Maigret experiences defeat

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Maigret experiences a defeat (French: Un échec de Maigret ) is a crime novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It is the 49th novel in a series of 75 novels and 28 short stories about the detective Maigret . The novel was written from February 26 to March 4, 1956 in Cannes and was published in September 1956 by the Paris publisher Presses de la Cité . At the same time it was printed in 20 episodes from September 13th to October 5th of that year in the French daily Le Figaro . The first German translation by Isolde Kolbenhoff was published in 1957 by Kiepenheuer & Witsch . In 1978 the Diogenes Verlag published a new translation by Elfriede Riegler in double volume with Maigret hat Angst .

The Minister of the Interior personally supports a visitor to Commissioner Maigrets who feels threatened by anonymous letters and asks for police protection. It is, of all things, an old classmate Maigrets who has built an empire of butchers through ruthless business practices . The butcher is as disagreeable to the Commissioner as it was then. But he suspects that his visitor will cause him some trouble.

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House on the Boulevard de Courcelles in Paris

It's a cold, wet March in Paris . The criminal police have been searching for days without a result for an English package tourist named Muriel Britt, who has disappeared from her travel group without a trace. When the chief of the criminal police announces a visitor who is personally sponsored by the interior minister, this is not done to cheer up Commissioner Maigret's gloomy mood.

The visitor turns out to be Ferdinand Fumal, a former classmate from Maigret's birthplace Saint-Fiacre. Even the young Jules couldn't stand the fat Ferdinand, known as Bum-Bum, and the fathers, after an attempt to bribe the butcher Fumal at the castle manager Évariste Maigret, also harbored a deep dislike for one another. Now the former classmate has grown rich, runs several chains of butcher shops all over France and has influence in the highest social circles. The reason why he turns to his old classmate Maigret is because of anonymous threatening letters for which he demands police protection. But his secretary Louise Bourges, who appears shortly after her boss on the Quai des Orfèvres , claims that Fumal wrote the threatening letters himself.

Maigret dutifully posts an inspector in front of Fumal's house on Boulevard de Courcelles, but when the butcher is found shot the next day, the inspector has a pangs of conscience as to whether his reluctance to investigate has not been guided by his dislike of his classmate. Maigret is not alone in his feelings towards the dead. Almost every respondent from Fumal's environment is relieved by the demise of the vicious and ruthless “king of butchers”, as the press dubbed him. The first suspicion is directed against Roger Gaillardin, one of Fumal's numerous competitors, whom he drove to bankruptcy. But when Gaillardin is found, the desperate man has committed suicide, and his pistol is not the caliber of the murder weapon, a Luger .

Maigret focuses his investigation on the residents of the house on Boulevard de Courcelles, each of whom appears to have a motive for murder. Jeanne Fumal, the dead man's wife, is an alcoholic humiliated by her husband for life, her brother Émile Lentin, who was also ruined by Fumal, secretly stole money from the postage for his addiction. The managing director Joseph Goldman was responsible for the cunning and unscrupulous financial transactions of the group and managed it in his own pocket. The secretary Louise Bourges disclosed company secrets in order to use bribes to lay the financial foundation for a life together with the chauffeur Félix. The house servant Victor Ricou, a former poacher from Saint-Fiacre, found himself in the hands of Fumal after his murder of a game warden, who had ensured that the murder charges were put down. Only Fumal's lover, Martine Gilloux, knows the weaknesses of the lonely and suspicious butcher, but her main concern is her future livelihood.

It takes Maigret a long time to identify the suspect who hated Fumal the most. It was the poacher Victor, who felt locked up and longed for a life in the woods. His need for material security led him to combine the murder of his boss with the robbery of 15 million from his safe. When Maigret wanted to arrest the perpetrator, the secretary gave him a tip and he had already gone into hiding. Thereupon the Paris press announced a double defeat of the criminal police, which could neither track down the missing Englishwoman, nor was able to arrest the murderer in the monitored house. The self-dissatisfied commissioner Maigret takes the defeat personally. Only after years are the two missing people tracked down: The Englishwoman, who found the love of her life in Paris, now lives married in Australia . The poacher Victor got his prey through in a very short time and is returning from Panama seriously ill with tropical conditions . Before he can be tried, he dies. Commissioner Maigret was the only person who had previously visited him in the hospital.

interpretation

According to Stanley G. Eskin, Simenon in Maigret experiences a defeat the "question of the baseless evil". Josef Quack is reminded of a novel noir , the focus of which is the son of a butcher from the provinces, who rose to become a powerful meat wholesaler and whose protection extends to the French government. Fumal aims to humiliate and ruin all people around him and to attract their hatred. Maigret, whose image of man knows no pure badness, is disturbed by the malice that flashes behind all the actions of the "king of butchers". This seems to be "fundamentally bad," for the sheer joy of harming others. It is true that Maigret learns from the dead man's lover about Fumal's human weaknesses, about his experiences of loneliness and rejection as well as the overwhelming urge for self-affirmation. But unlike in other novels in the series, this does not make the image of the murder victim appear in a friendlier light. In any case, Maigret cannot remember any case in which he “had less desire to find a murderer.” In the end, the victim remains responsible for his own murder. Among the multitude of possible perpetrators, it is the freedom-loving poacher Victor who takes revenge on the fact that Fumal suppressed him and robbed him of his freedom for his entire life.

For Murielle Wenger, Maigret experienced a defeat marked by a disillusionment with Maigret's childhood memories. In Maigret and the Saint-Fiacre affair , a novel from the early days of the series, the commissioner returns to his place of birth and experiences the contrast between the glorified past and the current decline of the place, which is symbolized above all by the dilapidated Count's castle. In Maigret's memoirs , the inspector's biography is elaborated, and from this point on, the later novels in the series repeatedly fall back on set pieces from Maigret's youth. In Maigret, the castle, which was once managed by Maigret's father, finally passes into the possession of the upstart Fumal, with which Maigret's childhood dreams are devalued in one fell swoop. His idealistic desire to intervene in the world as a “cobbler of fates” and to transfer people to their respective places is ironically compared in the novel with naive painting , the picture sheets by Épinal . While Maigret's interventions in destinies are usually benevolent, he makes it clear to Fumal that he has no right to the life he leads. When the butcher actually loses his life, the inspector does everything in his power to scratch the hole. Other childhood friends of Maigret also trigger extremely negative feelings when they meet the inspector again, such as Ernest Malik in Maigret gets upset or Léon Florentin in Maigret's childhood friend . Throughout the series Maigret has only one person whom he really sees as a friend: the doctor Dr. Pardon.

background

Ten years after Simenon left France for America at the end of World War II , he returned to Europe in the spring of 1955. The departure was hasty without Simenon having any firm plans for permanent residence. He toured all of France, stayed for longer periods in Mougins , where he wrote a trap for Maigret , and Cannes , where in the Villa Golden Gate on Avenue de la Reine Elisabeth, Maigret also experienced a defeat , Maigret was amused and five Non-Maigret -Novels emerged, including Le nègre . Although Cannes is the setting for eight works by Simenon, the busy life on the Côte d'Azur was not to the author's taste in the long run, and he retired to Switzerland in 1957. There he wrote the remaining 25 novels of the Maigret series until 1972 in the small villages of Echandens and Epalinges .

reception

Publishers Weekly called the American anthology A Maigret Trio , which, in addition to Maigret Experienced a Defeat, also contained Maigret and the old people and Maigret and the lazy thief , as "three superb detective novels". Newgate Callendar emphasized in the New York Times the "sharp, economical, realistic" spelling that is as typical of Simenon as his "ability to capture the reader and keep his interest awake". The Pittsburgh Press placed the novel slightly below Simenon's standard. For Josef Quack, Maigret experienced a defeat "of all the dark Maigrets that Simenon has written - and he has described an impressive series of oppressive and depressing episodes - the blackest and most desolate."

The novel was filmed a total of three times as part of television series about Commissioner Maigret. The title role was played by Rupert Davies (Great Britain, 1961), Jean Richard (France, 1987) and Bruno Cremer (France, 2003).

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Un échec de Maigret . Presses de la Cité, Paris 1956 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret experiences defeat . Translation: Isolde Kolbenhoff. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1957.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret experiences defeat . Translation: Isolde Kolbenhoff. Heyne, Munich 1967.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret is afraid . Maigret experiences defeat . Translation: Elfriede Riegler. Diogenes, Zurich 1978, ISBN 3-257-00971-2 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret experiences defeat . Complete Maigret novels in 75 volumes, volume 49. Translation: Elfriede Riegler. Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23849-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographie de Georges Simenon 1946 à 1967 on Toutesimenon.com, the website of Omnibus Verlag.
  2. ↑ Un échec de Maigret 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. 55.
  4. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , p. 395.
  5. ↑ Georges Simenon: Maigret experiences a defeat . Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23849-5 , p. 36.
  6. ↑ Georges Simenon: Maigret experiences a defeat . Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23849-5 , p. 81.
  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. 62.
  8. ↑ Ira Tschimmel: Detective novel and representation of society. A comparative study of the works of Christie, Simenon, Dürrenmatt and Capote . Bouvier, Bonn 1979, ISBN 3-416-01395-6 , p. 60.
  9. ↑ Maigret of the Month: Un échec de Maigret (Maigret's Failure) on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  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 , p. 57.
  11. ^ Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret-Marathon 49: Maigret experiences a defeat . On FAZ.net from April 7, 2009.
  12. ↑ Dominique Meyer-Bolzinger: Une méthode clinique dans l'enquête policière: Holmes, Poirot, Maigret . Éditions du Céfal, Brussels 2003, ISBN 2-87130-131-X , p. 118.
  13. ^ Pierre Assouline : Simenon. A biography . Chatto & Windus, London 1997, ISBN 0-7011-3727-4 , pp. 301-302.
  14. ↑ "Three superb detective novels". Quoted from: Publishers Weekly Volume 203, 1973, p. 149.
  15. ↑ "the writing here is sharp, economical, realistic [...] his ability to involve the reader and continue to keep him interested". Quoted from: Newgate Callendar: Criminals At Large . In: The New York Times, March 4, 1970.
  16. ↑ "slightly substandard Simenon". Quoted from: Press Book Shelf . In: The Pittsburgh Press, April 7, 1973.
  17. ↑ Maigret Films & TV on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.