Maigret is afraid

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Maigret hats fear ( French Maigret a peur ) is a crime novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It is the 42nd novel in a series of 75 novels and 28 short stories about the detective Maigret . Written from March 20 to 27, 1953 in Lakeville , Connecticut , the novel was pre-published in 33 episodes from May 19 to June 6, 1953 in the daily Le Figaro , the book edition was published in July of that year by Presses de la Cité . The first German translation by Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau was published in 1957 by Kiepenheuer & Witsch . In 1978 the Diogenes Verlag published a new translation by Elfriede Riegler in double volume with Maigret Experiencing a Defeat .

Maigret actually only wants to visit a college friend, the examining magistrate from Fontenay-le-Comte , but he is drawn into the investigation of a series of murders against his will that has resulted in the third victim within a week. In the village hostilities break out between the common people and the wealthy landed gentry. There is a climate of suspicion, denunciation and a willingness to use violence that scares even the commissioner.

content

Street in Fontenay-le-Comte

Three years before his retirement, Maigret becomes aware of his age at an International Police Congress in Bourdeaux . He has no access to the young colleagues who consider him old-fashioned. On the way home, he stopped in Fontenay-le-Comte in the Vendée department to visit his old student friend Julien Chabot, the examining magistrate there. Only in the small town does the inspector learn of a series of murders that have claimed three victims within a week: the impoverished aristocrat Robert de Courçon, the lonely widow Gibon and the drunken rabbit fur dealer Gobillard. All were attacked head-on in the same way and killed with a heavy object. The missing link between the victims makes the murders seem like arbitrary acts of a mentally ill person.

The inhabitants of the place are divided into two camps: On the one hand there are the by-related clans of the Courçons and Vernoux, headed by Hubert Vernoux de Courçon, who can withstand the rest of the clan with his fortune, his wife's impoverished noble family Courçon as well as the Family of his impulsive son Alain, who finds no real task in life and tries his hand at being a lay psychiatrist. On the other hand are the small citizens with their deep-seated suspicion and hostility towards the "rich". Their prejudice that the perpetrator must come from the Vernoux-Courçon clan is reinforced by the testimony of the politically active teacher Émile Chalus, who incriminated Alain on one of his nightly forays through the city. In a climate of fear and anger, the residents set up a vigilante group that patrols the streets and gathers threateningly in front of the Villa Vernoux.

While the mistrust of the common people also includes examining magistrate Chabot, who is on friendly terms with the Vernoux ', their hopes are on the famous visitor from Paris, who precedes the reputation of a friend of the common people, and against his will Maigret becomes part of the investigation drawn in. The commissioner learns of Alain's affair with the Italian-born waitress Louise Sabati through anonymous letters. While Maigret wants to be discreet about the love affair, the local inspector Féron pulls it into the light of day with his rough approach to Louise. In desperation, the lovers attempt a joint suicide attempt, which Alain does not survive. A box full of affectionate love letters found under Louise's bed paints a very different picture of the eccentric young man than the citizens of the city have made.

Nevertheless, an ideal perpetrator seems to have been found in the dead eccentric Alain, and Chabot would like to close the case. However, Maigret has now realized that the series of murders was merely fake: the identical sequence of the two later murders of chance victims was only intended to conceal the fact that the first murder was not a coincidence, but the result of a personal argument among relatives. The only possible perpetrator is Hubert Vernoux: A bridge game tells the inspector that old Vernoux is a bad loser. Years ago he lost all of his fortune and with it the respect and esteem of his family. Only to the outside world did the clan maintain the facade of wealth; in fact, there were always arguments between Vernoux and the family members who were financially dependent on him. Maigret no longer learns which specific incident it was that drove Hubert Vernoux to the murder of his brother-in-law Robert. He had already left for Paris when Chabot wrote to him about the arrest of old Vernoux, which had been accompanied by a fit of rage.

background

Château de Terre-Neuve in Fontenay-le-Comte

For Simenon, who moved to America in 1945, Maigret hat fear meant a kind of return to Fontenay-le-Comte . During the occupation of France in World War II , Simenon lived between 1940 and 1942 in the village in western France, where he rented a wing of the Château de Terre-Neuve . Numerous other novels by Simenon are set in the Vendée department , such as Maigret and his rival or Maigret in the judge's house , where the commissioner is transferred to the department for a year . They often paint an unfavorable picture of the region and its inhabitants, which Murielle Wenger attributed to Simenon's own depressing life situation during the war years, not least due to the misdiagnosis of a doctor from the area who predicted an imminent death. Simenon's biographer Fenton Bresler pointed out, however, that the description of Fontenay as an "unsympathetic, narrow-minded place" with "fermenting personal, social and political hatreds under the surface" did nothing to change the author's popularity in the area and the citizen's mention of places or would have understood family names as a gain in popularity.

interpretation

For Gavin Lambert , the late Maigret novels often repeat themes from the early books, albeit in a grimmer tone. In this sense, remember Maigret is afraid of Maigret's basic situation and the Saint-Fiacre affair . However, the landed gentry is now just a waning relic, to which the village population is just as hostile as their own servants. In Maigret's social tensions , fear no longer leaves room for the nostalgia for the fading glory of the nobility that had determined the early novel . Another theme of the late novels is the commissioner's confrontation with modern criminal methods, to which he no longer wants to get used. According to Jean Fabre, this unease about the changed police work can already be heard in many titles: Here Maigret is wrong , Maigret experiences a defeat , Maigret defends himself , Maigret hesitates or Maigret is afraid , where the inspector at the police congress has the feeling that he has long been "yesterday " to be.

Murielle Wenger sees the novel as determined by two major themes: age and friendship . The question of age is introduced at the beginning with Maigret's displeasure at the congress, when the commissioner suddenly realizes: “Perhaps he suddenly felt old?” The topic runs through the considerations of advanced age Hubert Vernoux de Courçon, Maigret in got to know the train until the end when Maigret, who had returned home, describes his friend Chabot to his wife: “I thought he was getting old.” The friendship between the two men suffered during the visit. Maigret's earlier jealousy of the orderly circumstances from which Chabot came has vanished, and the inspector states: “He [Chabot] must have always been like that. It was Maigret who was wrong, back when they were both students, and he envied his friend. ”Chabot is one of a number of Maigret's childhood friends, whose meeting will be an unpleasant event for the inspector, be it Malik in Maigret up , Fumal in Maigret experiences a defeat or Florentin in Maigret's childhood friend . Even the return to the place of his childhood in Maigret and the Saint-Fiacre affair are depressing and depressing for the inspector.

Tilman Spreckelsen finally led Maigret to speculate about Simenon's attitude to marriage , of which the novel paints a gloomy picture: Hubert Vernoux de Courçon is only respected by his wife and relatives by marriage as long as he can provide them financially. His son Alain escapes his bleak marriage to the first waitress he comes across and compensates for his sadness in romantic letters. But the friend Chabot, who did not get married, also lives a dreary life in his hometown, so that Madame Maigret says in the last sentence of the novel: "He should have married". However, her husband does not comment.

reception

The New Yorker listed Maigret is afraid "like all of Simenon's works of this period among the most mature and subtle novels with a hidden wealth." John Clarke in the Evening Standard wanted "Simenon to have a magnum bottle in this form." For Maurice Richardson in the Observer, however , the novel was “far from superlatives”. He was "almost too close to the pattern of a spiced up Whodunnit to be the purest Simenon".

Kirkus Reviews described the plot as a "bad tempered version" of Agatha Christie's The Murders of Lord ABC . The commissioner was "this time even darker than usual". the novel as a whole a “Maigret from the second guard with less captivating figures among the suspects than usual.” According to Art Bourgeau, on the other hand, typical of Simenon is the end of the novel, which presents the resolution of the case “almost as a gleaning”. The book is "one of the rare encounters Maigret with true madness".

The novel was filmed a total of three times: as part of the television series with Rupert Davies (1963), Jean Richard (1976) and Bruno Cremer (1995).

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Maigret a peur . Presses de la Cité, Paris 1953 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret is afraid . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1957.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret is afraid . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Heyne, Munich 1971.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret is afraid. Maigret experiences defeat . Translation: Elfriede Riegler. Diogenes, Zurich 1978, ISBN 3-257-00971-2 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret is afraid . All Maigret novels in 75 volumes, volume 42. Translation: Elfriede Riegler. Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23842-6 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographie de Georges Simenon 1946 à 1967 on Toutesimenon.com, the website of Omnibus Verlag.
  2. ↑ Maigret a peur on the page of 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. 59.
  4. ↑ a b Maigret of the Month: Maigret a peur (Maigret Afraid) on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  5. ^ Fenton Bresler: Georges Simenon. In search of the "naked" person . Ernst Kabel, Hamburg 1985, ISBN 3-921909-93-7 , p. 212.
  6. ^ Gavin Lambert: The Dangerous Edge . Grossmann, New York 1976, ISBN 0-670-25581-5 , p. 183. (also online )
  7. ^ Fenton Bresler: Georges Simenon. In search of the "naked" person. Ernst Kabel, Hamburg 1985, ISBN 3-921909-93-7 , p. 345.
  8. ↑ Georges Simenon: Maigret is afraid . Diogenes, Zurich 2009, p. 10.
  9. ↑ a b Georges Simenon: Maigret is afraid . Diogenes, Zurich 2009, p. 197.
  10. ↑ Georges Simenon: Maigret is afraid . Diogenes, Zurich 2009, p. 147.
  11. ^ Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret-Marathon 42: Maigret is afraid . On FAZ.net from February 4, 2009.
  12. ^ "Like all the work that Simenon did in that period, it ranks with his most mature and most obliquely rich and subtle novels." In: The New Yorker, September 5, 1983.
  13. ↑ “Of Maigret in this form, make mine a magnum”, “far from superlative”, “rather too near the pattern of a pepped-up whodunnit to be purest Simenon”. All quoted from: The Bookseller , editions 2906–2922. J. Whitaker, London 1978, p. 2006.
  14. ↑ "The somber Inspector - even more somber than usual this time [...] the solution is a moody variation of Christie's ABC Murders idea. Second-string Maigret, with fewer engaging characters than usual among the suspects. "In: Kirkus Reviews of April 1, 1983. ( online )
  15. ^ "As often in Simenon's books, the resolution of the case comes almost as an afterthought. This book is one of Maigret's few encounters with true insanity. ”In: Art Bourgeau: The mystery lover's companion . Crown, New York 1986, ISBN 0-517-55602-2 , p. 302.
  16. ↑ Maigret is afraid on maigret.de.