Maigret sets a trap

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Maigret sets a trap (French: Maigret tend un piège ) is a crime novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It is the 48th novel in a series of 75 novels and 28 short stories about the detective Maigret . The novel was written from July 5 to 12, 1955 in Mougins and was published by Presses de la Cité in October of the same year . The first German translation by Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau was published in 1958 by Kiepenheuer & Witsch . In 1985, Diogenes Verlag published a new translation by Angela von Hagen.

Paris is shaken by a series of feminicides . Despite great pressure from the public, the police investigation remained unsuccessful. A conversation with a friend of mine, a psychiatrist, gives Inspector Maigret an unconventional idea: he sets a trap for the murderer.

content

View of Montmartre and Sacré-Cœur

It is an oppressively hot August in Paris. A series of murders has been terrifying the city for six months. All murders happened in the 18th arrondissement on Montmartre . All victims are female, but come from different age groups and social classes, and all they have in common is their obesity. The perpetrator stabbed the women and tore their clothes, but without rape or steal anything. Despite intensive investigations, the Parisian criminal police, which are being besieged by representatives of the press, have so far lacked any trace.

At his friend Dr. Pardon me, Maigret meets Professor Tissot, the famous director of the Saint-Anne psychiatric clinic, with whom he agrees that most crimes can be traced back to the perpetrators' exaggerated need for recognition and offended pride. The exchange of ideas gives the commissioner the idea of ​​setting a trap for the serial killer. He pretended to have Pierre Mazet, a former employee who recently returned from the French colonies, brought to the Quai des Orfèvres and played one of his notorious long interrogations to the assembled reporters. As expected, the rumor that the woman murderer has been caught is spreading in the city. Maigret hopes that this will grab the real culprit's pride and lead them to take action. The 18th arrondissement is monitored by all available civil servants, while female volunteers who correspond to the type of previous victims act as bait.

In fact, during the night there is an attack on Marthe Jusserand, a young police officer who uses her judo skills to defend herself against the attacker. He managed to escape, but he lost a button on his suit while escaping. The rare English material quickly leads the criminal police on the trail of Marcel Moncin, an interior designer who lives on Boulevard Saint-Germain but originally comes from the Montmartre district, where he still visits his mother regularly. Not only Moncin accepts his arrest with serenity, his wife and mother also leave the allegations against him cold. While the wife Yvonne Moncin is outwardly unmoved and friendly, the widowed mother turns out to be a dominant personality who would like to get her beloved son out of prison with her own hands.

Although all suspicions point to the imprisoned Moncin, another murder occurs that night. The victim is a 19-year-old maid named Jeanine Laurent. Maigret, who believed the case to be closed with Moncin's arrest, only now understands the context. Moncin grew up in the shadow of his mother, who adored him but never let him develop freely. The wife chosen by the mother later played the same role. Moncin was too weak a personality to ever dare to break free from the grip of the two women. Instead, his hatred of his mother and wife broke out in the murders of strange, outwardly similar women. The love of both women goes so far that they want to protect Moncin even after he has been exposed as a murderer, and both take on the murder of the maid with pride. But when Maigret asks about the details of the crime, only Yvonne can answer, who added a sixth to her husband's five murders to divert suspicion from him.

interpretation

Maigret Traps was the first Maigret novel that Simenon wrote after returning to France from the United States. It remained the only novel written in Mougins before Simenon settled in Cannes for some time and then moved to Switzerland, where the rest of the series was written in Echandens and Epalinges . Fenton Bresler does not notice in the novel that it was written 5000 kilometers away and under completely different living conditions than his predecessor Maigret and the headless corpse , which is about a similarly cruel crime. For Murielle Wenger, however, Maigret marks a “turning point” in the Maigret series, from which the later novels increasingly ask the author's questions about human nature, responsibility and fate. The titles of many of the following novels, such as Maigret, experienced a defeat , Maigret has scruples , Maigret's confession speak to Maigret's doubts about his profession and his increasing questions about justice.

Jérôme Devémy does not see the serial murder of the novel as a “typical Maigret crime”. The unusualness of the crime goes hand in hand with Maigret's discomfort during the first half of the novel. The large number of victims makes his usual approach impossible for him to empathize with the act by getting to know the victims. Irene Beissmann describes the novel's literary trick of entering medias res directly with the arrest and apparently presenting the conclusion of an ongoing investigation. Only through a narrative flashback is the arrest exposed as a ruse. The first chapter focuses on the journalists who try to derive the facts from the Commissioner's behavior. The description of her work reminds Wenger of Simenon's own past as a young police reporter at the Gazette de Liège . Again and again, Simenon later incorporated characters from the journalist milieu into his Maigret novels. Stanley G. Eskin, on the other hand, refers to an “artistic decadence as the background of a crime”, since the serial killer turns out to be a painter of “dreary” and “macabre” pictures, a theme that already featured in one of Maigret's very early novels Maigret and the Hanged Man by Saint -Pholien had determined.

Eskin calls Maigret a trap "the most 'psychological' of all Maigret novels", since not only is the murderer's motive a psychological one, but Maigret's approach in his capture is also based on psychological findings. Lucille F. Becker, however, emphasizes the generalizations that are typical of the pseudo-medical and pseudo-psychological discussions in the Maigret novels that are usually made between the Commissioner and Dr. Pardon take place. In Maigret, this role is played by the exchange of words between Maigret and Professor Tissot, in which both views of humans are expressed. In doing so, Maigret shows his continued endeavor to understand those people who have crossed the barrier to becoming criminals. He conjures up the murderer in an interrogation: “For me you remain a human being. Do you not understand what it is exactly that I am trying to wake up in you: the little human spark? ”And even after Moncin's arrest he remains dissatisfied for a long time, because it is not enough for him to have pulled a criminal out of circulation . He must always get to the point where he has learned to understand him.

Becker points out, however, that Simenon's maxim “Understanding without judging” does not apply to all characters equally. The commissioner feels empathy for the serial killer, but not for his mother, whom he believes to be the cause of his crime and whom he is hostile to throughout the case. In general, Maigret's sympathy and understanding are often unevenly distributed between the sexes, and the type of man suffering from a dominant mother is a frequent topos in Simenon's works. Maigret's irony lies in the fact that the perpetrator, who reacts off his hatred of his mother and wife through substitute acts, fails to free himself from their dominance. On the contrary, both show themselves able to mimic his murders in order to protect him and keep him under their influence. In the struggle between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law for the man whom they both adored, the latter carried off the decisive victory by carrying out the deed.

reception

The American magazine Newsweek described the actions of the inspector in Maigret sets a trap : “He orders beer, grabs his pipe, lolls around pondering the motifs, grumbles about modern art, sets a tricky trap and realizes (as always) that he will not have his husband as long as he does not understand the psychology of the perpetrator. ”Overall, the novel is“ one of Georges Simenon's milder affairs ”,“ as familiar and unsightly as a raincoat of the same age ”. Publishers Weekly, however, rated the novel as "a very good Maigret with insight and tension". The ironic question of the novel is: "How far will a neurotic woman go to protect her psychotic husband?" Nick Rennison and Richard Shephard placed the English translation Maigret Sets a Trap among a list of 100 must-read detective novels must.

During his Maigret marathon, Tilman Spreckelsen exclaimed : “Ruler of the sky, if time has thoroughly passed over one of the Maigret novels, then this one. What is served to us here as a somehow scientifically proven psychogram of a mad murderer is pretty absurd ”. In contrast to what we are used to from reading Maigret, this novel is “a little too much of everything”. For Oliver Hahn from maigret.de, the novel, which adds unusual elements to the Maigret universe with a serial killer and the desperate trick of the inspector, was one of the five best Maigret novels. And Stanley G. Eskin also categorized Maigret, setting a trap under “a handful of first-class novels” from the late phase of the Maigret series.

The novel was filmed a total of six times. The 1958 film by Jean Delannoy had the German title Kommissar Maigret Poses a Trap . Jean Gabin played the inspector Maigret. Also starring were Annie Girardot , Jean Desailly and Olivier Hussenot to see. The novel was later filmed within three television series in which Rupert Davies (1962), Michael Gambon (1992) and Bruno Cremer (1996) took on the role of Maigret. In 2004, an Italian television film followed, directed by Renato De Maria with Sergio Castellitto as the commissioner. In 2016 Rowan Atkinson starred in a British TV adaptation of Ashley Pearce.

In 1994 Fred C. Siebeck read an audio book version for Schumm speaking books . Two years later, Deutschlandradio produced a radio play adaptation directed by Patrick Blank . Joachim Nottke spoke to Commissioner Maigret . Also starring were Boje , Charles Wirth , Margarete Salbach , Hubertus Gertzen , Mark-Oliver Bögel , Heinz Meier , Markus Hoffmann, Sabine Niethammer and Ernst August Schepmann heard. In 2018, Audio Verlag published a new audio book reading by Walter Kreye .

Various literary scholars emphasized the closeness of Simenon's Maigret, which sets a trap for Friedrich Dürrenmatt's detective novel The Promise or the film version It happened in broad daylight , both of which were published in 1958. Irene Beissmann names a similarity between perpetrator and motive, the pathological relationship to women, as well as the central element of action, the trap that the inspector sets for the murderer and in which he lays a "bait". In both novels, the trap is preceded by a conversation between the inspector and the head of a mental hospital, both of whom identify the perpetrator as a victim. Reclam's detective novelist describes Dürrenmatt's suspicions succinctly: "He probably found the plot in the Simenon novel Maigret tend un piège (1955), published a few years earlier ."

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Maigret tend un piège . Presses de la Cité, Paris 1955 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret is setting a trap . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1958.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret is setting a trap . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Heyne, Munich 1967.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret is setting a trap . Translation: Angela von Hagen. Diogenes, Zurich 1985, ISBN 3-257-21374-3 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret is setting a trap . Complete Maigret novels in 75 volumes, Volume 48. Translation: Angela von Hagen. Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23848-8 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret is setting a trap . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Kampa, Zurich 2018, ISBN 978-3-311-13048-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographie de Georges Simenon 1946 à 1967 on Toutesimenon.com, the website of Omnibus Verlag.
  2. ↑ Maigret tend un piège on the page of 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. 75.
  4. ↑ a b c d e Maigret of the Month: Maigret tend un piège (Maigret Sets a Trap) on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  5. ^ Fenton Bresler: Georges Simenon. In search of the "naked" person. Ernst Kabel, Hamburg 1985, ISBN 3-921909-93-7 , p. 291.
  6. ↑ Irene Beissmann: From Maigret to Bärlach. A comparative study of crime novels by Georges Simenon and Friedrich Dürrenmatt . Master's thesis at McGill University Montreal 1973, pp. 12–13 (pdf; 5.4 MB).
  7. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , pp. 158-159.
  8. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography , p. 395.
  9. ↑ Lucille F. Becker: Georges Simenon . House, London 2006, ISBN 1-904950-34-5 , p. 46.
  10. ↑ Quoted from: 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. 48.
  11. ↑ Josef Quack: The limits of the human. About Georges Simenon, Rex Stout, Friedrich Glauser, Graham Greene , p. 38.
  12. ↑ Lucille F. Becker: Georges Simenon , pp. 45, 47.
  13. ↑ "Maigret goes through the motions: he sends out for beer, packs his pipe, slouches around wondering about motives, grumbles over modem painting, sets a delicate trap at some risk to his colleagues, and realizes (as always) that he will not." have his man until he understands the psychology of the criminal. ”“ one of Georges Simenon's milder affairs ”,“ as familiar and unprepossessing as a raincoat of equivalent age ”. In: Newsweek , Volume 80, Issues 14-25, pp. 88.
  14. ↑ "The really ironic question is - how far will a neurotic woman go to protect a psychotic man? Very good Maigret, with insight and suspense. “In: Publishers Weekly Volume 201, Leypoldt 1972, p. 63.
  15. ↑ Nick Rennison, Richard Shephard: 100 Must-Read Crime Novels . A&C Black, London 2006, ISBN 0-7136-7584-5 , p. 135.
  16. ↑ Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret Marathon 48: Maigret sets a trap . On FAZ.net from March 27, 2009.
  17. ↑ The five best on maigret.de.
  18. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography , p. 414.
  19. ↑ Maigret sets a trap on maigret.de.
  20. ↑ Maigret sets a trap in the HörDat audio game database .
  21. ↑ Irene Beissmann: From Maigret to Bärlach. A comparative study of crime novels by Georges Simenon and Friedrich Dürrenmatt . Master's thesis at McGill University Montreal 1973, p. 68, p. 109–110 (pdf; 5.4 MB).
  22. ^ Armin Arnold, Josef Schmidt (Ed.): Reclams Kriminalromanführer . Reclam, Stuttgart 1978, ISBN 3-15-010279-0 , p. 147.