Word: simenon
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Skinner nonetheless allows himself some relaxation. He drinks vodka and tonic in the late afternoon, sees an occasional movie, reads Georges Simenon detective novels once in a while, and enjoys the company of friends, his two children and his grandchildren. It sounds fulfilling, but a poignant passage from a personal journal several years ago suggests an underlying sadness: "Sun streams into our living room. My hi-fi is midway through the first act of Tristan and Isolde. A very pleasant environment. A man would be a fool not to enjoy himself in it. In a moment I will work...
...miles apart. But the emotional gap is virtually infinite. Take, for example, the reliable litmus of crime. As two new films demonstrate, the accounts of evildoer and pursuant vary enormously with the turf. The favored French mode is the grittily realistic roman policier, in which the detective, like Simenon's Inspector Maigret, is presumed human, hence flawed. In England both criminal and captor implicitly play the gentlemanly hare-and-hounds game-a legacy of what W.H. Auden called the "guilty vicarage" tradition...
Canny in Court. By the end of last year, Gardner's 140 books had sold a total of 170 million copies in the U.S. Among fellow mystery writers, only Georges Simenon, the Belgian creator of the Inspector Maigret stories, surpassed Gardner in output or ranks with him in sales...
...straight mystery the book will probably disappoint most Western readers. Wispy implications substitute for concrete clues. The end is not solution but dissolution. Yet the hand of a novelist of quality is omnipresent. The book is not unlike a Greene entertainment or a serious Simenon; one never feels too far removed from the chill that comes from brushing up against the raincoat tails of true mystery-the real nature of human experience...
...Simenon no longer mixes much at all. His day begins at 6 a.m. but, since he acts as his own agent, much time is taken up with voluminous correspondence with publishers in each country where his books appear. He writes in brief, intense spurts, but he is no longer quite as prolific as he was in 1928, for example, when he turned out 40 books in one year. Simenon's yearly harvest is now four, and he uses an IBM electric typewriter in place of the pencils that once lasted only three lines each before they became blunted...