Maigret and the ghost

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Maigret and the Ghost (French: Maigret et le fantôme ) is a crime novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It is the 62nd novel in a series of 75 novels and 28 short stories about the detective Maigret . The novel was written in Echandens from June 17 to 23, 1963 and was published in advance in 23 parts by the French daily Le Figaro from May 18 to June 12, 1964 . The book was published in July of that year by Presses de la Cité . The first German translation by Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau was published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in 1965 under the title Maigret und das Phantom . In 1989 Diogenes Verlag published the new translation Maigret and the Ghost by Barbara Heller.

When Inspector Lognon, alias Inspector Curmudgeon , is gunned down in Paris at night, Inspector Maigret feels personally affected and takes over the investigation, although at the beginning he is barely able to recall his usual professionalism. He's looking for a young beautician with whom the supposedly faithful husband is said to have spent the night. And he is wondering what the last word that Lognon was able to pronounce should mean: "Ghost".

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Avenue Junot in Paris

Inspector Lognon, a district policeman from the 18th arrondissement of Paris, who despite numerous efforts never managed to be transferred to the criminal police on the Quai des Orfèvres , is called by all colleagues only Inspector "curmudgeon", although Maigret, because of his insufferable behavior Finds the nickname Inspector “Unlucky Raven” much more appropriate, because Lognon seems to be drawn to bad luck. He was gunned down on Avenue Junot on a November night and is seriously injured in a coma. Maigret feels personally affected by the fate of his companion and takes up the investigation, while Madame Maigret looks after the hypochondriacal wife of the injured man.

At first glance, a lot seems to indicate a rendezvous between Lognon and the young beautician Marinette Augier, where Lognon is said to have stayed overnight several times lately, but the woman has disappeared, and Maigret, who is about Lognon's devotion to his quarreling wife knows, cannot imagine him as a philanderer. In addition, the course of events - two perpetrators who ambushed the inspector in the car - and the murder weapon - a Mauser - indicate professional criminals. The only word that the downed inspector Angèle Sauget, the concierge who had hurried up, was able to whisper: “Ghost” remains a mystery .

The appearance of the beautician confirms Maigret's suspicion that the inspector wanted nothing more from her than to carry out secret investigations from her apartment, about which he, for fear of being spoiled by colleagues, did not reveal a word to anyone. The testimony of an old misanthrope from the neighboring house named Maclet, who spends the whole day observing the area from his window sill, leads Maigret to the nearby villa of the Dutch art collector Norris Jonker, where Maclet has seen prostitutes come and go want. Maigret discovers a dungeon-like, bare room in the house, the walls of which are covered with suggestive graffiti. And he meets Jonker's attractive wife Mirella, who, disguised in a ghostly white robe, tries to trick him into believing that the house's studio is serving her obviously untalented attempts at painting.

The past life of the beautiful Mirella, who before her marriage, when she was still called Marcelle Maillant, was the mistress of the criminal Stanley Hobson, alias "Bald Stan", and the Tatauto, the yellow jaguar of the art critic Ed Gollan, who stayed at the Ritz , eventually expose a gang of art forgers . Through a fake Van Gogh , which he unknowingly resold, Jonker fell into the hands of the critic Gollan, who only kept the fraud secret on condition that Jonkers cooperated in his plans. Gollan found the ingenious but semi-crazy and sex-obsessed forger Federigo Palestri, who forged numerous masterpieces in Jonker's villa, always wearing the ghostly white robe that Lognon saw him in. The forgeries were sold under the guise of the Dutchman's collection, which enjoyed an impeccable reputation in the art world. The dirty work for the gang of forgers was done by Mirella's lover Stanley Hobson and his criminal colleague Mario de Lucia. When they noticed Lognon's surveillance, they tried in cold blood to get the witnesses out of the way, as they subsequently got rid of the mad painter who is found hanged in de Lucia's apartment.

The whole investigation takes barely a day until Maigret has brought Inspector Lognon's preparatory work to a quick conclusion. The members of the forgery gang are arrested and sentenced to long prison terms, only Jonker gets away lightly and after six months of pre-trial detention, after which he returns to his still loved Mirella. For Inspector Curmudgeon, the case comes to an unusually happy ending. After a month of recovery, he is released from the clinic and celebrated as a hero by the press for the first time in his life.

shape

Maigret and the Ghost is one of the shortest novels in the series, in which the entire investigation is concentrated in a single day. It is the only Maigret novel to consist of just seven chapters. Typical of Simenon's work are the atmospheric, detailed descriptions and the authentic drawings of the figures. The language remains simple and easy to understand. Julian Symons describes some tricks and techniques of concise summary that are typical of the late Maigret novels. These include, for example, one-way phone calls that stretch over half a page and whose sole purpose is to convey information, a method that is both effective and tiring.

interpretation

Within the Maigret series, the novels that revolve around Inspector Lognon alias Inspector Curmudgeon, and in which the inspector regularly has to cede the solution of his cases to Commissioner Maigret despite self-sacrificing duty, form a separate part series, that with the novel Maigret and the Ghost finds its conclusion. Only at the end of his last series appearance does the inspector receive the satisfaction he longed for in the form of public recognition. Yet Lognon cannot get out of his skin and spends his own convalescence tending to his wife rather than enjoying his late triumph. In addition to the curmudgeon figure, Maigret und das Gespenst focuses on the psychological confrontation between the stubborn, bourgeois inspector and the intelligent, arrogant art connoisseur Jonker. It leads Maigret into a milieu that is particularly alien to him: that of wealth, conceit and snobbery. Only when she interrogates Mirella, who comes from the south of France, is Maigret able to look behind the facade, and he realizes that she, like him, comes from the environment of the “little people”, which immediately makes him feel connected to her. Maigret's reply to Jonker's accusation that the inspector could not understand him because he was not a collector becomes a key sentence in the novel. Maigret simply replies: “I collect people…” Simenon's biographer Stanley G. Eskin adds that Maigret has this in common with his author.

For Dieter Paul Rudolph , the focus of the novel is primarily on three couples, who provide insights into "the perfectly normal married existence and its abysses". On the one hand there is the marriage of the Lognons, in which Madame Lognon pretends to be bedridden to her husband because she is chronically ill, in order to force him to take care of her. The arrangement of the rich Dutch art dealer Jonkers and his much younger and beguilingly beautiful wife Mirella, who lead an open marriage , is completely different . The relationship between the Maigrets, on the other hand, is hardly a partnership anymore, but rather a merger of two people, of whom it is stated at one point that they do not address each other by their first names or nicknames because they feel as if they have long since become one. In this identity it is for Rudolph Madame Maigret, whose individuality has fallen by the wayside. She cares for her husband, but always stays in the background, and as the climax of her fulfillment the novel describes a moment when the information she has gathered, and thus herself, prove useful in the case of her husband. On the other hand, Maigret always depends on the care of his wife and the framework she has set, he is at least as dependent on her as she is on him.

reception

According to Dieter Paul Rudolph, Maigret und das Gespenst is one of the “more conventional” Maigret novels, which, unlike in other cases by the commissioner, is also “clarified according to the genre”. Tilman Spreckelsen sums up: “What at first looks like a particularly inscrutable case, marches straight to an anticipated end in the second half of the novel.” For Detlef Richter, Simenon sets “a high pace at the beginning, increasing the tension and pace even further.” until the end". Therefore, Maigret and the Ghost is "one of the most exciting Maigret novels". Julian Symons describes a “compellingly interesting”, but at the same time “highly improbable” plot about art fraud. The novel from the late phase of the Maigret series is "not the best year, but still very acceptable".

The novel was filmed three times: as part of the television series with Jean Richard (France, 1971), Kinya Aikawa (Japan, 1978) and Bruno Cremer (France, 1994).

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Maigret et le fantôme . Presses de la Cité, Paris 1964 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the Phantom . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1965.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the Phantom . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Heyne, Munich 1973.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the ghost . Translation: Barbara Heller. Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-21760-9 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the ghost . Complete Maigret novels in 75 volumes, volume 62. Translation: Barbara Heller. Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23862-4 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographie de Georges Simenon 1946 à 1967 on Toutesimenon.com, the website of Omnibus Verlag.
  2. ↑ Maigret et le fantôme 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. 58.
  4. ↑ a b c Maigret of the Month: Maigret et le fantôme (Maigret and the Ghost, Maigret and the Apparition) on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  5. ^ A b Detlef Richter: Maigret and the ghost (Georges Simenon); Volume 62 . On leser-welt.de.
  6. ↑ a b Julian Symons : The Hatter's Phantoms and Maigret and the Apparition by Georges Simenon . In: The New York Times, November 21, 1976.
  7. ^ A b Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret Marathon 62: The Ghost . On FAZ.net from July 3, 2009.
  8. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , p. 406.
  9. ↑ Georges Simenon: Maigret and the ghost . Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23862-4 , p. 164.
  10. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , p. 393.
  11. ↑ a b Dieter Paul Rudolph : La protoagoniste inconnue . In the blog Watching the detectives .
  12. ↑ "an absorbingly interesting but outstandingly unlikely plot about art frauds [...] not the best vintage but still very acceptable". Quotes from: Julian Symons: The Hatter's Phantoms and Maigret and the Apparition by Georges Simenon . In: The New York Times, November 21, 1976.
  13. ↑ Maigret Films & TV on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.