Stan the killer
Stan the Killer (original title Stan le tueur ) is a short story by Georges Simenon , in which Commissioner Maigret and his team try to find the head of a robbery gang in downtown Paris . The work belonging to the series of Maigret novels and stories was created in the winter of 1937/38 in Neuilly-sur-Seine or in March 1938 in Porquerolles . The story first appeared on December 23, 1938 in Police-Film / Police-Roman magazine .
The story was published in book form in 1944 in the volume of stories Les Nouvelles Enquêtes de Maigret by Gallimard . The German translation by Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau first appeared in 1972 under the title Maigret and the Pole by Kiepenheuer and Witsch , in a new translation by Schönfeld in 1987 in the volume Six New Cases for Maigret and in 1989 in the volume Maigret and Stan the Killer at Diogenes Verlag .
The story provided the script for the first episode of a television series about Commissioner Maigret; in Stan the Killer (1950) played by Herbert Berghof in CBS TV's The Trap .
action
Maigret and his inspectors have organized a hiding place in front of a hotel on a small side street in the Rue de Birague in the 4th arrondissement , from which they want to watch a gang of Polish criminals who are supposed to carry out robberies on lonely farms in northern France. Lucas has been monitoring the shabby Hôtel Beauséjour for several hours. Two men stay there, Boris Saft, known as “Barbu”, and Sacha Vorontzov, also known as “Borgne”, and a woman, 28-year-old Olga Tzérewski, who is said to be Saft’s lover. They get regular visits from cronies, so Maigret suspects that another attack is being prepared. In order to avoid bloodshed during the arrest, the detective carefully prepared the storming of the hotel.
One day he receives a visit from a former Polish officer who is now a sports teacher at a Paris school. Michel Ozep wants to help Maigret to arrest "Stan the killer". He also tells him that he left his homeland because of lovesickness. In order to provoke Stan to react, he decides to send Ozep to Olga to get the gang to give up. As soon as Saft and Vorontzov are gone, Ozep breaks into the hotel, but he cannot find his way around the building. Eventually Maigret and his men find Olga's body strangled. Saft, Vorontzov and other members of the gang were arrested soon after, but remained silent about the crime. It is found that Olga Tzérewski is actually called Stéphanie Polintskaïa and was the wife of Michel Ozep, with whom she had a child who stayed in Poland. After leaving her husband to immigrate to the United States, she stabbed her young son. In the USA and then in France it achieved notoriety under the name "Stan le Tueur".
expenditure
After the first publication in Police-Film / Police-Roman (1938), the story appeared in the Le Jury collection (n ° 38, coupled with Mademoiselle Berthe et son amant ) under the title Les silences de Maigret (Bruxelles, A. Beirnaerdt, o . J. [1942]), finally in the anthology Les nouvelles enquêtes de Maigret (Paris, Gallimard, NRF., 1944). It was included in the Simenon works Œuvres complètes (Lausanne, Editions Rencontre, 1967–1973) in Volume IX, in Tout Simenon (Paris, Presses de la Cité, 1988–1993) in Volume 25 and in Tout Simenon (Paris, Omnibus, 2002–2004) included in volume 25. It is also available in German translation in the anthology Complete Maigret Stories ( ISBN 978-3-257-06682-1 ) published by Diogenes in 2009 .
Adaptations
- Stan the Killer , American television film (Director: Joseph DeSantis , with Herbert Berghof as Maigret). Aired on CBS TV on The Trap series May 20, 1950.
- Stan the Killer , American TV Movie (Director: Paul Nickell , with Eli Wallach as Maigret), CBS TV Studio One , September 20, 1952.
- Stan le tueur , French TV film (director: Philippe Laïk , with Jean Richard as Maigret), broadcast in 1990.