Maigret in artistic circles

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Maigret in artists' circles (French: Le voleur de Maigret ) is a crime novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It is the 66th novel in a series of 75 novels and 28 short stories about the detective Maigret . The novel was written in Epalinges from November 5 to 11, 1966 and was preprinted in 15 episodes from January 28 to May 6, 1967 in the French weekly Télé 7 Jours . The book was published in April 1967 by the Paris publisher Presses de la Cité . The first German translation Maigret und der Dieb by Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau appeared in 1969 in the anthology with Maigret and the Nahour case and Maigret in Kur at Kiepenheuer & Witsch . In 1990 the Diogenes Verlag published a new translation by Ursula Vogel under the title Maigret in Künstlerkreis .

Inspector Maigret's wallet is stolen while driving a Parisian bus . But the very next day he received it safely back, while the thief called to make a completely different confession: his wife was murdered in his apartment with his own pistol. The man is a young filmmaker, and the search for the murderer leads the inspector into artistic circles.

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Old RATP bus with a characteristic platform at the rear
Rue Saint-Charles in the 15th arrondissement

It is March 15th and spring has already broken out in Paris. Inspector Maigret enjoys the ride on the open platform of the bus, where he can smoke a pipe. But in the crowd of passengers, a young man steals his wallet, jumps off the bus and escapes in Parisian traffic. It is not one of the pickpockets Maigret knew personally. In fact, the Post delivers his wallet to the Quai des Orfèvres the next day without anything being stolen. When the thief answers by phone, he tells the inspector about a completely different crime.

François “Francis” Ricain, in his mid-twenties, is a hopeful talent in the film business who is waiting for his breakthrough as a screenwriter . Until then, he has to live a meager existence as a freelance film critic and lives more badly than right on borrowed money and small donations from his friends, an artist clique around the film producer Walter Carus. Two days ago he left his apartment on Rue Saint-Charles to collect the outstanding rent. When he returned unsuccessfully that night, his wife Sophie, a budding actress , was lying on the ground, shot with his own pistol. In a panic, Ricain fled the apartment, threw the gun from the Pont de Bir-Hakeim into the Seine and tried to steal money to get out of Paris. When he got hold of Maigret's wallet, of all things, he gained confidence in the famous inspector with his proverbial limitless understanding. Now he hopes that Maigret will help him and solve the murder.

Maigret takes a close look at the artist clique who meet every evening in the Vieux-Pressoir , run by former stuntman Bob Mandille. The undisputed ruler of the group is the jovial producer Carus, who had a relationship with the murder victim but was out of the country on the evening of the crime. His muse , Nora, who is as mysterious as she is calculating, is bad at both her rival Sophie and her husband and gives a verifiably false alibi. A number of unknown artists gather around the two of them, who live on the grace of the film producer and his occasional assignments. The assistant director Gérard Dramin lacks Ricain's ingenuity, although his reliability is ahead of the erratic competitor. Sophie was the model for the taciturn sculptor Maki and slept with him as allegedly with every other male member of the group. The photographer Jacques Hugue, who is third married, impregnates every woman he gets involved with, which could be accompanied by an unprofessional abortion of the dead.

After all, it is the statement made by the photographer, who lives in the same block of flats as Ricain, that sheds light on the night of the murder. He too had a relationship with Sophie, and when he saw her husband leave the apartment that evening, he wanted to visit his lover, who, however, could not open because she was already dead by then. François Ricain had killed his wife after an argument that had shown him the gaping gap between his lofty claims and the miserable reality of his life as a bailiff for the producer Carus. In order to free himself from suspicion, his extraordinary intelligence led him to develop a complicated plan. The theft of Maigret's wallet was supposed to drag the inspector into the case so that the widower could play his desperate innocence on him. With Maigret, however, he ran into the wrong person who saw through Ricain's game, just as he suspects that the cornered artist will stage a suicide that he can thwart at the last minute. The film talent, who always considered himself extraordinary, has to play his last hero role in court.

interpretation

In Maigret in artistic circles , according to Stanley G. Eskin, Georges Simenon proved his cynical view of the film industry. Very fond of the medium of film from his youth, Simenon had bad experiences in 1932 and 1933 with the film adaptations of Maigret's Night at the Crossroads , Maigret and the Yellow Dog, and Maigret fighting for a man's head , after which he spent several years writing his novels locked against any film implementation. Although he already resigned from this during the Second World War, he only considered the numerous later big screen successes of his books from a purely business perspective. The author's disillusionment with the once beloved medium of film is also reflected in his work. Although Inspector Maigret repeatedly shows himself to be a friend of the cinema, the film producers in Maigret and his dead or Die Zeit with Anaïs are extremely dodgy characters.

For Tilman Spreckelsen , Simenon paints a disillusioning picture of the gladly transfigured bohemian , in which little of the “life of air and love”, of romance and solidarity among the dispossessed can be felt. On the contrary, there is envy and jealousy among the members of the artist clique, and anyone who exposes himself is attacked by the others. Although they believe that they have overcome bourgeois morality, for the young artists everything revolves around money and recognition, for which they are willing to supply their wives to the producer themselves. Even the murderer, who would like to be special, ultimately commits his deed out of very simple hurt vanity. According to Detlef Richter, the “dazzling and pretending in the artistic circles” runs through the entire novel, the turns of which remain surprising not only for Maigret, but also for the reader.

From the beginning, there is a mixture of the scent of spring and mild sunshine in the air. The positive mood carries over to Commissioner Maigret, who indulges in culinary specialties such as an eel soup from La Rochelle . The detective even takes the loss of his wallet calmly, which only changes when the theft becomes a murder case. For the subsequent investigation of Maigret, Simenon finds a fitting picture: “During the first phase, in which he suddenly found himself placed in a completely strange milieu, had to face completely unknown people, he absorbed all of the life in the new environment until he was there was soaked like a sponge. ”Although he is only“ a cog in the complicated machine of justice ”, Maigret proves his special sense of responsibility towards the characters involved when he ponders:“ It was as if the fate of a person depended solely on him from". It is precisely this special sympathy of the inspector, his understanding for victims and perpetrators alike, that the murderer tries to use for his own benefit, but is entangled in contradictions. For Murielle Wenger, in the end, Rincain remains just a perpetrator who “believed he was intelligent”.

reception

The New York Times Book Review described Maigret in artistic circles as a "good, quietly entertaining Simenon". After the commissioner had to accept the humiliation that his wallet was stolen by an amateur, he sauntered amidst the parties like a gracious but purposeful agent of retaliation, asking endless and seemingly unimportant questions in order to peer behind the impenetrable facades. “Maigret is part of contemporary Paris like Sherlock Holmes is part of gas lamp London”. The Kirkus Service judged: "After champagne ,Maigret isstill the best French export." The commissioner was downright hypnotized by the amoral members of a colony of so-called filmmakers. "But none of the clever people is an equal opponent for Maigret." The New Yorker saw the famous commissioner "almost outwitted by a new generation". There'sjust too much talk in the novelfor the Saturday Review .

The novel was filmed three times as part of television series about Commissioner Maigret. The title roles were played by Gino Cervi (Italy, 1972), Kinya Aikawa (Japan, 1978) and Jean Richard (France, 1982).

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Le voleur de Maigret . Presses de la Cité, Paris 1967 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the thief. Maigret and the Nahour case . Maigret in cure . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1969.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the thief . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Heyne, Munich 1970.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret in artistic circles . Translation: Ursula Vogel. Diogenes, Zurich 1990, ISBN 3-257-21871-0 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret in artistic circles . All Maigret novels in 75 volumes, volume 66. Translation: Ursula Vogel. Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23866-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographie de Georges Simenon 1946 à 1967 ( Memento of the original from October 30, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on Toutsimenon.com, the website of Omnibus Verlag. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / toutsimenon.placedesediteurs.com
  2. ↑ Le voleur 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. 61.
  4. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , p. 175.
  5. ↑ a b Maigret of the Month: Le voleur de Maigret (Maigret's Pickpocket) on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  6. ^ Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret-Marathon 66: In artist circles . On FAZ.net from July 14, 2009.
  7. ↑ a b Maigret in artist circles (Georges Simenon); Volume 66 on leser-welt.de.
  8. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , p. 389.
  9. ↑ Saturday Review . Volume 51, 1968, p. 116.
  10. ^ Georges Simenon: Maigret in artist circles . Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23866-2 , p. 123.
  11. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , p. 408.
  12. ^ Georges Simenon: Maigret in artist circles . Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23866-2 , pp. 165-166.
  13. ↑ 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. 54.
  14. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , p. 399.
  15. ^ "Chief Inspector Maigret belongs to the Paris of today as surely as Holmes did to gaslit London. […] It's good, quietly entertaining Simenon. "Quoted from: The New York Times Book Review Volume 2, 1968, p. 49.
  16. ^ "Maigret is, after champagne, still the best French export. […] But none of the clever people are a match for Maigret. "Quoted from: The Kirkus Service , Volume 36, Issues 1-12 1968, p. 665.
  17. ^ "The famous Inspector is almost outsmarted by the New Generation" In: The New Yorker , Volume 44, Part 3 1968, p. 96.
  18. ↑ “A bit overdialogued.” Quoted from: Saturday Review . Volume 51, 1968, p. 116.
  19. ^ Films & TV on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.