Maigret is upset

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Maigret gets excited (French: Maigret se fâche ) is a crime novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It is the 26th novel in a series of 75 novels and 28 short stories about the detective inspector Maigret . Simenon wrote the novel in the spring / summer of 1945 and completed it on August 4th of that year in Saint-Fargeau-Ponthierry . From March 19 to May 9, 1946, the novel was pre-published in the Paris-Soir newspaper. The book edition followed in 1947 together with the story La pipe de Maigret by Presses de la Cité . The first German translation by Wolfram Schäfer was published by Diogenes Verlag in 1981 .

Maigret has been retired for almost two years when a feisty old lady hires him for a private investigation. She does not consider her granddaughter's recent death to be an accident or suicide. When Maigret travels to the small village in which the wealthy family resides, the head of the family proves to be a former schoolmate who is still as unsympathetic to Maigret today as it was then. Dark secrets seem to weigh on the family clan, and Maigret, who is clearly being made to understand from all sides that his presence is undesirable, is upset that he has even accepted the assignment.

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The Porte d'Amont in Meung-sur-Loire

It's a hot August in Meung-sur-Loire . Former inspector Maigret has been enjoying his retirement for almost two years and devoted himself to his garden until 82-year-old Bernadette Amorelle visits him, who treats Maigret as a gardener and Madame Maigret as a maid. The energetic old lady succeeds in what nobody has been able to do since Maigret's retirement: to engage the ex-commissioner for a criminal case. Her 17-year-old granddaughter Monita drowned and the grandmother does not want to believe in an accident or suicide by the experienced swimmer.

Maigret travels to the small town of Orsenne on the Seine , the seat of the large company Amorelle and Campois , which was once founded with a gravel pit by Bernadette's deceased husband and the old Campois , but has now invested in numerous branches of business and controls large areas of inland shipping . The company is now run by the Malik brothers, Ernest and Charles, who married Amorelle's two daughters. Maigret recognizes Ernest Malik as a former classmate from high school in Moulins , whom everyone called the “tax collector” after his father's occupation. Even the boy had never been sympathetic to Maigret, and that has only increased over the years.

Treated condescendingly by the ostentatious upstart Malik, suspicious of the other family members, and obviously annoying even to his landlady Jeanne, Maigret already regrets that he let himself be slapped into the investigation at all. Only the simple housemaid Raymonde from his pension brings the former inspector back down to earth after his insight into the wealthy, powerful and repulsive family clan of the Amorelles. And when Maigret is shot one after the other and Ernest first offers money, then threats so that the ex-commissioner can stop his investigation, Maigret's ambition is really spurred on.

The off-duty inspector asks his old colleagues on the Quai des Orfèvres , Lucas, Janvier and Torrence, for help. And he finds the circus artist Mimile, with whose help he frees Ernest's 16-year-old son Georges-Henry from a dungeon in which the father has locked the boy since Maigret's arrival, because he obviously suspects something of the family secrets that are above Clan of the Amorelles burden. The boy, who was in love with his cousin Monita, the daughter of Charles Malik, remains obstinate in Madame Maigret's care and does not want to talk, but the former inspector gradually reveals the secrets.

Before the ambitious Ernest Malik could marry into the family and thus the Amorelles company, he got rid of his rival, the young Roger Campois, by seducing him to gamble and driving him into debt from which Roger saw no other way out than himself kill. Malik then married the older daughter Laurence, but loved the younger Aimée, for whom he arranged a marriage to his brother Charles. Monita, allegedly Charles' daughter, was also Ernest's child, and when the sensitive girl found out about her real father, his machinations and the sibling ties to her beloved Georges-Henry, she too committed suicide. Despite all the guilt that Maigret's schoolmate has charged on himself for the sake of getting up, he is not responsible for any judicial crime, and the “tax collector”, unlike his victims, is not the person who would judge himself. Old Bernadette Amorelle takes fate in her hand and shoots her son-in-law Ernest. When she confesses the deed to Maigret, she looks almost happy to have finally cleared up the "dirt" in her family.

Origin and background

21, Place des Vosges : Simenon's and Maigret's house

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 , from where he emigrated to America and wrote several novels in the waiting time . Maigret se fâche was the first Maigret novel to be written after the end of the war, after Simenon had previously written the story La pipe de Maigret . According to Stanley G. Eskin, it was the publisher Pierre Lazareff who initiated the novel, which was first published in the following year in his daily Paris-Soir . In the book edition it was summarized with the story that was created at the same time under the title La pipe de Maigret , which, according to Peter Foord, subsequently caused confusion as to whether the relatively short novel should not be classified as a story. La pipe de Maigret was the first Maigret edition after Simenon's move from Éditions Gallimard to Presses de la Cité . In the German translation, Maigret upset is the only novel besides Maigret im Haus des Richters that did not appear in the Maigret edition of Kiepenheuer & Witsch , and was only published by Diogenes Verlag in the 1980s .

The town of Orsenne des Romans is a fictional place, whereby the Simenon researchers Michel Lemoine and Claude Menguy deciphered that Simenon probably took the real city of Le Coudray-Montceaux as a model. In other locations, too, Simenon oriented himself to the reality of his life at the time, so that instead of the usual address on Paris Boulevard Richard-Lenoir , he assigned Maigret a city apartment on Place des Vosges , which he lived in at the time. Peter Foord points out that the end of the novel, with its hectic changes of location between Paris and Orsenne, corresponded to Simenon's actual situation during his attempt to leave the country. According to Fenton Bresler, the image of Paris in the novel is still an image of pre-war Paris, which in its peacefulness of the 1930s was “preserved in the formaldehyde of Simenon's imagination”. Simenon himself described: “When I returned after the war […] I found a Paris that had been defeated, but which claimed - or at least de Gaulle wanted us to believe - that it had won the war. It was sad and I hated the thought. My Paris no longer existed! "

reception

Over 500,000 copies of the double volume La pipe de Maigret , the first Maigret edition of the Presses de la Cité publishing house, which in addition to Maigret is upset also contained the story Maigret's pipe , were sold in French alone, with Fenton Bresler ruling that Simenon during of the Second World War "had not forgotten anything of his storytelling". In Maigret agitates Stanley G. Eskin, on the other hand, made some unusual influences from Dickens to the horror novel . Ulrich Schulz-Buschhaus saw in the confrontation between the “upper-class luxury” of Malik's childhood friend and the “petty-bourgeois social status” Maigrets “a European variant of the confrontation between Marlowe and the gangster Menendez in The Long Good-Bye ” by the American detective writer Raymond Chandler .

Leo Schneiderman described "the greedy, power-hungry villain" Ernest Malik as an exception in Simenon's work, whose villains are otherwise rarely characterized by hubris . For Bernard Alevoine, it is typical for Simenon how an event 20 years ago in the novel triggered the death of young Monita. In Simenon's novels, death is the climax of a crisis, but not its triggering factor, and the investigation is not so much the investigation of the murder as the uncovering of the influences on the lives of the characters.

Tilman Spreckelsen also asked: “Who cares about the perpetrator?” Above all, he read “a book about a greedy generation and their better parents and children” who sought “solidarity across the middle generation”. He commented: "Maigret, it seems, is by no means the only one who gets angry - it's been its author for a long time." Oliver Hahn read the novel very differently, who discovered "far and wide no trace" of anger on the part of the inspector . Instead, he recalled "some memorable situations that not only make the novel very exciting, but in which Simenon also shows his comic talents." And he drew the conclusion: "There are few stories that are funnier and more entertaining."

The novel was filmed twice as part of Maigret TV series: in 1962 with Rupert Davies under the title The Dirty House , ten years later with Jean Richard as Maigret se fâche .

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Maigret se fâche . In: La pipe de Maigret . Presses de la Cité, Paris 1947 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret is upset . Translation: Wolfram Schäfer. Diogenes, Zurich 1981, ISBN 3-257-20820-0 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret is upset . Complete Maigret novels in 75 volumes, volume 26. Translation: Wolfram Schäfer. Diogenes, Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-257-23826-6 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographie de Georges Simenon 1924 à 1945 on Toutesimenon.com, the website of the Omnibus Verlag.
  2. ↑ Maigret se fâche 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. 71.
  4. ^ A b Fenton Bresler: Georges Simenon. In search of the "naked" person . Ernst Kabel, Hamburg 1985, ISBN 3-921909-93-7 , p. 241.
  5. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , p. 283.
  6. ↑ a b Maigret of the Month: Maigret se fâche (Maigret in Retirement) on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  7. ↑ Oliver Hahn: Bibliography of German-language editions . Georges-Simenon-Gesellschaft (Ed.): Simenon-Jahrbuch 2003 , pp. 83-85.
  8. ^ Fenton Bresler: Georges Simenon. In search of the "naked" person , p. 242.
  9. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography , pp. 284, 437.
  10. ^ 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 , p. 159.
  11. ^ "A notable exception is Malik, the greedy, power-hungry villain of Maigret in Retirement ". In: Leo Schneiderman, Simenon: To Understand Is To Forgive. Clues, 7, no.1 (Spring-Summer, 1986), p. 32.
  12. ^ Bernard Alavoine: Les enquêtes de Maigret de Georges Simenon . Encrage, Amiens 1999, ISBN 2-911576-15-2 , p. 39.
  13. ^ Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret marathon 26: Maigret is upset . On FAZ.net from October 13, 2008.
  14. ↑ a b Maigret gets excited on maigret.de.