Maigret takes her time

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Maigret lets itself be (French: La Patience de Maigret ) is a crime novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It is the 64th novel in a series of 75 novels and 28 stories about the detective Maigret and was written from 25 February to 9 March 1965 in Epalinges . The novel was published by Presses de la Cité in November of that year and preprinted in 23 episodes from November 29 to December 24, 1965 in the Le Figaro newspaper . The first German translation by Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau appeared in 1967 under the title Maigret hat Geduld bei Kiepenheuer & Witsch . In 1982 the Diogenes Verlag published a new translation by Sibylle Powell under the title Maigret lets himself be .

Commissioner Maigret is taking his time, because his longest investigation into a series of robberies on Parisian jewelers has been going on for twenty years. The murder of the suspected head behind the gang gives the case new impetus. In addition to the dead person's criminal past life, Maigret also deals with the private environment of the man in need of care, who could no longer leave his apartment without help. The plot follows on from the novel Maigret defends himself .

content

Rue Fontaine (now Rue Pierre-Fontaine), where the Clou Doré is located.

It's a sunny July in Paris. Inspector Maigret is 53 years old and only two years separate him from his retirement from the Paris Criminal Police. He would like to complete his longest investigation beforehand, which revolves around a series of robberies on Parisian jewelry stores that has been going on for twenty years. Maigret has long suspected Manuel Palmari as the central figure behind the crimes, without yet being able to provide any tangible evidence of his involvement. Maigret has friendly respect for Palmari, who is now approaching sixty, who once collected information from the Parisian underworld for the inspector in his Clou Doré night bar . Palmari has been in a wheelchair since an attack three years ago and lives in his apartment completely cut off from the outside world. The only contact outside is his twenty-five-year-old friend Aline Bauche, who has retained her proud aversion to the police from her time as a street girl.

Palmari has now been shot in his apartment. Aline was shopping at the time of the crime, and no one else seems to have entered the house under police surveillance. The interrogation of the residents remains inconclusive. Only in the Clou Doré does a regular guest lead Maigret on a trail when he calls one of the tenants to warn of Maigret's investigation. The person called is Fernand Barillard, a gift packaging representative who also goes to and from Parisian jewelers in this capacity. Maigret has both him and Aline shadowed after openly expressing his suspicions to both of them. He plays on time and on the fear of the isolated suspects, because he is still missing a link in the chain: a diamond cutter who would be able to rework the stolen goods to make them unrecognizable.

When another murder occurs in Palmari's house, Maigret feels complicit for the crime. The victim is old deaf and mute Jef Claes aka Victor Krulak from the attic . Maigret learns the life stories of the two from Mina Barillard: They escaped from Belgium to France on refugee trains during World War II . When the refugees were bombed at the Douai train station , there was a real massacre, in the course of which little Mina Claes, who had lost her loved ones, joined the unknown man. Krulak, who was badly injured in the face and remained deaf and mute, regained courage through the little girl. He took her last name and adopted her after the war. It turns out that the deaf and mute Krulak was the diamond cutter of the band of robbers whom Barillard murdered for fear of his testimony.

For Maigret, all the pieces of the puzzle come together: since the attack, after which Palmari remained dependent on the wheelchair and lived completely isolated in his apartment, Aline had continued his diamond business for him. Barillard's job remained scouting the jewelers for profitable booty for the raids. When Aline and Barillard started an affair, they decided to get old Palmari out of the way. Aline slipped the Palmaris pistol into her lover, and he committed the murder in her absence. The inspector leaves the decision of which of the two was the driving force behind the plan to the inexperienced examining magistrate Ancelin, to whom he hands over the couple after a confrontation in which they both attacked each other in hatred. Maigret prefers to dedicate himself to the Paris summer again.

background

The abandoned Maison de Simenon in Epalinges (2013; demolished 2016/2017)

Simenon wrote the novel between February 25 and March 9, 1965 in his self-designed villa in Epalinges. His work was interrupted for a week by the flu. The novel is one of the rare cases in which Simenon, who always planned his work phases in advance, completed a work after such an interruption. For the first time in the Maigret series, the plot of Maigret lets time closes directly on the previous novel Maigret defends itself , since the events of the plot time only one week has passed. Manuel Palmari and Aline Bauche already appeared there, and the end of the novel read: “You should see Maigret often in the Rue des Acacias.” Despite the retrospective of what happened in the previous one, the plot of both novels follows an independent arc of tension and lets itself go also read individually.

reception

In 1967, Spiegel found in the anthology by Kiepenheuer & Witsch, which also contained the novels Maigret and the maid and Maigret loses an admirer , “the best crime fiction, a touch of sex, but above all an assortment of concierges and petty bourgeoisie, coffee and Rum smells of impressionistic summer days that hardly any contemporary work of 'high literature' can really do. "

In the course of his Maigret marathon , Tilmann Spreckelsen was disappointed 42 years later by the dismantling of the figure of Aline, whom he valued as "plump" and in which Simenon makes "a sad picture". He also complained about calendar discrepancies with the previous novel. Also Ulrich Schulz-Buschhaus scored the Roman those works Simenon, which were "written so sloppily" that they "do not meet even elementary demands technically sound spelling assets". Simenon dedicates himself to a "detailed description of a bistro menu", which is unusual for the tradition of the crime novel.

Stanley judged quite differently. G. Eskin, who classified La Patience de Maigret among "a handful of first-class novels" from the third period of the Maigret series. For him, the underlying structure of the novel lay in the interplay of “darkness” and “cheerfulness”. After the beginning of summer in a country house in Meung-sur-Loire , Maigret returned to a “sunny world” at the end of a “story of murder, cruelty and fraud” and looked at an angler on the banks of the Seine .

La Patience de Maigret was five times total filmed : in the television series with January Teulings (1967), Gino Cervi (1968), Jean Richard (1984), Michael Gambon (1992) and Bruno Cremer (1993). In 1988 the WDR produced a radio play directed by Dieter Carls . Charles Brauer spoke to Maigret .

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: La Patience de Maigret . Presses de la Cité, Paris 1965 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret is patient. Maigret and the maid . Maigret loses an admirer . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1967. Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret is patient . Heyne, Munich 1967. Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret takes her time . Diogenes, Zurich 1982. Translation: Sibylle Powell.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret takes her time . All Maigret novels in 75 volumes, volume 64. Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23864-8 Translation: Sibylle Powell.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Biographie de Georges Simenon 1946 à 1967 on Toutsimenon.com, the website of the Omnibus Verlag.
  2. ↑ La Patience 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. 66.
  4. ^ A b Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret Marathon 64: Maigret takes her time . On FAZ.net from July 17, 2009.
  5. ↑ criticism . In: Der Spiegel . No. 19 , 1967, p. 167 ( online ).
  6. ^ Ulrich Schulz-Buschhaus : Forms and ideologies of the crime novel. An essay on the history of the genre . Athenaion, Frankfurt am Main 1975, ISBN 3-7997-0603-8 , pp. 157, 166.
  7. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , pp. 404, 414.
  8. ↑ Maigret Films & TV on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  9. ↑ Maigret takes her time in the HörDat audio game database .