The man from London

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The Man from London (French: L'homme de Londres ) is a novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon , which was written in Marsilly , Charente-Maritime , in the autumn of 1933 . The French publisher Fayard published the book edition in December 1933, while the daily Le Journal published the novel in 23 episodes from December 18, 1933 to January 9, 1934. A total of four German translations were published under the title Der Mann aus London : 1934 by Hilde Barbasch in the German-language exile newspaper Pariser Tageblatt , the following year by Harold Effberg in the Schlesische Verlagsanstalt , 1969 by Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau in Heyne Verlag and 1981 by Stefanie Weiss in Diogenes Publishing House .

A French railroad worker witnesses a man from London smuggling his suitcase through customs and then murdering his accomplice. He manages to get the suitcase that contains the booty from a robbery. Tempted by the sudden wealth, he keeps his find a secret from the investigative authorities. When he meets the murderer again, a psychological duel ensues between the two men, who are not allowed to betray each other.

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Former Gare de Dieppe-Maritime station at the beginning of the 20th century

Louis Maloin is the shunting foreman at the port station in the northern French city of Dieppe . In his signal box he towers over the harbor and watches the hustle and bustle below. He witnessed one night when a passenger on the ferry from Newhaven smuggled his suitcase through customs with the help of a waiting accomplice. Later the two men get into an argument, the newcomer from London pushes his companion into the harbor basin, where he drowns and takes the mysterious suitcase down with him. Maloin scares away the murderer and hides the suitcase containing 5,000 pounds, the equivalent of half a million francs. Knowing that he had missed the moment to turn on the police, the railroad worker hides the suitcase in his locker and hides the find.

The next morning, Maloin meets the Englishman for the first time in daylight. It's about Pitt Brown, a clown from the London Palladium , who, together with his accomplice Teddy Baster, robbed the theater owner Harold Mitchel. Brown is desperately looking for the suitcase, but when he meets Maloin's gaze, he suspects his involvement in the case and begins to watch the railroad worker. He indulges in dreams of starting a new life with the money. To the displeasure of his wife, he quit his daughter Henriette's job as a butcher's assistant and bought her a fur coat and a new pipe for himself. On the other hand, he is preoccupied with the restless search of the melancholy Brown, and several times he is close to simply handing the suitcase over to him.

Steep coast near Dieppe

Scotland Yard Commissioner Molisson arrives at Dieppe and locates Brown at his hotel. He offers the suspect to stop the investigation against return of the stolen money. But without the suitcase with the booty, Brown has no choice but to go into hiding. He hides in Maloin's boathouse, where Henriette discovers him and traps him in a panic. While Maloin ponders how the situation can be saved without getting himself into a mess, Mitchel and his daughter Eva travel in person to look for the money. Eva comes up with the idea of ​​luring Brown's intimidated wife to the scene to put further pressure on the thief, who turns out to be a murderer when the accomplice's body is found in the harbor.

Driven by the feeling of having to intervene in what is happening, Maloin sneaks to his boathouse to provide the imprisoned with food. He tries to get into conversation with the Englishman, but is attacked by him with a crab hook and kills his adversary in a fight to the death. Without giving a thought to covering up what he believes was a disaster that could have happened to anyone, he delivers Molisson's suitcase of money and leads Brown's wife to her husband's body. In the mills of the French judiciary, however, it soon becomes clear to him that nobody is trying to understand what he has done, and he closes himself off, which gives the impression of coldness and pity. Maloin is sentenced to five years in prison. He keeps thinking of the dead man's family and how history would have been different if he had been able to come to terms with Brown.

interpretation

For Stanley G. Eskin, the man from London has all the components of a detective novel , but without actually being one. The crime committed remains in the background, the attention is fully focused on the chance witness and his sensitively described reaction to the discovery of the prey, which completely upsets his life. In contrast to the Maigret series, there is no benevolent and reassuring figure of the inspector and his special ability to mend the fate of the figures like a tailor. Instead, Maloin is left alone with his existential fears, which make him increasingly headless and ultimately drive him to kill the man from London. Only at the end, when the proletarian Maloin becomes a victim of class justice , does he acquire a certain dignity. His fate becomes “a miniature tragedy of the Hardy type”.

The British magazine The Listener considers Maloin to be one of the likeable characters in Simenon's work, who is marked with his equivalent of pity: with respect. His fate moves the reader because it reveals profound truths about human nature. Maloin's impulse to surrender to the police arises from his need for human dignity. According to Peter Kaiser, Simenon's sympathy always goes to the outsider, the unadjusted, the angry breakout. His motto is: “What distinguishes the common man from the murderer? Only the one moment of action. "The novel becomes" a question of ethics and moral decision. And because of those, others have failed than a railroad worker from Dieppe. ”For Tilman Spreckelsen, every character in the novel is isolated from their fellow men. One meets incomprehensively, spies on one another, "longs for closeness and kills one another in the same breath." After several sleepless days and nights, Maloin is so overwhelmed that he is ready to do anything that puts an end to the hustle and bustle in order to finally move on Calm to come.

For Behrang Samsami, Maloin is a petty bourgeois who once in his life something extraordinary happens to him, the hope for that social prestige that life has so far denied him. What connects him to other negative heroes from Simenon's novels such as Das Haus am Kanal is the passivity and fatalism with which he endures the events without actively intervening in them. One almost gets the impression that he welcomes the calamity that is brewing over him and his family. With Peter Kaiser one would like to call out to the railroad worker: “Stand still and don't take a step further!” But his path seems to be mapped out, his actions inevitable. An invisible bond ties him to the murderer, from whom he cannot break free. According to Jack Edmund Nolan, this inescapability is a central thesis in Simenon's work: Even if his heroes seem to get away with an act, they only take on all the more guilt until the postponed punishment ultimately hits them.

Tim Morris identifies two central motifs in the novel: that of the harried man, which determines many of Simenon's early novels, such as The Man Who Watched the Trains , and that of the doppelganger, which turns the hunted Brown into the double of the railwayman Maloin. For Gavin Lambert , Maloin is a simple man who is trapped in his curriculum vitae, which is symbolized by the glass case at his job. At the end he exchanges this glass box for a prison cell in which he continually ponders about his victim and the interchangeability of their lives with his wife, family and house on both sides of the English Channel . Both were victims of the circumstances: Brown, who murdered for money, ends up as a murder victim. Maloin, who turns out to be an unfit thief, becomes an unwanted murderer. Both men screw up the possible breakout of their lives, it is left to chance to expose their fate of failure.

According to Lucille Frackman Becker, this significance of chance for human fate is characteristic of Simenon's work. The fate of both main characters could have been different if Brown had taken a step towards Maloin at the right time. Instead, there was a fatal misunderstanding, and at the end of the day the railroad worker imagined in his cell what kind of understanding it might have been. For John Raymond, Maloin's universal status lies in the fact that events are not predetermined for him like a Macbeth or a Medea ; they happen to him like an ordinary person, everyone. This makes him a typical Simenon hero, the man from the crowd who is caught in the web of events, a figure in which the special and the universal merge.

reception

Tim Morris compares L'homme de Londres to Simenon's best works, as well as those of his French colleague Francis Carco, such as the genre- defining novel L'homme traqué ( The Hurried ). For Oliver Hahn it is "a gloomy, dark novel", the main character of which he can hardly win, although it forms a good change from the Maigret series. Tilman Spreckelsen speaks of an "ice cold" novel, and The New Yorker of a "ruthless study of French criminal psychology" that will make Simenon's lovers' blood clot. On the trail of Simenon's novel, the French journalist Jacky Durand went to Dieppe in 2012, where the port station Gare de Dieppe-Maritime described above was closed in 1994.

The novel was filmed a total of five times. The French film L'homme de Londres was made in 1943 under the direction of Henri Decoin . It played Fernand Ledoux , Suzy Prim and Jules Berry . In 1947, the British feature film followed Temptation Harbor (German: Port of temptation ) with Robert Newton , Simone Simon , William Hartnell and Marcel Dalio . Directed by Lance Comfort . In 1971, ZDF broadcast the television film Der Mann aus London by Heinz Schirk with Jean Servais , Paul Albert Krumm and Ilse Ritter . In 1988, an episode of the French television series L'heure Simenon was made under the direction of Jan Keja . In 2007 the Hungarian feature film A Londoni férfi by Béla Tarr was shown at the Cannes International Film Festival .

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: L'homme de Londres . Fayard, Paris 1933 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: The man from London . Translation: Hilde Barbasch. In: Pariser Tageblatt No. 163–195. May / June 1934.
  • Georg Simenon: The man from London . Translation: Harold Effberg. Schlesische Verlagsanstalt, Berlin 1935.
  • Georges Simenon: The man from London . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau. Heyne, Munich 1969.
  • Georges Simenon: The man from London . Translation: Stefanie Weiss. Diogenes, Zurich 1981, ISBN 3-257-20813-8 .
  • Georges Simenon: The man from London . Selected novels in 50 volumes, volume 4. Translation: Stefanie Weiss. Diogenes, Zurich 2010, ISBN 978-3-257-24104-4 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographie de Georges Simenon 1924 à 1945 on Toutesimenon.com, the website of the Omnibus Verlag.
  2. ↑ L'homme de Londres in the Simenon Bibliography by Yves Martina.
  3. ↑ Oliver Hahn: Bibliography of German-language editions . Georges-Simenon-Gesellschaft (Ed.): Simenon-Jahrbuch 2003 . Wehrhahn, Laatzen 2004, ISBN 3-86525-101-3 , p. 103.
  4. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , pp. 188-189, 371.
  5. ↑ The Listener . Volume 28, 1942, p. 123.
  6. ↑ a b Peter Kaiser: The Human Factor ( Memento of the original from March 2, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.litges.at archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on litges.at.
  7. ↑ a b Tilman Spreckelsen: The man from London . On: faz.net of December 26, 2010.
  8. ↑ Behrang Samsami: "The naked human" on literaturkritik.de No. 12/2011.
  9. ↑ Jack Edmund Nolan: Simenon on the Screen . In: Films in Review magazine Vol. XVI, No. 7, August / September 1965, pp. 419-437.
  10. ↑ a b Tim Morris: lection: l'homme de londres on the website of the University of Texas at Arlington .
  11. ^ Gavin Lambert : The Dangerous Edge . Grossmann, New York 1976, ISBN 0-670-25581-5 , pp. 200-201. (also online )
  12. ↑ Lucille Frackman Becker: Georges Simenon . Twayne, Boston 1977, ISBN 0-8057-6293-0 , p. 66.
  13. ↑ John Raymond: Simenon in Court . Hamilton, London 1968, ISBN 0-241-01505-7 , p. 86.
  14. ↑ The man from London on maigret.de.
  15. ↑ “dispassionate studies of French criminal psychology […] Both novels no doubt will be very successful in curdling the blood of M. Simenon's admirers.” Quoted from: The New Yorker . Volume 20, issues 27-39, 1944, p. 100.
  16. ↑ Jacky Durand: Ce poisson que rien n'arrête . In: Liberation of May 31, 2012.
  17. ^ L'homme de Londres (1943) in the Internet Movie Database (English).
  18. ↑ Temptation Harbor in the Internet Movie Database (English).
  19. ↑ The Man from London (1971) in the Internet Movie Database (English).
  20. ↑ L'homme de Londres (1988) in the Internet Movie Database (English).
  21. ↑ A Londoni férfi (1988) in the Internet Movie Database (English).