Maigret in New York

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Maigret in New York (French: Maigret à New York ) is a crime novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It is the 27th novel in a series of 75 novels and 28 short stories about the detective Maigret . The manuscript was written from February 27 to March 7, 1946 in Sainte-Marguerite-du-Lac-Masson , Québec . From June 25 to August 7, 1946, the novel was pre-published in 38 episodes by the daily newspaper L'Aurore . The book was published in July 1947 by Presses de la Cité . The first German translation by Bernhard Jolles was published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in 1956 . In 1985, Diogenes Verlag published an adaptation by Henriette Bonhoeffer.

A millionaire's son, who fears for his father's life, succeeds in luring the retired detective Maigret to New York . There the young man disappears without a trace, while the old man proves to be a dismissive businessman. Everything in the American metropolis is alien to the guest from France, but he begins to investigate the millionaire's past, who in turn is a French emigrant.

content

View of Lower Manhattan , photograph by Jack Delano (1941)

Maigret is 56 years old and enjoys life as a pensioner in Meung-sur-Loire , where he works in his garden and plays cards in the village restaurant. One day a 19-year-old boy named Jean Maura comes to us because he's worried about his father in New York: Joachim, called "Little John" Maura, who has become a millionaire through the production of jukeboxes . Maura's French notary d'Hoquélus reports on suspicious transactions with which money is apparently supposed to be cleared away. Jean wants to see that things are going well in America and hopes for support from the retired detective inspector. Before he knows it, Maigret has agreed and is on a ship crossing to the American continent.

As soon as the steamer has docked in New York Harbor , the inspector loses his young companion. So he goes to the Hotel Saint-Régis on Fifth Avenue , where Maura senior resides and shows strangely little interest in the arrival and disappearance of his son. His young secretary Jos MacGill plays himself in the foreground and gets rid of the French guest. Maigret seeks support from Michael O'Brien, an old friend from the FBI , who stresses that he is not allowed to investigate the case because of American civil liberties, but makes hints about Maura's past. The millionaire came to New York as a French immigrant at the age of 22 and lived in the Bronx under modest circumstances for the first few years . When Maigret, who has been shadowed by a gang of dodgy gangsters since his arrival, shows up, an old tailor named Angelino Giacomi was run over, it looks like, in order to clear a confidante out of the way. Now the New York police, under the direction of formalistic Lieutenant Lewis , intervene in the investigation.

Aerial photograph of Manhattan (1931)

Maigret, who is unable to find his way into the customs of the foreign country, hires the American private detective Ronald Dexter, a former clown who is characterized above all by melancholy and a penchant for alcohol. Nonetheless, his contacts in the circus milieu bring Maura's past life to light: In his first time in America he performed as a violinist in variety shows and formed the musical-comedic duo J & J with the clarinetist Joseph Daumale . A young girl named Jessie Dewey never left the two partners. While Maigret learns Maura's life story, Maura junior has reappeared safely and joins the ranks of those who ask Maigret to stop his investigation. However, the former commissioner has already picked up the trail of a crime long ago. He asks Maura Sr., MacGill and a sleazy journalist named Jim Parson to his hotel, as he would have summoned them to the Quai des Orfèvres in Paris .

A call to La Bourboule from Daumale, who has returned to France and made a career as a conductor, clears up the background: Maura and Jessie had married and had just had a child when Maura had to return to France temporarily because of the death of his father . In the meantime, his friend Daumale approached Jessie and brought his partner's child into the home. Later it was taken care of by a Mrs. MacGill. The returning Maura killed Jessie out of jealousy, an act he suffered from all his life. Maigret, too, feels sorry for old Maura and sees the cowardly maneuvering Daumale as the real culprit for the tragedy. It was he who revealed the ancient story to Parson. The journalist passed it on to Jos MacGill, Maura's and Jessie's son, who was under the bad influence of a four-man gang of criminals who believed that the relationship would give them financial benefits. Although father and son reached an understanding at their meeting and Jos has been working as a secretary at Maura's side since then, they are now blackmailed by his unscrupulous friends who have already taken large parts of Maura's fortune. It was they who murdered the witness Giacomi when Maigret's investigations jeopardized their criminal business. And they also execute the alleged traitor Parson with a submachine gun as soon as he leaves Maigret's hotel. Maigret no longer cares that Lieutenant Lewis succeeds in arresting the gang. He is not interested in the testimony of common criminals and returns home to the Loire Valley , where his plant saplings are waiting for him.

interpretation

According to Crystel Pinçonnat, Maigret in New York follows the scheme of all Maigret novels in its structure: An initial state of recovery is ended by a crime and the investigation by the commissioner. A long period of despondency ensues, during which Maigret's methods do not seem appropriate to the circumstances. In the end, the Commissioner manages to find his way into the milieu. He identifies with the case and develops sympathy and compassion for the people involved until his understanding of the background to the crime clears up the case. Simenon breaks with the traditional mechanisms of detective novels, which Thomas Narcejac sums up: Simenon is not interested in "how", but only in "why".

For Pinçonnat, the specialty of Maigret in New York lies in the strange environment in which Simenon relocates his commissioner. The title, with its connection between the Paris- rooted Maigret and the city of New York, seems like an oxymoron . The strangeness of the commissioner in the American metropolis pervades the novel and is already expressed on the first pages: "He felt completely out of place". The drawing of New York lacks any fascination: “The car drove through a filthy neighborhood with houses of repulsive ugliness. Was that New York? ”Maigret takes on the attitude of a tourist to the city without a concierge , and so the descriptions of picturesque places like Fifth Avenue or Greenwich Villages are those of an uninvolved strollers . Maigret only found a certain familiarity when he moved from the luxury hotel Saint-Régis to shabby Berwick on Broadway , where the furnishings were “as you can find them in every furnished room in every city in the world.” First as the city for Maigret loses its peculiarity when he succeeds in blocking out the outside world completely, he can concentrate on the people, empathize with them and "become Little John himself".

In Maigret in New York Simenon not only deconstructs the myths of America and New York, he also makes tabula rasa for Pinçonnat with the myth of the American crime novel. The exoticism of roman noir finds no place in Maigret's world and is only shown in a few ironic set pieces such as the description of a former boxer: "Bill led the action, vigorously chewing his chewing gum, hat on his neck like in old films." the film Maigret is watching to get in the mood for the decisive interrogation is not a film noir , but a comedy by Laurel and Hardy . Like most Maigret novels, Maigret proves in New York a defense of the Commissioner's famous method against her critics, in this case his American colleagues. Maigret's method proves its universality and general validity. Regardless of geographic location and social masks, he is interested in something unchangeable: the "naked" person.

background

After the end of World War II and the liberation of France , Simenon returned to Paris from western France, where the family had lived during the Vichy regime . He had made up his mind to emigrate to America and, while completing the necessary formalities, wrote several novels, including the first post-war Maigret novel, Maigret Excites . On October 5, 1945, Simenon and his family arrived in New York, where he spent ten days before traveling to French-speaking Canada to Sainte-Marguerite-du-Lac-Masson , northwest of Montreal . It was here that Simenon wrote his first novel in January 1946 on the American continent, Three Rooms in Manhattan . The autobiographically inspired novel was based on Simenon's meeting with his second wife a few weeks ago and so troubled Simenon that, as Pierre Assouline notes, he followed the novel Maigret in New York to relax .

For Stanley G. Eskin, Simenon had his Commissioner Maigret "come after" after he had set up himself on the American continent and was so curious "how Maigret might react to a place like New York City" that he put questions of plausibility aside about whether a retired commissioner would actually be ready for a 3,000-mile journey across the ocean, at the end of which nothing but an unpleasant assignment awaits him. The stays of the writer and his fictional character in the American metropolis show some parallels, starting with the arrival of both ships to their poor knowledge of English. In New York, Simenon had to rely on the help of a friend, the literature professor Justin O'Brien. Michael O'Brien, FBI colleague Maigrets, has the same last name. The Hotel Saint-Régis in the novel is - like the Hotel Majestic in Maigret and the cellars of the "Majestic" - a combination of the name of a real Hotel St. Regis and the ambience of the Drake Hotel on Park Avenue , in the Simenon himself had descended.

reception

Tilman Spreckelsen described Maigret in New York in his Maigret marathon : “It's all uncomfortable: the streets, the literally murderous cars, the foreign language and above all these strange people! But the drama that gradually reveals itself to Maigret's eyes could just as well have taken place in Paris, perhaps a little less brutal, but just as painful. ”Typical for Simenon is that“ the children of these guilty dreamers ”are the starting point to expose the crime long ago. Hans Reimann said: “Simenon's lack of sensationalism has something sensational about it. He knows how to present exciting things in such a bourgeois manner that you feel like you're in a grandfather's chair. "

The Saturday Review summarized the novel in short form in 1955: “Ex the Sûreté leads an easy life in the country, receives a call from Manhattan to search for a private detective. The hero's acclimatization is treated nicely, the story has its roots in the distant past. Holds its height. ”Jon L. Breen posed the general question of whether serial detectives associated with a particular location should be sent on trips. The worst results for him came from European detectives in America. In particular, Maigret in New York's Underworld is "the weakest Simenon novel I have ever read". For Books on Trial, however , the same novel was "the best of recent publications" in 1954 in the Crime Club Selection series .

Maigret à New York was developing into a bestseller among Simenon's works in America . In 1958 the American translation Maigret had sold over 230,000 copies in New York's Underworld . In France, too, the novel led the sales list of Simenon's books in 1962 with 92,000 copies. The novel was filmed in 1990 as part of the TV series with Jean Richard as Maigret.

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Maigret à New York . Presses de la Cité, Paris 1947 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret in New York . Translation: Bernhard Jolles. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1956.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret in New York . Translation: Bernhard Jolles. Heyne, Munich 1967.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret in New York . Translation: Bernhard Jolles and Henriette Bonhoeffer. Diogenes, Zurich 1985, ISBN 3-257-21308-5 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret in New York . Complete Maigret novels in 75 volumes, volume 27. Translation: Henriette Bonhoeffer. Diogenes, Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-257-23827-3 .

literature

  • Crystel Pinçonnat: Maigret versus Metal. Georges Simenon et Léo Malet face à la tradition américaine du roman noir. In: Études littéraires. Vol. 29, n ° 2, 1996, pp. 111-122. ( online )
  • Crystel Pinçonnat: New York, mythe littéraire français. Droz, Geneva 2001, ISBN 2-600-00494-7 . Chapter Maigret à New York (1947) ou l'antiroman noir , pp. 134-138.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographie de Georges Simenon 1946 à 1967 on Toutesimenon.com, the website of Omnibus Verlag.
  2. ^ Maigret à New York on Yves Martina's website.
  3. ↑ Oliver Hahn: Bibliography of German-language editions . Georges-Simenon-Gesellschaft (Ed.): Simenon-Jahrbuch 2003 . Wehrhahn, Laatzen 2004, ISBN 3-86525-101-3 , p. 61.
  4. ↑ Crystel Pinçonnat: Maigret contre Metal , p. 118.
  5. ^ Georges Simenon: Maigret in New York . Diogenes, Zurich 2008, p. 9.
  6. ^ Georges Simenon: Maigret in New York . Diogenes, Zurich 2008, p. 10.
  7. ^ Georges Simenon: Maigret in New York . Diogenes, Zurich 2008, p. 58.
  8. ^ Georges Simenon: Maigret in New York . Diogenes, Zurich 2008, p. 150.
  9. ↑ Crystel Pinçonnat: Maigret contre Metal , pp 118-120.
  10. ^ Georges Simenon: Maigret in New York . Diogenes, Zurich 2008, p. 31.
  11. ↑ Crystel Pinçonnat: Maigret contre Metal , S. 121st
  12. ^ Fenton Bresler: Georges Simenon. In search of the "naked" person . Ernst Kabel, Hamburg 1985, ISBN 3-921909-93-7 , pp. 240-241.
  13. ↑ Patrick Marnham: The Man Who Wasn't Maigret. The life of Georges Simenon . Knaus, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-8135-2208-3 , pp. 305-306.
  14. ^ Pierre Assouline : Simenon. A biography . Chatto & Windus, London 1997, ISBN 0-7011-3727-4 , p. 235.
  15. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , p. 287.
  16. ↑ Maigret of the Month: Maigret à New-York (Maigret in New York's Underworld / Maigret in New York) on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  17. ^ Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret-Marathon 27: Maigret in New York . On FAZ.net from October 24, 2008.
  18. ↑ Hans Reimann : The Literazzia. Volume 5. Pohl, Munich 1956, p. 55.
  19. ↑ "Surete ex, taking life easy as campagnard, gets call to Manhattan for private-eye chase. Hero's acclimatization nicely handled; yarn's roots are in far past. Holds up. "In: Saturday Review Volume 38, New York 1955. p. 27.
  20. ^ "Maigret in New York's Underworld (1955) was the poorest Simenon novel I have ever read". In: Jon L. Breen: The Jury Box . In: Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine . Davis, New York 1981, p. 103.
  21. ^ "The best among recent Crime Club Selections is a new Simenon story, Maigret in New York's Underworld ". In: Books on Trial . Volumes 13-14. Thomas More Association, Chicago 1954, p. 409.
  22. ↑ Simenon's US Best Sellers. In: Life, November 3, 1958, p. 105.
  23. ^ Pierre Assouline: Simenon. A Biography , p. 303.
  24. ↑ Maigret in New York on maigret.de.