Maigret in Arizona

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Maigret in Arizona (French: Maigret chez le coroner ) is a crime novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It is the 32nd novel in a series of 75 novels and 28 short stories about Detective Maigret . The novel was written from July 21-30, 1949 in Tucson , Arizona , and was published in October 1949 by the Paris publisher Presses de la Cité . The first German translation by Jean Raimond was published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in 1957 under the title Maigret in Arizona . In 1981 the Diogenes publishing house gave upa new translation by Wolfram Schäfer under the title Maigret by Coroner , which was also published as Maigret in Arizona from 1991 .

French Commissioner Maigret is on a study tour of the United States . In Arizona he is prosecuting a coroner trial . While Maigret was initially wondering about the unusual methods of his American colleagues, he gradually began to develop interest in the case in which five members of the army were accused of causing the death of a young woman.

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Pima County Courthouse in Tucson , Arizona

At the invitation of the FBI, the French Commissioner Maigret travels through the United States to find out about the methods of the American criminal investigation department. After him a number of counties to Deputy Sheriff have appointed honorary, it is in Tucson , the county seat of Arizona. Since his host Harry Cole is involved in the hunt for a drug dealer, Maigret pursues a jury hearing in the local courthouse in the meantime . While his main focus is initially on the strange customs of the negotiation, he soon begins to be interested in the case and the people involved.

On the night of July 27-28, 17-year-old Bessy Mitchell was killed. The young, divorced woman worked as a waitress in a bar and as an occasional prostitute for members of a nearby Air Force base . On the night of her death, she was out with five young soldiers, including her lover Sergeant Ward and his friend Dan Mullins, who also had a relationship with the dead woman. Sergeant Ted O'Neil and Corporals Jimmy Van Fleet and Wo Lee were also present. The exuberant group was on the way to Nogales on the Mexican border, where the drunk Bessy, after a rest under unexplained circumstances, was left alone in the desert and was hit by a train on the railway line and killed.

Mexican-American border in Nogales

The testimonies of all those involved contradict each other seriously. Ward and Mullings accuse each other of being the last to be with the dead woman. After dropping off their three companions in Tucson, the two men drove back to the rest area, but fell asleep in the car without seeing Bessy. O'Neil, Van Fleet and Lee also returned by taxi and looked for the woman they left behind on their own, but no one wants to have found the young woman. Maigret is amazed at how many details are not even discussed in the trial, such as the sexual relations between the accused and the dead. Much more attention is paid to the underage woman's alcohol consumption, and the soldiers are arrested for having induced the deceased to drink. But when Maigret meets the Chief Deputy Sheriff Mike O'Rourke, who assists the District Attorney during the trial and whispers the questions of the interrogation to him, he becomes convinced that his American colleague has the case under control as well as Maigret has a trial in the native Paris .

When the defendants are supposed to testify under oath at the end of the day, Van Fleet collapses and confesses. After returning by taxi, the two friends Van Fleet and O'Neil left their colleague Lee on the street to look for the drunken Bessy on their own. The two men, who had previously not been able to land with the young woman, hoped to make Bessy compliant with sexual intercourse with the help of more alcohol. Indeed, O'Neil found the young woman, but she resisted his advances, stumbled on the run on the train tracks and hit the head unhappily, so that she was already dead when the train later hit her. A sealed envelope, which Maigret O'Rourke slips, proves that the French commissioner exposed the perpetrator before he made his confession. But when Harry Cole reappears, there is no time to follow the negotiation any further. Maigret has to rush to leave Arizona to fly to Los Angeles , the next stop on his study trip. He does not find out about the outcome of the proceedings, nor does he ever hear from the people involved.

background

Following his move to America in August 1945, Simenon settled in Arizona in June 1947 after stays in New York , Canada and Florida , first in Tucson and later in nearby Tumacacori . In all of his time in North America, Simenon wrote 21 novels and 5 short stories in the Maigret series, but only two of them actually take place on the American continent: Maigret in New York , where the retired commissioner is taking a private investigation to New York, and Maigret in Arizona where a Maigret who is still in the service of the French police travels to America for further training. According to Murielle Wenger, the two novels as well as the later volume Maigret, Lognon and the Gangsters , in which the inspector triumphs over a gang of American gangsters, served the author Simenon to settle personal accounts with his host country. Jack Edmund Nolan even speaks of Maigret in Arizona as a “particularly anti-American novel”.

Pima County Courthouse in Tucson

Simenon wrote Maigret in Arizona in July 1949 in a rented house on East Whitman Street just two weeks after completing the non-Maigret novel The Poor Man's Last Days . He lived a few blocks from the Tucson Courthouse, and not only is the novel one of the few cases Simenon wrote "on the ground," so to speak, but it also goes back to a real-life court hearing the author attended in Tucson. Ten years after Maigret in Arizona , Simenon returned with Maigret before the jury court to the topos of a court hearing, which his commissioner Maigret followed largely as a passive observer.

In his intimate memoirs Simenon described: “ Maigret chez le coroner […] was almost a report . We had spent two or three days attending a trial in the white-walled law courts, where the only adornment was the stars and stripes, and we were particularly interested in the dramatic death of a young girl somewhere between Tucson and Tumacacori, whom we knew very well. ”As in the novel, four soldiers were involved in the case and the girl had been hit by a train and killed after having had sexual intercourse with the heavily drunk men. "I wish that my good Maigret got acquainted with the judiciary of the West, and for this reason I wrote this novel, almost a transcript."

interpretation

“We have seldom seen Maigret so inactive.” Said Tilman Spreckelsen in his Maigret marathon about Maigret in Arizona : “He is not allowed to investigate, and during the trial the questions burn on his lips that he is not allowed to ask and those otherwise no one provides. ”Oliver Hahn does not know of any other Maigret story in which the inspector is only an observer and at no point actively intervenes in the action. The structure of the novel reminds him of Anglo-American detective puzzles, for the resolution of which the reader has to evaluate not only the text but also interspersed graphics. In Maigret in Arizona , too , several graphic visualizations of the witness statements have been inserted, an otherwise untypical stylistic device for Simenon.

Almost the entire novel reproduces the coroner's interviews in dialogue form, which, according to Murielle Wenger, leads to a theatricalization of the plot, a focus on the processes in the courtroom and the different personalities of suspects and witnesses, which are presented as if in a parade. For Helmut Heißenbüttel, the detective's distance also has something to do with the rudimentary criminals, strangers to the detective, with whom he can identify less than usual. Despite all the alleged transparency, Maigret learns during the trial that the decisive things happen in secret, and in the end he learns that life on this side and the other side of the Atlantic is not so different, which enables him to identify the main culprits before he even confesses guess. Regardless of all cultural differences, Maigret reiterates his view that "people and their passions are the same everywhere."

Nevertheless, the novel is for the most part a discovery of the new world America, a world with different customs and morals, from the warmth and joviality of the Americans, who to his horror constantly call Maigret by the first name "Julius", to the wealth of the country, the Comfort, the perfection that gets on the French inspector's nerves so much that he keeps looking for a crack in the intact facade. Unlike in France, the misery in America shows no external traces for Maigret, it takes place completely inside and is covered with shame by the Americans. In particular, it is the way people deal with sexuality that distinguishes the old and the new world: because prostitution is illegal, the dead have a quasi-prostitutional relationship with the young soldiers. Anatole Broyard describes their crimes as a "crime of dispassion". Thomas Narcejac speaks of the "drama of boredom". Tilman Spreckelsen sees a “sweaty solidarity between men” that showed cracks in the presence of the girl, but welded the soldiers together again in court.

reception

According to The Publishers' Trade List Annual , Maigret, Arizona , confronts Commissioner Maigret with two riddles: "The murder of a young woman and the American judiciary". For Maurice Dubourg, Simenon failed in an attempt to write a detective novel in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, the plot of which takes place almost entirely in a courtroom. The result is a far cry from court dramas like The Bellamy Trial . Murielle Wenger disagreed, who found the presentation of the legal proceedings extremely successful. She also referred to the unusually high sales that the novel achieved in France. For Oliver Hahn from maigret.de, Maigret in Arizona was "not only written in an exciting way, I consider it one of the best Maigret stories."

The legal journal The Practical Lawyer promised, "This detective novel is great fun with its astute observations of American life in the Southwest." According to British magazine Punch , 30 years after its first publication, the novel did not solve the problem of life on the American-Mexican border has more of the same effect as when it appeared, but "Simenon's description of the protagonists through Maigret's sharp but amazed eye is as vivid as ever." Jill Colvin Jones found an "interesting riddle" in the criminal case, but it lay in Simenon's description of the American West "nothing unfathomable [...] - only men in white shirts who drink Coca-Cola (and far too much alcohol) with the usual everyday human motives."

The New Yorker saw the “main pleasure” in the “dirty little case” in Maigret's observations of the American Southwest: “a haunting refrain of heat, men in white shirt sleeves, Coca-Cola, bourbon whiskey and bromo seltzer.” For Anatole Broyard in the New York Times gave Maigret a "bad observer". He wonders about the harmlessness of the Coroner's questions, drinks and indulges in wild generalizations about Americans. Obviously the commissioner and the author play a role in the novel, which Broyard in turn generalized: “Simenon's commissioner Maigret should never leave France. Like French wine, the French personality does not travel well. A Frenchman needs his ambience: it fades when he strays too far from it. "

The novel was filmed in 1981 as part of the French TV series Les Enquêtes du Commissaire Maigret . The title role played Jean Richard .

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Maigret chez le coroner . Presses de la Cité, Paris 1949 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret in Arizona . Translation: Jean Raimond. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1957.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret in Arizona . Translation: Jean Raimond. Heyne, Munich 1966.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret with the coroner . Translation: Wolfram Schäfer. Diogenes, Zurich 1981, ISBN 3-257-20811-1 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret in Arizona . Translation: Wolfram Schäfer. Diogenes, Zurich 1991, ISBN 3-257-22474-5 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret in Arizona . Complete Maigret novels in 75 volumes, volume 32. Translation: Wolfram Schäfer. Diogenes, Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-257-23832-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographie de Georges Simenon 1946 à 1967 on Toutesimenon.com, the website of Omnibus Verlag.
  2. ↑ Maigret chez le coroner in the Maigret 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 , pp. 52-53.
  4. ↑ Patrick Marnham: The Man Who Wasn't Maigret. The life of Georges Simenon . Knaus, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-8135-2208-3 , pp. 16-17.
  5. ↑ Maigret of the Month: Maigret et la Vieille Dame (Maigret and the Old Lady) on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  6. ^ A b c d e Maigret of the Month: Maigret chez le coroner (Maigret at the Coroner's) on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  7. ↑ "particularly anti-American novel". Quoted from: Jack Edmund Nolan: Simenon on the Screen . In: Films in Review magazine Vol. XVI, No. 7, August / September 1965, pp. 419-437.
  8. ↑ Maigret of the Month: Maigret aux Assises (Maigret in Court) on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  9. ^ Georges Simenon: Intimate Memoirs and the Book of Marie-Jo. Diogenes, Zurich 1982, ISBN 3-257-01629-8 , pp. 349-350.
  10. ↑ a b c Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret Marathon 32: Maigret in Arizona . On FAZ.net from November 21, 2008.
  11. ↑ a b Maigret in Arizona on maigret.de.
  12. ↑ Helmut Heißenbüttel : Rules of the crime novel . In: About literature . Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1995, ISBN 3-608-93372-7 , p. 116.
  13. ^ Georges Simenon: Maigret in Arizona . Diogenes, Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-257-23832-7 , p. 45.
  14. ↑ "crime of dispassion" Quoted from: Anatole Broyard : Books Of The Times . In: The New York Times, December 12, 1980.
  15. ↑ "drama of boredom." Quoted from: Thomas Narcejac : The Art of Simenon . Routledge & Kegan, London 1952, p. 83.
  16. ↑ “Maigret's first case in the United States confronts him with two mysteries: the murder of a young woman and the American judicial system.” Quoted from: The Publishers' Trade List Annual Volume 2, 1986, p. 72.
  17. ^ Maurice Dubourg: Maigret & Co. or The Detectives of the Simenon Agency . In: Ellery Queen Mystère Magazine No. 203, December 1964, pp. 108-118.
  18. ↑ "this mystery is great fun for its keen observation of American life in the Southwest." Quoted from: The Practical Lawyer Volume 27, 1981, p. 77.
  19. ↑ “Simenon's description of the protagonists, through the sharp but puzzled eyes of Maigret […] is as vivid as ever.” Quoted from: Punch Volume 278, 1980, p. 814.
  20. ↑ "while the mistery is an interesting puzzle, there's nothing unfathomable in Simenon's west - just men in white shirts drinking Coca-cola (and way too much alcohol) with the usual humdrum human motives." Quoted from: Jill Colvin Jones: Cowboy Kitsch : Arizona Crime Fiction . In: Steve Glassman, Maurice O'Sullivan (Eds.): Crime Fiction and Film in the Southwest: Bad Boys and Bad Girls in the Badlands . Popular Press, Bowling Green 2001, ISBN 0-87972-846-9 , p. 45.
  21. ↑ "sordid little case. The chief pleasure here, however, is Maigret's observation of America in general and of the Southwest in particular: a haunting refrain of heat, men in white shirtsleeves, Coca- Cola, bourbon whiskey, and Bromo- Seltzer. ”Quoted from: The New Yorker Volume 56, Issues 41-45, 1980, p. 174.
  22. ^ "Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret should never leave France. Like French wines, the French personality does not travel well. A Frenchman needs his ambience: he begins to fade if he gets too far from it. […] Maigret makes a poor bystander […] both the author and his inspector are obviously out of sorts. ”Quoted from: Anatole Broyard: Books Of The Times . In: The New York Times, December 12, 1980.
  23. ↑ Maigret Films & TV on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.