Maigret is on vacation

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Maigret is on vacation ( French Les Vacances de Maigret ) is a crime novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It is the 28th novel in a series of 75 novels and 28 short stories about the detective Maigret . The novel was written from November 11 to 20, 1947 in Tucson , Arizona and was published the following year by Presses de la Cité . The first German translation Maigret takes leave by Jean Raimond appeared in 1956 by Kiepenheuer & Witsch . In 1985 the Diogenes Verlag published a new translation by Markus Jakob under the title Maigret makes vacation .

Maigret is on vacation on the French Atlantic coast . When his wife fell ill and was admitted to the clinic, Maigret learned of the death of a fellow patient, a young woman who fell out of her brother-in-law's car while driving and died of the injuries. He is one of the wealthiest and most influential citizens of the city, and he is obsessed with the love for his wife, whom he treasures. To prove that he has nothing to hide, he invites the inspector to his villa.

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View of Les Sables-d'Olonne

Maigret travels to Les Sables-d'Olonne with his wife in August to finally go on vacation. But the holiday mood is already clouded on the second day by an acute appendicitis Madame Maigrets. Her husband visits her every day in the clinic, but otherwise doesn't know what to do with his free time apart from a tour of the local bars. After a visit to the clinic, he found a note in his jacket pocket: "Please have mercy and visit the patient in room 15." When Maigret returned the next morning, the patient, 19-year-old Lili Godreau, was died of injuries sustained when she fell from her brother-in-law's moving car. Maigret learns that the note from Sister Marie des Anges has been slipped to him. But the rules of the order forbid him from talking to the young nurse, and he has no official authority on vacation.

However, he has already met the dead man's brother-in-law. It is the well-known neurologist Philippe Bellamy who plays a game of bridge every afternoon in the Brasserie de Remblai with local dignitaries, including the police chief Mansuy . More than the game, Bellamy's passion is his wife Odette, who has a reputation for being a great beauty without being seen often. Rumor has it that she is jealously guarded and monitored by her husband and mother. When Bellamy notices the Parisian commissioner's interest, he invites Maigret to his villa to convince himself of his innocence in his sister-in-law's accident. Maigret can't catch a glimpse of Odette there, however. Apparently she is sick and does not appear at her sister's funeral. Instead, a fourteen-year-old girl runs out of the house who doesn't seem to fit into Bellamy's milieu at all and whose presence makes the doctor visibly uncomfortable.

Throughout the evening Maigret tried in vain to uncover the girl's identity, but when he found out her name - Lucile Duffieux - the next morning, it was through a phone call from Mansuy that the girl had been strangled that night. The grief of the Duffieux family is all the greater since 19-year-old brother Émile has just run away to seek his fortune as a journalist in Paris . It is strange that he sent a postcard from there, but without anyone being able to observe his departure. He also bought not just one, but two tickets to Paris. After Maigret ascribes the death to Lucile himself, he fears that there will be at least one more victim, and he systematically combs Bellamy's neighborhood for witnesses who have seen Odette alone outside her home. It turns out that she only went out once or twice a week, always to her seamstress Olga. However, it was not just about trying things on, as Maigret learns from Olga, an old friend of Odette. In fact, Odette had been secretly meeting her lover Émile Duffieux for several months under her friend's roof. Olga also knows about Odette's plans to break out of her golden cage and run off to Paris with young Émile.

Maigret visits Bellamy again, who admits that he ambushed Émile on the evening of the planned escape and stabbed him to death. Lili had heard details of the crime, but she only understood the connections when she accidentally discovered the hidden weapon, his silver knife, in Bellamy's glove compartment. In shock, she opened the door of the moving car and actually fell onto the street without the assistance of her brother-in-law. But even after her death, there were too many confidantes who could incriminate Bellamy. Odette has been on sleeping pills since the deed, Lucile knew about her brother's relationship with Odette, and Bellamy's mother-in-law threw in the postcard in Paris that Émile had to write on Bellamy's instructions before his death. After killing Émile's sister to delay his arrest, Bellamy is tired of the further killing, and he turns himself in to the coroner after speaking with Maigret. Maigret has the task of informing the sleeping Odette about her husband's deeds.

interpretation

For Tilman Spreckelsen , Maigret macht Ferien draws its tension from the contrasts of the setting Les Sables-d'Olonne, which is “a small town and a sophisticated holiday resort in one”. On the surface there is sunshine and a holiday mood, underneath are the abysses of the province and a conspiratorial clique of local dignitaries. For Ulrich Schulz-Buschhaus, for example, in a novel in which the perpetrator was the only suspect from the start, Maigret's task is above all to break the conspiracy of the upper-class " caste " and their solidarity-based protection against the perpetrator from within their own ranks, to bring justice to the common people, which is a typical motif of the Maigret series. After the doctor's conviction, sympathy and understanding also include the “previously completely disgusting” perpetrator. For Josef Quack, Maigret's famous method is evident in how the commissioner succeeds in empathizing with completely alien milieus, on the one hand the rigid clinic run by nuns , and on the other hand the prideful doctor's privacy until he has learned to understand the people there. At one point in the novel, Maigret's method is compared with Henri Bergson's philosophy of life , but without the commissioner being able to gain much from this comparison.

According to Dominique Meyer-Bolzinger, the relationship between the inspector and the doctor is characterized by mutual attraction throughout the novel, as its name "Bellamy" (good friend) already expresses. It is said at one point that Maigret "sneaked around his opponent like a schoolboy sneaks around the darling of the class." In Maigret, the respected doctor awakens memories of his own youth and the aborted medical studies. Their roles are reversed in their relationship and it is largely the doctor who takes the initiative and puts the same questions to the inspector with which he usually conducts his interrogations. Because of Bellamy's deed, the friendship between the doctor and the inspector ultimately turns out to be impossible. Nevertheless, according to Patrick Marnham, Maigret shows understanding for the excessive jealousy of Bellamy, who in the end only kills to gain a little more time with his wife before he is finally arrested. Bellamy is reminiscent of another doctor Dr. Alavoine from the non-Maigret novel Letter to my judge , written less than a year earlier , whose jealousy also leads to murder. The convicted murderer, although morally defeated, is left with a grand exit in which he says goodbye to the things of his life, so that Thomas Narcejac is reminded of the pain of a soldier who leaves his family to go to war.

background

Maigret on vacation was the second Maigret novel that Simenon wrote on the American continent after Maigret in New York . While the first was still shaped by the impressions of his arrival in America, the setting of Maigret is on vacation led back to Europe. The Vendée department was familiar to Simenon from the pre-war years and is the setting for many of his novels. During the Second World War he lived mainly in the La Rochelle area . From September 1944 to April 1945 he spent eight months in Les Sables-d'Olonne , among other things in the form of house arrest , under which he was placed after the liberation of France because of the later invalidated suspicion of collaboration . Many locations in Maigret makes holidays refer to real role models in the city. Simenon himself was a patient at the local clinic, the Hôpital des Sables . Simenon is still popular in the area today, and a Simenon festival has been held every year around Les Sables-d'Olonne since 1999 .

reception

The magazine Punch rated the joint English edition of Maigret macht Ferien and Maigret versus Picpus as a “particularly good couple”. The Illustrated London News described the novel as "a Maigret duel that is almost completely open and without any bitterness." Kirkus Reviews ruled that Maigret's vacation is “compact” and stated : “The great man from Paris listens to many stories, searches for connections to another dead person and receives a confession that resolves an unexpected case.”

The novel was filmed three times as part of the TV series with Rupert Davies (1961), Jean Richard (1971) and Bruno Cremer (1994). In 1958, the broadcaster Free Berlin produced a radio play adaptation under the title Maigret sucht Urlaub . Directed by Hans Drechsel , among others, spoke Tobias Pagel as the narrator, Hans Hessling as Maigret, and Alexander Kerst as a doctor Berousse.

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Les Vacances de Maigret . Presses de la Cité, Paris 1948 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret is on vacation . Translation: Jean Raimond. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1957.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret is on vacation . Translation: Jean Raimond. Heyne, Munich 1968.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret is on vacation . Translation: Markus Jakob. Diogenes, Zurich 1987, ISBN 3-257-21485-5 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret is on vacation . Complete Maigret novels in 75 volumes, volume 28. Translation: Markus Jakob. Diogenes, Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-257-23828-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographie de Georges Simenon 1946 à 1967 on Toutesimenon.com, the website of Omnibus Verlag.
  2. ↑ Oliver Hahn: Bibliography of German-language editions . Georges-Simenon-Gesellschaft (Ed.): Simenon-Jahrbuch 2003 . Wehrhahn, Laatzen 2004, ISBN 3-86525-101-3 , p. 66.
  3. ↑ Georges Simenon: Maigret is on vacation . Diogenes, Zurich 2008, p. 7.
  4. ^ Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret Marathon 28: Maigret is on vacation . On FAZ.net from October 26, 2008.
  5. ^ 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. 162, 170.
  6. ↑ 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. 34.
  7. ↑ Georges Simenon: Maigret is on vacation . Diogenes, Zurich 2008, p. 51.
  8. ↑ Dominique Meyer-Bolzinger: Une méthode clinique dans l'enquête policière: Holmes, Poirot, Maigret . Éditions du Céfal, Brussels 2003, ISBN 2-87130-131-X , p. 121.
  9. ↑ Patrick Marnham: The Man Who Wasn't Maigret. The life of Georges Simenon . Knaus, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-8135-2208-3 , pp. 322-323.
  10. ^ Thomas Narcejac : The Art of Simenon . Routledge & Kegan, London 1952, pp. 162-163.
  11. ↑ Maigret of the Month: Les Vacances de Maigret (A Summer Holiday / Maigret on Holiday) on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  12. ↑ Homepage of the Simenon Festival in the area around Les Sables-d'Olonne.
  13. ↑ "A particularly good pair". In: Punch Volume 220, 1951, p. 126.
  14. ↑ "This is a Maigret duel, conducted almost openly, and without rancour." In: The Illustrated London News Volume 218, 1951, p. 150.
  15. ↑ “The great man from Paris lists to many stories, looks for connections with another death and gets a confession that winds up an unexpected case. Compact. "In: Kirkus Reviews of October 8, 1953. ( online )
  16. ↑ Maigret is on vacation on maigret.de.
  17. ↑ Maigret takes a vacation in the ARD audio game database.