Maigret on the move

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Maigret auf Reisen (French: Maigret voyage ) is a crime novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It is the 51st novel in a series of 75 novels and 28 short stories about the detective Maigret . The novel was written from August 10 to 17, 1957 in Echandens and was published in December of that year by the Paris publisher Presses de la Cité . The first German translation by Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau was published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in 1959 . In 1988 Diogenes Verlag brought out a new translation by Ingrid Altrichter.

The death of an English billionaire leads Commissioner Maigret into the world of luxury hotels and the VIPs residing there , a milieu that the petty-bourgeois police officer deeply detests. The investigations extend from Paris over the Côte d'Azur to Switzerland . Maigret is extremely reluctant to travel.

content

Hotel George V in Paris
Lausanne Palace in Lausanne

On the night of October 7, the English billionaire drowned Colonel David Ward in the bathtub of his suite of Parisian luxury hotels George V . Bruising on his shoulders suggests that he did not die of an accident but was deliberately pushed underwater. That very night, Ward's lover Louise Paverini, originally called Palmieri, known by everyone as "the little Comtesse ", attempted suicide on the same floor , but called for help in good time and was admitted to a hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine . When the police were to question her there the next morning, she disappeared without a trace.

Disgruntled, Commissioner Maigret takes over the investigation, accompanied by numerous good advice to exercise discretion and to handle the high-ranking personalities involved in the case with kid gloves. The grumpy commissioner cannot avoid impressing John Arnold, the dead man's eloquent friend and general agent, and it annoys him that his young inspector Lapointe witnesses his embarrassment.

Maigret follows in the footsteps of the missing Comtesse, who takes him from Orly to Nice and Monte Carlo , where he meets her divorced husband Joseph Van Meulens in the Hôtel de Paris , an equally wealthy Belgian manufacturer with a decidedly self-confident demeanor. Louise Paverini, however, has long since traveled on to Lausanne , and so the commissioner has to take another flight before he can question her the next day at the Lausanne Palace .

The Comtesse testifies that on the night of the crime she found her husband-to-be, the triple divorced Ward, dead in the bathtub, swallowed an overdose of sleeping pills and desperately sought help from her ex-husband Van Meulens the following day. But Maigret also learns that the Comtesse is penniless without the support of her two wealthy patrons, while her real passion is her first husband, the impoverished Italian aristocrat Comte Marco Paverini, who can be supported by wealthy women and is about to become the rich Dutch woman To marry Anna de Groot.

Back at the George V in Paris, Maigret begins to understand the mentality of people from high society who stay in the same luxury hotels all over the world. Their motive is not jealousy, because they pass their loved ones on to their business partners at any time, like the “little comtesse”. But they are all afraid of falling out of their milieu and having to lead a completely normal life, which they no longer believe they are capable of after getting used to luxury and comfort.

Maigret realizes that it is John Arnold who had to fear this fall most. He sets a trap for the dead man's confidante by summoning a number of witnesses who could have seen him fleeing the hotel on the night of the murder, but who in truth did not. Faced with the seemingly overwhelming burden of proof, Arnold confesses. He, who had had to forego marriage all his life in order to remain available as a factotum for Ward, wanted to marry Ward's third wife, Muriel Halligan. Before their divorce became final and they would have lost the right to the inheritance, he murdered Ward so that he would not have to forego Muriel's property on his side.

background

Echandens Castle

Maigret auf Reisen was the first novel that Georges Simenon wrote after he settled in Switzerland in July 1957, which would remain his home for the rest of his life. He rented the Echandens Castle in the canton of Vaud until he moved to Epalinges in 1963 and later to Lausanne . Just as the writer once had his commissioner Maigret in Maigret in New York and Maigret in Arizona in the American adopted home, he introduced him to the new host country again this time, albeit only for a short flying visit to Geneva and Lausanne. After all, the short visit to the inspector is enough to get to know some typical peculiarities of the country and its inhabitants: a certain slowness that mixes with comfort, the proverbial hospitality that still allows a meticulous control of the guests, and last but not least the quiet inns with their local ones Cry.

Simenon's biographer Patrick Marnham points out, however, that Simenon went through the most stressful period of his life in Echandens, which was mainly due to the broken second marriage. Even though Simenon's writing work initially suffered neither quantitatively nor qualitatively as a result of moving to Switzerland, it is noticeable that none of his late novels were completely set in the new adopted home. Besides Maigret on her travels , only two non-Maigret novels took her characters temporarily to Switzerland: Le Train de Venise (1965, German: The Train from Venice ) and La Disparition d'Odile (1971, German: The Missing Daughter ).

interpretation

Maigret on his travels leads Commissioner Maigret into a milieu that is little familiar to him and in which he feels uncomfortable: that of high society and big money. According to Josef Quack, Simenon "ironically criticizes the snobbish world of the rich" in the guise of the commissioner, to which the successful writer himself belonged for a long time. The stereotype of the Anglo-American multimillionaire can also be found in other novels in the series, for example in Maigret and Pietr the Latvian and Maigret fights for a man's head . Maigret's deeply felt aversion to the international flair of grand hotels is also evident in Maigret and the cellars of the “Majestic” and Maigret and his revolver . The last act of the novel takes the inspector back to his home in Paris, where the case comes to its familiar conclusion with the perpetrator's confession on the Quai des Orfèvres over sandwiches and beer from the Brasserie Dauphine .

Before it comes to a "brilliant victory" according to Tilman Spreckelsen , which the inspector casually celebrates by placing his hand on the murderer's shoulder, Maigret is downright intimidated by the "better circles" at the beginning of the novel. In particular, the later murderer bought the inspector's guts at the first meeting, and Maigret is not only annoyed that the young Lapointe witnessed his loss of face, but the incorruptible inspector was outraged by the violation of his own principles. It is the experiences of his trip to America in Maigret in New York that let him see through the milieu of millionaires, and he sums up their way of life to the formula that they, used to luxury and numerous auxiliary services, fear failure in ordinary life.

Simenon summed up his literary endeavors by saying that he was always urged to "discover people, without their fuss, without their masks, naked people, [...] people as they are, no matter where." than in his other works, he takes up this thesis in Maigret on his travels , when it is said that the inspector tries “to scratch the paint in order to discover (as he put it) the 'naked person' behind the various external appearances . ”And in fact, with the dead Colonel in the bathtub and his Belgian business friend on the massage bench, two representatives of the millionaire caste are stripped of the facade of their elegant luxury, and they literally face the inspector naked. According to Murielle Wenger, Maigret discovers the same human truths, the same fears and compulsions for self-assurance behind every social manifestation and all veiling rites and rituals.

reception

Publishers Weekly described the novel Maigret while traveling : “A captivating Whodunit that is located in the playground of the super-rich.” According to Kirkus Reviews , Maigret receives little material to work with, as usual, “but the story seems a bit richer - maybe just because of the caviar and Champagnes ”. However, Newgate Calendar in the New York Times stated , “This is not one of the better Maigret novels; he's a bit careless and the resolution is unusually theatrical for Simenon. ”And the American magazine Best Sellers felt compelled to admit that the novel“ does not come close to the best Maigret adventures. ”

The Yale Literary Magazine found in the novel "the old kind of murder with some new twists." Although there is little “action”, the drama arises from Maigret's dialogues and his trains of thought. "With his precise writing style, Simenon offers enough details and tension to make the novel a short but enjoyable read." According to Elisabeth Schulze-Witzenrath, Simenon was able to "almost completely hold out" a personal narrator in the novel . For Peter Kaiser “Simenon creates a feeling in the reader that is similar to that of Maigret himself. Rarely do you get to feel a protagonist of a novel so intensely. ”Impressed by the“ intense and vivid hotel scenes ”, he concluded:“ This time a somewhat surly Maigret, ”nonetheless“ a great pleasure to read. ”

The novel was filmed twice as part of television series about Commissioner Maigret. 1963 embodied Rupert Davies the Commissioner in the episode Another World of the British BBC series. In 1987 Jean Richard played the title role in an episode of the French TV series Les Enquêtes du Commissaire Maigret .

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Maigret voyage . Presses de la Cité, Paris 1957 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret on the road . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1959.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret on the road . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau. Heyne, Munich 1966.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret on the road . Translation: Ingrid Altrichter. Diogenes, Zurich 1988, ISBN 3-257-21593-2 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret on the road . All Maigret novels in 75 volumes, volume 51. Translation: Ingrid Altrichter. Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23851-8 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Biographie de Georges Simenon 1946 à 1967 on Toutesimenon.com, the website of Omnibus Verlag.
  2. Maigret voyage in the Simenon bibliography by Yves Martina.
  3. Oliver Hahn: Bibliography of German-language editions . In: Georges-Simenon-Gesellschaft (Ed.): Simenon-Jahrbuch 2003 . Wehrhahn, Laatzen 2004, ISBN 3-86525-101-3 , p. 52.
  4. a b c Maigret of the Month: Maigret voyage (Maigret and the Millionaires) on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  5. Patrick Marnham: The Man Who Wasn't Maigret. The life of Georges Simenon . Knaus, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-8135-2208-3 , p. 371.
  6. ^ Newgate Calendar: Maigret and the Millionaires . In: The New York Times of November 24, 1974.
  7. a b 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 , p. 78.
  8. ^ Bill Alder: Maigret, Simenon and France: Social Dimensions of the Novels and Stories . McFarland, Jefferson 2013, ISBN 978-0-7864-7054-9 , p. 155.
  9. Mike Gerhardt: Maigret and the Millionaires . In: Yale Literary Magazine, Vol. 142-144, 1972, p. 308.
  10. ^ A b Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret-Marathon 51: Maigret on trips . On FAZ.net from April 17, 2009.
  11. Dominique Meyer-Bolzinger: Une méthode clinique dans l'enquête policière: Holmes, Poirot, Maigret . Éditions du Céfal, Brussels 2003, ISBN 2-87130-131-X , p. 73.
  12. ^ Georges Simenon: Intimate Memoirs and the Book of Marie-Jo . Diogenes, Zurich 1982, ISBN 3-257-01629-8 , p. 579.
  13. ^ Georges Simenon: Maigret on trips . Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23851-8 , p. 33.
  14. ^ "An absorbing whodunit set in the playground of the super rich". Quoted from: Publishers Weekly Volume 205, Issues 13-25, 1974, p. 45.
  15. "Maigret, as always, is given very little to work with but the story seems a little fuller - perhaps it's only the caviar and champagne." Quoted from: Maigret and the Millionaires by Georges Simenon in Kirkus Reviews of October 9, 1974.
  16. ^ "This is not one of the better Maigret books; it is a bit perfunctory and the solution is, for Simenon, altogether stagy. ”Quoted from: Newgate Calendar: Maigret and the Millionaires . In: The New York Times of November 24, 1974.
  17. "One must confess, that this is not up to the best Maigret adventures." Quoted from: Best Sellers: From the United States Government Printing Office , Volume 34, 1974, p. 326.
  18. ^ "The same old type of murder with a few new twists [...] The suspense and excitement in the novel are developed through Maigret's questioning and thinking; there is little action. […] Simenon, with his concise writing style, provides enough details and enough suspense to make the novel a quick but enjoyable reading experience. "Quoted from: Mike Gerhardt: Maigret and the Millionaires . In: Yale Literary Magazine, Vol. 142-144, 1972, p. 308.
  19. Elizabeth Schulze-Witzenrath: The history of the detective novel. On the structure and reception of its classic form . In: Jochen Vogt (Ed.): The crime novel. Poetics – theory – history . Fink, Munich 1998, p. 222.
  20. Peter Kaiser: Maigret on trips (Georges Simenon); Volume 51 on leser-welt.de.
  21. Maigret Films & TV on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.