third career, as a writer of romans durs, or ‘psychological’ novels. He declared that in developing the skills he had learned while creating Maigret he would win the Nobel Prize. Over the next nine years he published 45 romans durs as well as the book that now appears in English for the first time as Three Crimes, written in Paris in January 1937 and originally entitled Les trois crimes de mes amis. Three Crimes has always been described as a novel but it is in fact a ‘memoir’, a fragment of autobiography in which the author has not bothered to invent any new characters, or even change their names.

Simenon was unusual among crime writers in that he knew the criminal world from the inside. As he once said, ‘I was born in the dark and in the rain, and I got away.