Jeumont, 51 minute stop
Jeumont, 51 minutes stay (original title: Jeumont, 51 minutes d'arrêt ) is a story by Georges Simenon in which Commissioner Maigret helps his nephew to solve a murder case. The work belonging to the series of Maigret novels and stories was written in La Rochelle in July 1938 and was published in 1944 in the volume Les nouvelles enquêtes de Maigret by Éditions Gallimard . The story appeared for the first time in 1976 in a German translation by Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau, and in a new translation by Gudrun Zett in 1989 by Diogenes in the volume Maigret and the most stubborn guest in the world .
action
Maigret is woken up early in the morning by a call from his nephew Paul Vinchon, inspector at the Belgian border; a dead person was found on the train from Warsaw to Paris when the border control between Erquelinnes and Jeumont took place. The cause of death was found to be a needle stick in the heart.
Vinchon had the corresponding wagon and the suspicious passengers traveling in it uncoupled at the Jeumont border station and informed his uncle. Maigret then rushes to his office on the Quai des Orfèvres and has information gathered from the passengers' countries of origin. In the course of the morning Maigret arrives at the border station and has the dead person shown in the train compartment. It is a certain Otto Braun, 58 years old according to the passport and a former banker from Stuttgart . Investigations revealed that Brown Jew and after the takeover by the Nazis had prohibition of employment. Maigret now gets an idea of the other passengers in the compartment; an Adolphe Bonvoisin from Lille , representative of a spinning company, who came from Lviv ; an elderly lady, Mme Irvin from Vilna, a Jew like Otto Braun, who went to Paris for treatment; then a half-world lady named Lena Leibach from Vienna; a certain Thomas Hanke, who was already in jail for stolen goods , and finally a Dr. Gellert from Cologne, an archaeologist on his way to the Louvre in Paris . They also found a stowaway named Bebelmans who wanted to escape, had a third class ticket and was smuggling securities. According to Bonvoisin, Braun knew Lena Leibach because he spoke to her after they had crossed the German-Belgian border. According to witness statements, he forbade her to leave the compartment. Maigret suspects that Otto Braun wanted to emigrate, judging by the amount of luggage he had, but you cannot find any large amounts of money with him.
Maigret now has the only logical explanation for these connections: Otto Braun tried to get his fortune out of Nazi Germany . So he discussed it with a demimonde lady, whose suitcase he had furnished with a false bottom. Her friend, Thomas Hanke, found out about it and stole the securities hidden in the suitcase in Berlin, with Lena 's consent. Hanke then got on in Cologne to monitor the whole thing, while Bebelman's helper traveled with the third-class papers, with instructions to disappear under the car every time he crossed the border. When Lena Leibach tried to get off the train in Belgium, Braun seemed to be suspicious. Leibach stabbed the crowd that arose after the instruction “Have your passports ready!” With a brooch needle.
expenditure
The story was first published in 1944 by the Gallimard publishing house along with 18 other stories in the volume of stories Les Nouvelles Enquêtes de Maigret . It was also included in the Simenon work edition Œuvres complètes (Lausanne, Editions Rencontre, 1967–1973), in Tout Simenon (Paris, Presses de la Cité, 1988–1993) in volume 24 and in Tout Simenon (Paris, Omnibus, 2002– 2004) included in volume 24. It is available in German translation in the anthology, All Maigret Stories ( ISBN 978-3-257-06682-1 ) published by Diogenes in 2009 .
Adaptations
- Jeumont, 51 minutes d'arrêt , TV film by Gilles Katz with Jean Richard , first broadcast in 1989.
- Un meurtre de première classe , TV film by Christian de Chalonge, with Bruno Cremer as Maigret, first broadcast in 1999.