Maigret in distress

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Maigret in Nöten (French: L'Écluse N ° 1 ) is a crime novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It is the 18th novel in a series of 75 novels and 28 short stories about the detective Maigret . The novel was written in Marsilly in April 1933 and was published by Fayard in June of the same year. It had previously been pre-published in 25 episodes from May 23 to June 16, 1933 in the daily Paris-Soir . The first German translation by Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau was published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in 1960 . In 1987 the Diogenes Verlag published a new translation by Markus Jakob.

It is Maigret's last case on duty: the commissioner is a few days before his early retirement when he is supposed to investigate an attack on a shipowner. He was injured by a knife and thrown into the canal, but saved in time. Now he offers a reward for the capture of the perpetrator and makes the commissioner an offer to come into his service. Even Maigret is impressed by the strong personality of the shipowner, but with his rough manner he not only makes friends. Soon a dead person is found, and Maigret investigates in the milieu of the inland boatmen around “lock no. 1”.

content

Pier on the Marne in Charenton-le-Pont on a postcard from 1906

An April evening in Charenton-le-Pont at lock no. 1: On his way home, the drunken skipper Gassin falls on his barge, the Péniche La Toison d'Or , into the canal. When he is pulled ashore, a second man is discovered who is floating motionless in the water, but can still be found alive. It is the shipowner Émile Ducrau, who controls the lock and most of the inland shipping to Belgium and for whom most of the people in the area work. Ducrau was thrown into the water after a knife stab in the back. Now he offers a reward of 20,000 francs for the capture of the perpetrator.

Maigret, although still well before the age limit, recently submitted an application for retirement and is only in office for a few days as a detective inspector. While his wife is already preparing the move to Meung-sur-Loire , the Commissioner is pleased to see that Ducrau is a person worth looking into. The shipowner is a broad, strong man from a simple background who, despite his career advancement, has still kept his uncouth manner. Compared to his dominant nature, his employees and family members - the careworn wife Jeanne, the feeble son Jean, the greedy daughter Berthe and her husband, the stuffy officer Decharme - all look like idiots, and Ducrau is not afraid to call them that in public . In the house, one floor above the family's apartment, lives his lover Rose, a former animation girl. And Maigret recognizes at first glance that Ducrau is also sleeping with his maid Mathilde. Maigret is the only one who resists the influence of the charismatic shipowner, and refuses when he wants to take him into his service after retirement.

While Ducrau is running his business again with the usual vigor days after the attack, the skipper Gassin does not get back on his feet so easily. He moves from one bar to another and is so under the influence of alcohol that there is no need for the inspector to question him. Maigret Gassin's retarded daughter Aline, a young woman who has remained at the developmental stage of a twelve-year-old, although she is the mother of the child of an unknown father. The shy girl is particularly afraid of the rough Ducrau, who seems to be chasing after her like any other woman. Two more deaths occur in quick succession: Jean Ducrau hangs himself and accuses himself of attacking his father in his farewell letter, whereupon the auxiliary lock keeper Bébert is also found untied. Gassin is also noticed when he gets a revolver and writes a farewell letter to his sister.

Gassin follows Ducrau to his country house in Samois-sur-Seine , where the shipowner's family gathers for dinner while the skipper hugs the garden. At the last minute, Maigret thwarted Gassin's planned attack with a dynamite cartridge. When Ducrau finally lifts the veil over the events, he does it not in the form of a repentant confession, but in an effort to snub those present as much as possible with his revelations. Ducrau and Gassin were once old friends, without this preventing Ducrau from sleeping with Gassin's wife. Aline is really the daughter of the shipowner and from a distance he took an active part in her development. When he caught the auxiliary lock keeper Bébert on Gassin's boat one evening spying on the undressed Aline, he turned him over. A scuffle broke out in which Bébert Ducrau attacked with a knife and then threw it into the canal. His son Jean, who had a platonic friendship with Aline since his youth, assumed that the girl had tried to defend herself against his father's stalking by the act. Tired of his life in the shadow of his dominant father anyway, he killed himself and took the attack on himself to protect Aline. Thereupon Ducrau called the actual perpetrator Bébert to account and killed him. The following night there is another death when Gassin, who cannot get over his wife's affair, hangs himself in his former friend's country house. In the morning Maigret leads Ducrau to the Palace of Justice, where a murder charge awaits him. While the barges sail on the Seine as always , they no longer do so under Ducrau's command.

interpretation

The Quai des Carrières in Charenton-le-Pont on a postcard from 1908

The novel Maigret in Need is set near Paris, but the lock and its surroundings form a world of their own: “Cars, trucks, trams drove by, but Maigret had now understood that none of this meant anything here. [...] Paris drove past here in the direction of the Marne-Ufer, but that was nothing but a boom, because what really counted here, that was the lock, [...] that was the ships and barges, the two ship's barges and above all the high one House of the Ducraus. The river Seine, on which all important events take place, becomes a constant in the novel. The events are reflected in the houses on the river, for example when Maigret derives the meaning of Ducrau for the first time from the numerous barges on the river that carry the shipowner's blue pennant. According to Bernard Alavoine, the descriptions of the Ducraus company facilities are in a style that is rare for Simenon, reminiscent of Zola or Balzac .

Stanley G. Eskin described that Maigret had to deal in the novel with an opponent who resembled the commissioner as well as his author Simenon. He is an “attractive, 'strong' figure”, matter-of-fact, powerful and open, who stands out from their surroundings. The harmony between Maigret and Ducraus is evident right at the beginning, when they can't help but laugh at each other broadly: “His eyes laughed, and without meaning to, he made a funny face; between the two men, it seemed, the truth was admitted from the outset. ”As is often the case in the Maigret series, Maigret's intelligent opponent speaks out some of the fundamentals of Simenon's concept of man. Here it is the shipowner's existentialist weariness: “I wandered around until I dreaded myself. You never have that disgust for yourself? ”At the end of the novel, the commissioner and the criminal are not opposed to each other, but almost as partners. So Ducrau is happy and relieved after his confession when the inspector accompanies him to the police headquarters. Almost exuberantly, he grabs the inspector by the arm like a good friend.

background

Simenon's contract with the Paris publisher Fayard for the Maigret series comprised a total of eighteen novels. So Simenon planned L'Écluse N ° 1 as the last Maigret novel in which he consequently sent his commissioner into retirement. Simenon, who always referred to the Maigret series as "semi-literary novels", wanted to develop literarily and write psychological novels. His publisher Arthème Fayard, however, was not very enthusiastic about Simenon's intention to phase out the successful series. In the end, the compromise was that Simenon had a nineteenth novel with his famous detective inspector follow, which should finally round off the series. In June 1933 the novel Maigret (German: Maigret and his nephew ) was written, which was published the following year, and in which the retired detective intervenes again in the investigation. Only four years later did new Maigret stories appear in magazines, and readers had to wait until 1942 for the next Maigret novel.

Simenon is known for locating his novels in places that were familiar to him from his own experience. The young Simenon also got to know the setting of the novel Maigret in Nöten , the town of Charenton and the lock no. 1, in the first months of 1923 after he had moved to Paris while hiking through the French metropolis. In contrast, there are inaccuracies in Maigret's place of residence, which in the first edition of L'Écluse N ° 1 is located at the well-known address on Boulevard Richard-Lenoir and sometimes on Boulevard Edgar-Quinet . Such a mix-up of dates is not unusual for Simenon's hasty and subsequently hardly revised writing process and is found again and again within the series. In later editions, the differing information was wrongly standardized for Boulevard Edgar-Quinet . It was not until the edition of Tout Simenon from 1988 to 1993 by the Presses de la Cité publishing house that the inspector moved back to the familiar Richard-Lenoir boulevard .

reception

The New York Times Book Review described the English title of the anthology Maigret Sits It Out in 1942, which in addition to Maigret in Nöten also contained the following novel Maigret and his nephew , as unusually apt. It is “amazing how much information Maigret is able to absorb just by sitting, looking and listening.” In the end, Maigret “solves the case to the satisfaction of all involved, including the murderer.”Maigret investigatesfor Tilman Spreckelsen by explaining “the whims that Outbursts of anger and insolence of the rich are studied with interest, without taking their eyes off the eternally drunk poor. Nobody gets off scot-free. Except Maigret. "

Brian Jones was so captivated by the first lines of the novel that he couldn't put it down until he had finished reading it. According to his statement, L'Écluse N ° 1 was the novel that made Ernest Hemingway a Simenon fan. In his memoirs Paris - A Festival of Life , Hemingway wasn't sure if this or La Maison du Canal was his first Simenon novel, but he assumed that Gertrude Stein might have liked them.

The novel was filmed four times within the Maigret TV series. In 1961 Rupert Davies played the commissioner, in 1968 Gino Cervi , in 1970 Jean Richard and in 1994 Bruno Cremer .

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: L'Écluse N ° 1 . Fayard, Paris 1933 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret in distress . Translation by Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1960.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret in distress . Translation by Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Heyne, Munich 1966.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret in distress. Translation Markus Jakob. Diogenes, Zurich 1987, ISBN 3-257-21522-3 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret in distress. (= All Maigret novels in 75 volumes. Volume 18). Translation Markus Jakob. Diogenes, Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-257-23818-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ L'écluse n ° 1 in the Bibliography of Yves Martina.
  2. ↑ Oliver Hahn: Bibliography of German-language editions . Georges-Simenon-Gesellschaft (Ed.): Simenon-Jahrbuch 2003 . Wehrhahn, Laatzen 2004, ISBN 3-86525-101-3 , pp. 61-62.
  3. ^ Georges Simenon: Maigret in distress . Diogenes, Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-257-23818-1 , pp. 41–42.
  4. ^ Hendrik Veldman: La tentation de l'inaccessible. Structures narratives chez Simenon . Rodopi, Amsterdam 1981, ISBN 90-6203-833-6 , pp. 64, 86.
  5. ^ Bernard Alavoine: La Banlieue de Simenon. In: Cahiers Simenon 9. Traversées de Paris. Les Amis de Georges Simenon 1995, p. 55.
  6. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , p. 167.
  7. ^ Georges Simenon: Maigret in distress . Diogenes, Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-257-23818-1 , p. 23.
  8. ↑ Chiara Elefante: Les écritures de Maigret . Clue, Bologna 1998, ISBN 88-491-1138-X , p. 332.
  9. ^ Georges Simenon: Maigret in distress . Diogenes, Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-257-23818-1 , p. 74.
  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. 66.
  11. ↑ Maigret - The Man Simenon Wishes He Had Been. In: Quadrant. Volume 33, HR Krygier, Sidney 1989, p. 27.
  12. ^ Fenton Bresler: Georges Simenon. In search of the "naked" person . Ernst Kabel, Hamburg 1985, ISBN 3-921909-93-7 , pp. 150-152.
  13. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography. Pp. 93-94.
  14. ↑ Maigret of the Month: L'écluse n ° 1 (The Lock at Charenton) on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  15. ↑ "Seldom has a book title been mory aptly chosen than this one. […] It is astonishing how much information Maigret is able to absorb just by sitting and looking and listening. [… Maigret] solves the mystery to the satisfaction of everybody concerned, including the murderer. "In: The New York Times Book Review . 1942.
  16. ^ Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret-Marathon 18: Maigret in distress . On: FAZ.net , August 12, 2008.
  17. ^ Brian Jones: Maigret - The Man Simenon Wishes He Had Been. In: Quadrant. Volume 33, HR Krygier, Sidney 1989, p. 24.
  18. ↑ Ernest Hemingway : A moveable feast. The restored edition . Simon and Schuster, New York 2009, ISBN 978-1-4165-9131-3 , p. 59.
  19. ↑ Maigret in need on maigret.de.