OU_214051 UNIVERSA - Osmania University

A NOTE FOR THE READER
THE discoverer of Simenon enjoys a rich gift, for he experiences in
this broken-up world of ours the intact and frank view of life yielded
by the great French writers of the nineteenth century. The line is
unbroken: the best work of this Belgian-born crime writer of our
time contains the penetration of Flaubert and Maupassant, the
breadth and realism of Balzac. To him the human situation, or the
section he deals with, is seen minutely and through a clear lens,
and—as in the Maigret stories—with a steady acceptance and understanding.
His point of interest is a crime—the finding of a body—
but in laying bare the reason for it he re-creates its entire setting,
both physically and psychologically, and in doing so the crime is
seen as it really is: the coming to the surface in a single act of
violence of a great number of unsuspected but complicated forces.
This happens in life. His material he uses as an artist, for he creates
his own world, taking as territory a microcosm of this one and
getting it to yield everything it can—for instance: the boardinghouse
on the outskirts of Brussels in A Lodger. In A Crime in
Holland his gift is especially clear: by vivid and exact description
a small town on the north Dutch coast somehow conveys to us a
whole people and their way of life.
But there are two Simenons, as well as the creator of two sets of
stories: that of Maigret, the brusque though sympathetic giant of
the Surete" who by allowing his unconscious mind to work its own
way to a solution can put his finger on the instability in the placid
outward scene—and thet uneasy, yet brilliant, writer who attempts
to explain the oblique mechanism of the minds of those who have
committed murder but who apparently feel no guilt. It is simple
to assess the value of Maigret, and the boldness with which he is
created—his background is generally a small harbour or canal wharf,
among people who make their living by water—for in him Simenon
is the tolerant chronicler of the human heart and the everyday
world, vividly varied and rich. The writing itself is both relaxed and
sure. The other Simenon is less satisfactory and less easy to measure.
In these studies of unusual criminals he penetrates deeply, but at
xi