Maigret and the late Monsieur Gallet

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Maigret and the late Monsieur Gallet (French: Monsieur Gallet, décédé ) is a detective novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It was written in Morsang-sur-Seine in the summer of 1930 and was published by Fayard in February of the following year, together with Maigret and the Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien . The two novels formed the prelude to the 75 novels and 28 short story series about the detective Maigret . The first German translation Maigret and the dead Herr Gallet by Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau brought out Kiepenheuer & Witsch in 1961 . In 1981 the Diogenes Verlag published a new translation by Roswitha Plancherel under the title Maigret and the late Monsieur Gallet .

The Paris Commissioner Maigret is summoned to the provinces for the murder of a small traveling salesman. Everything in the life of the late Monsieur Gallet, from his appearance to the furnishings of his villa to the unsympathetic family, exudes utter mediocrity for Maigret. And in the hot French summer he shows little interest in the investigation. In addition, nothing seems to go together in the case and in the life of the dead.

content

View of Sancerre from the south

On June 27, 1930, Maigret was 45 years old, the inspector was called to the small town of Sancerre to investigate a murder. The dead person is the traveling salesman Émile Gallet, who was shot through the open window of his room in the Hôtel de la Loire . Then a knife was stuck in his heart, which the dead man held in his own hand, apparently to defend himself against the perpetrator. From the beginning, the facts of the case do not quite fit together: in Sancerre, where he has often stayed, the dead man is known not under the name Gallet but as Monsieur Clément. Although his wife in her villa in Saint-Fargeau has regular correspondence with the company Niel & Co. , for which Gallet was the general agent selling silver-plated gifts in Normandy , according to the company, he left the company 18 years ago. And even after the agent's death, Gallet's wife received handwritten postcards from her husband from Rouen .

Maigret soon discovers that Gallet was actually making a living as a cheater. On a large scale he approached supporters of the royalists and compelled them to make donations, which he put in his own pocket. It was with such fraudulent intent that he apparently sought out Tiburce de Saint-Hilaire, the owner of a nearby castle, on the day he died. Witnesses claim to have seen how the two men got into a heated argument. Gallet's private life is also not very pleasant. Little is known about his past, his wife's grandiose family never accepted him as befitting, his hard-hearted wife Aurore and the unpleasant son Henri considered him a failure without ambition. Nonetheless, Gallet, who was seriously ill with the liver, took out a life insurance policy of 300,000 francs to protect his survivors in the event of his death. To make matters worse, he was blackmailed by an ominous Monsieur Jacob with the knowledge of his scams. Moers, a specialist from the Paris Identification Service summoned by Maigret, is lucky: When he puzzles together a burned ransom note in Gallet's hotel room, he is also shot through the open window, but he only loses a piece of his ear.

The testimony of an old Indochinese veteran who first found Maigret extremely annoying, finally leads the commissioner on the right track. Because she describes a completely different Gallet than the bleak picture that Maigret has made of the dead: he was a jolly fellow who played football and seduced a number of women in the colonies. Rather, the drawn picture seems to fit the fun-loving lord of the castle, Tiburce de Saint-Hilaire, and when the latter reveals himself to be left-handed through an involuntary hand movement, Maigret comes across an identity exchange: the Tiburce de Saint-Hilaire who is facing Maigret is him true Émile Gallet, who learned in Indochina of a great inheritance that lay ahead of true Tiburce as the last offspring of an impoverished aristocratic family. He found the nobleman in need of money and bought his name and identity for 30,000 francs. The untitled nobleman lived his life from then on as Émile Gallet and only found out years later about the inheritance of which he had been cheated. Since then he has appeared again and again at the prosperous Saint-Hilaire and asked for money. But when the latter finally refused to pay, Gallet could no longer raise the 20,000 francs demanded by his blackmailer Jacob, and in his desperation saw no other way out than to kill himself. He constructed a self-firing system to avoid the appearance of suicide and at least leave his family with the insurance payment. But when the pistol jammed after the first shot, the seriously injured Gallet had to put his own knife into his heart with a tremendous effort. It took days for the self-firing system to go off a second time and hit Moers of all people.

In the end, there is no justiciable crime: the deception of the fake Saint-Hilaire has long since become statute-barred. Behind the blackmailer Jacob was Gallet's own son Henri and his fiancée Éléonore Boursang, and there is no law that forbids a son from fraudulently gaining his father's property. If Maigret were to publicize Gallet's suicide, the insurance would not pay, and Aurore would once again lose the respect of her family, which she only gained through the sudden prosperity after the death of her husband. So the commissioner persuades his superior to put the case aside. For Maigret, the fake Gallet, who led a pseudo existence all his life and made one unfortunate decision after another, has finally found what he has been looking for all along: his peace.

background

After Simenon had invented his detective Maigret in the winter of 1929/1930 and wrote the first novel Pietr-le-Letton , the following three Maigret novels, Monsieur Gallet, décédé , Le Charretier de la «Providence» and Le Pendu de Saint-Pholien im emerged Summer 1930 in Morsang-sur-Seine, where he anchored his boat. In autumn, the fifth Maigret novel, La Tête d'un homme, followed. Simenon's in-house publishing house Fayard , in which he had previously mainly written penny novels under a pseudonym, promised to publish the series as soon as Simenon had completed ten novels in advance, in order to be able to publish a new book every month in quick succession. Although only five novels were available at the time, Fayard finally brought out the first two novels in February 1931, which appeared in a double pack to increase the effect. Monsieur Gallet, décédé and Le Pendu de Saint-Pholien were selected to kick off the series .

Simenon, who published for the first time under his real name, used the entire advertising budget of the publisher and still parts of his own author's fee for a big ball with which he wanted to introduce himself and his books. The motto of the ball in the Boule Blanche nightclub on Montparnasse was Bal Anthropométrique, according to the identification department of the Paris Criminal Police. It was armed with police equipment, and the guests - the 400 invited celebrities were joined by a further 700 uninvited visitors - appeared in suitably costume. The ball became the talk of the day all over France thanks to press reports and publicized Commissioner Maigret before anyone had even read any of his books. The magazine Le Canard enchaîné described ironically: “Monsieur Georges Simenon wants to become famous at all costs. Should he fail to achieve fame with his 'bal anthropométrique', he intends to walk around the pond in the Tuileries in a handstand - and write a novel in the process. "

Various details of the novel refer to Simenon's own biography. Pierre Assouline traces the royalism on the basis of which Monsieur Gallet committed his frauds back to Simenon's own experiences in his first months after moving to Paris in December 1922. Simenon was working at that time as the private secretary of the writer Binet-Valmer, who was a member of Action française . During his second job as private secretary to the aristocrat Marquis Raymond de Tracy, Simenon met, among others, the castle administrator Pierre Tardivon, who was transformed into Maigret's father in Maigret and the Saint-Fiacre affair . In Maigret and the late Monsieur Gallet , too , a figure bears the name “Tardivon”: the manager of the Hôtel de la Loire. Finally, with Moers from the Paris Identification Service, a figure makes its first appearance, who will accompany Maigret through the series. The name "Moers" also refers to people in Simenon's environment: his maternal great-grandfather had the family name Moors or Flemish Moers, and Simenon was in Brussels with a journalist named Henri-J. Moers friends.

Position in the Maigret series

For Fenton Bresler, the first five Maigret novels formed a "homogeneous unit", which is shown, among other things, in the fact that the publisher could reverse the order of publication. From the beginning there was the “characteristic Simenon style - concentrated, powerful depiction that seems strangely terrifying in a somewhat inexplicable way ”, as well as “the brief atmospheric description of the environment”. With regard to Maigret and the late Monsieur Gallet , he referred in particular to the sober entry: “The first contact between Inspector Maigret and the dead man, with whom he was to live in such an oppressively intimate way over the next few days, took place on June 27, 1930 everyday, but at the same time unpleasant and unforgettable circumstances. "

In Maigret's memoir , Simenon took up in a fictional dialogue between author and protagonist the question of why the Paris commissioner in Maigret and the late Monsieur Gallet investigated inland beyond his competence. As a subsequent declaration, he offered that Maigret had temporarily not worked for the Quai des Orfèvres , but for the Sûreté nationale , which reports directly to the Interior Minister . A writer has to make such simplifications for his readers so as not to confuse them with “official finesse”.

interpretation

In Maigret and the late Monsieur Gallet , Maigret gives a characteristic definition of his approach, which he will also maintain in his later cases: "I will know the murderer when I know the victim." Nevertheless, according to Josef Quack, it is striking that in the first Volumes there is still a skepticism towards the intuitive approach that will become Maigret's trademark at the latest with Maigret and the mysterious captain . In Maigret and the late Monsieur Gallet, for example, it is explicitly stated: “The inspector was forty-five and had spent half his life in various police departments: with the civil affairs department , the patrol service , the aliens police , the railway police , the match surveillance service. Long enough to nip every mystical impulse in the bud and to lose faith in intuition. ”In the resolution of the case, police investigative techniques, from the meticulous securing of evidence from Moers to the doll on which the course of the crime is recreated, play a major role Role, even though Maigret's knowledge of human nature comes in at the end of the criminal investigation work.

According to Dominique Meyer-Bolzinger, the investigation unfolds “like a gallery of divergent portraits that Maigret has to give a coherence”. Gavin Lambert emphasizes the special role that a photograph of the dead plays: for the inspector it cannot be reconciled with the reports on Gallet's life. The victim's face, split in half by the thin lips, instinctively leads Maigret to his dual identity. In the end, the detective novel leads to an ironic social fable : While the original aristocrat Saint-Hilaire led a typically mediocre middle-class life as Gallet , the real Gallet is officially declared dead in the end and acquitted of all guilt in order to continue his ascent in to indulge the aristocracy.

reception

The first Maigret novels were an instant hit. In August 1931, Simenon was named bestseller of the year by publisher Hachette . The reviews saw Maigret in an "honorable" place among the investigators of the crime novel, with Simenon succeeding in "renewing a long-standing conventional type", because his commissioner is "more human than police officer". Le Matin placed Simenon among the great crime novelists.

For Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller, Monsieur Gallet, décédé was in the “Maigret mainstream” because, like so many captivating characters from Simenon, the victim has “at least two identities”. Stanley G. Eskin judged, however, that Simenon had “only partially succeeded in working out an adequate plot for the given situation” in Maigret and the late Monsieur Gallet , particularly criticizing the “implausible suicide”. For Tilman Spreckelsen , the novel “fell a bit away from Maigret and Pietr the Latvian , always where Simenon no longer depicts, but explains what is going on in the characters.” He asked whether “time is simply a plot like that this "went away", praised the secondary characters including "the lovingly painted boredom".

The novel was filmed three times: in the television series with Henri Norbert (1956), Rupert Davies (1960) and Jean Richard (1987). In 2003 SFB - ORB , MDR and SWR produced a radio play adapted by Susanne Feldmann and Judith Kuckart . The speakers included Christian Berkel and Friedhelm Ptok .

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Monsieur Gallet, décédé . Fayard, Paris 1931 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the dead Mr. Gallet . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1961.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the dead Mr. Gallet . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Heyne, Munich 1969.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the late Monsieur Gallet . Translation: Roswitha Plancherel. Diogenes, Zurich 1981, ISBN 3-257-20817-0 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the late Monsieur Gallet . All Maigret novels in 75 volumes, volume 2. Translation: Roswitha Plancherel. Diogenes, Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-257-23802-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Oliver Hahn: Bibliography of German-language editions . Georges-Simenon-Gesellschaft (Ed.): Simenon-Jahrbuch 2003 . Wehrhahn, Laatzen 2004, ISBN 3-86525-101-3 , p. 65.
  2. ^ Fenton Bresler: Georges Simenon. In search of the "naked" person . Ernst Kabel, Hamburg 1985, ISBN 3-921909-93-7 , pp. 120-123.
  3. ↑ Quoted from: Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , p. 149.
  4. ↑ Maigret of the Month: Monsieur Gallet, décédé on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  5. ↑ Georges Simenon: Maigret and the late Monsieur Gallet . Diogenes, Zurich 2008, p. 7.
  6. ^ Fenton Bresler: Georges Simenon. In search of the "naked" person , pp. 122, 128.
  7. ^ Georges Simenon: Maigret's Memoirs . All Maigret novels in 75 volumes, volume 35. Diogenes, Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-257-23835-8 , pp. 36–37.
  8. ↑ Georges Simenon: Maigret and the late Monsieur Gallet . Diogenes, Zurich 2008, p. 47.
  9. ↑ Georges Simenon: Maigret and the late Monsieur Gallet . Diogenes, Zurich 2008, pp. 36–37.
  10. ↑ Josef Quack: The limits of the human. About Georges Simenon, Rex Stout, Friedrich Glauser, Graham Greene . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2000, ISBN 3-8260-2014-6 , pp. 31-33.
  11. ^ "Dans Monsieur Gallet décédé, l'enquête se déroule comme une galerie de portraits divergents auxquels Maigret doit thunder une cohérence". In: Dominique Meyer-Bolzinger: Une méthode clinique dans l'enquête policière: Holmes, Poirot, Maigret . Éditions du Céfal, Brussels 2003, ISBN 2-87130-131-X , p. 77.
  12. ^ Gavin Lambert: The Dangerous Edge . Grossmann, New York 1976, ISBN 0-670-25581-5 , p. 180. (also online )
  13. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography , pp. 149, 168.
  14. ^ "More in the Maigret mainstream is M. Gallet décédé (1931). [...] Here as usual the inspector probes a crime of private nature, the strange death and even stranger life of a petit bourgeois jewelry salesman who seems - like many of Simenon's most compelling characters - to have had at least two identities. "In: Bill Pronzini, Marcia Muller: 1001 Midnights. The Aficionado's Guide to Mystery and Detective Fiction . Arbor House, New York 1986, ISBN 0-87795-622-7 , p. 728.
  15. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography , p. 159.
  16. ^ Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret Marathon 2: The late Monsieur Gallet . On FAZ.net from April 18, 2008.
  17. ↑ Maigret Films & TV on Steve Trussel's website.
  18. ↑ Maigret and the late Monsieur Gallet in the HörDat audio game database .