Maigret and the Nahour case

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Maigret and the Nahour case (French: Maigret et l'affaire Nahour ) is a crime novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It is the 65th novel in a series of 75 novels and 28 short stories about the detective Maigret . The novel was written in Epalinges from February 2 to 8, 1966 and was pre-published in 27 parts by the French daily Le Figaro from November 22 to December 23 of that year . The book was published in 1967 by Presses de la Cité . The first German translation by Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau was published in 1969 by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in an anthology with Maigret and the Thief and Maigret in Kur . In 1985 the Diogenes Verlag published a new translation by Sibylle Powell.

On an icy January night, Dr. Pardon me, a close friend of Maigret, the wound of a young woman who was shot at. But his patient and her companion disappear as suddenly as they appeared. When a wealthy Lebanese professional player named Nahour was found shot the next morning , Inspector Maigret quickly made the connection between the mysterious couple and the "Nahour case".

content

View from the Place de la République onto the Boulevard Voltaire

It's Friday, January 14th, in a particularly cold winter in Paris . The doctor Dr. Pardon, with whom Commissioner Maigret has been friends for more than ten years, the doorbell rang in the middle of the night by a mysterious couple. He treats a gunshot wound in the woman's back while the man tries to convince him that he accompanied the chance acquaintance to the doctor after she was shot from a moving car on Boulevard Voltaire. But before Dr. Sorry to be able to record the personal details of their nocturnal visitors, the couple uses the opportunity to flee together when they clean their instruments after their work is done.

The next morning, Commissioner Maigret was called to a villa on avenue du Parc de Montsouris, where the Lebanese Félix Nahour was found shot. Nahour was the offspring of an internationally active banking family, but earned his living as a professional gambler in casinos . It quickly turns out that the mysterious patient Dr. Pardons his wife Évelina Nahour, a Dutch woman and former Miss Europe , whose young marriage with the rich Lebanese has been shattered for years. Her night companion is her lover Vicente Alvaredo, a Colombian who studies in Paris and is also a descendant of a wealthy clan. That night they both left for Amsterdam , where they found shelter with Évelina's childhood friend Anna Keegel.

Rue du Parc-de-Montsouris near the Parc Montsouris

When interviewing the residents of Villa Nahour, Maigret feels that he has been lied to on all sides. Louise Boudin, the cleaning lady who found the body, is obstinate. Nelly Velthuis, Évelina's maid, is not only Dutch like her mistress, she also shows the same carefree naivety that Maigret cannot tell whether it is real or played. Finally, there is the Lebanese Fouad Ouéni, a mixture of Nahour's secretary and family friend, who shows an alibi in a casino that cannot be confirmed and who, with his arrogant demeanor, turns the interrogation situation around in order to get the inspector into the background of the crime to ask. Only Alvaredo, whom Ouéni repeatedly tries to cast suspicion on, Maigret seems sincere in his love for the beautiful Dutch woman, whom he intends to marry against all the reservations of his family clan.

Despite all the lies, it turns out in the end that Évelina announced to her husband on the night in question that she was leaving him to marry her Colombian lover. Nahour, for whom a divorce was unthinkable, threatened his wife with a gun. Alvaredo and Ouéni were present in this situation, but it was the latter who intervened and shot his long-time friend Nahour, whose pistol simultaneously released a grazing shot at his wife. Superficially, feelings of revenge drove the secretary to his act, because he felt humiliated by the dependence on his rich compatriot. But Maigret finds out that Ouéni had been Évelina's secret lover for years, whose husband he shot to protect his lover and at the same time incriminate his rival Alvaredo. Even after Ouéni's arrest, the real motive did not come to light until Maigret had to testify the truth under oath a year later in the jury trial . The public turmoil caused by the relationship between Nahour's widow and his secretary destroys the future plans of the Dutch woman and her Colombian admirer. Maigret feels that he failed and that Ouéni, despite being sentenced to prison, ended up doing what he wanted.

interpretation

Tilman Spreckelsen describes how in the course of the Maigret series from 1931 to 1972 the figure of the inspector remains just as constant as his age, which is always around 50 years, but the décor increasingly approaches modernity. In Maigret and the Nahour case, there are modern cars, television has made its way, and telephone calls no longer rely on manual switching. However, the police's modern methods of investigation are not to the taste of the commissioner, who prefers to solve his cases through human understanding rather than through the “technical knick-knacks” that are part of an evidence-based investigation. According to Fenton Bresler, most of the criminal analysis methods in the Maigret novels are not described convincingly, which also applies to the paraffin test in Maigret and the Nahour case , after which the use of firearms could be determined five days after the crime. Simenon commented on the dislike of his novel hero against modern police work at the end of the 1970s: "If Maigret were still with the police today, he would quickly submit his resignation". In any case, Jochen Schmidt notices a clearly noticeable “reluctance to serve and use new methods” in the novel.

The “hero” of the Maigret novels, as world and word put it, always remains the human being. The commissioner analyzes the people involved in the case with all their weaknesses and thus comes to deeper knowledge about the people. Maigret's empathy goes so far that he regularly identifies with the victim, the perpetrator or other people involved in the case, which, according to Francis Lacassin , brings him close to an actor who has to conjure up new roles from a limited pool. In Maigret and the Nahour case , the commissioner describes at one point that he “should actually be at home in any milieu. For example, you should be familiar with casinos, international banking, with Lebanese Maronites and Mohammedans , with foreign bistros in the Latin Quarter and in Saint-Germain and with young Colombians, not to mention Dutch and beauty contests . ”But despite the foreign cultures , with whom Maigret has to do in the novel, it turns out for him in the end that people are not very different in their essence, in their “innermost instincts and motivations”.

In response to a question from his assistant Janvier, Commissioner Maigret expresses his deep-seated distrust in the investigation of a case: “Do you think that she? … ”“ Don't forget that I never believe anything until a case is closed. ”And with a skeptical smile he added,“ And even then… ”“ According to Murielle Wenger, Maigret's approach differs significantly from the deductive analysis of Hercule Poirot , who uses his gray matter solves the cases like a challenging puzzle. Maigret, on the other hand, is primarily concerned with understanding the act. René Descartes' formula “ I think, therefore I am .” He stops “I don't think. I'm looking for. " In general, Commissioner Maigret is deeply skeptical of any judgment on people. At the end of the novel, he is faced with the dilemma of hiding the knowledge that he had about the affair between the secretary Ouéni and the dead man's wife or of making a statement that would interfere with the Dutch woman's planned wedding. When he is forced under oath to incriminate Évelina Nahour, he feels like a traitor and then confesses to his friend pardon: "I have failed".

reception

The New Yorker described Maigret and the Nahour case as one of the late novels in the Maigret series, ranking “among its very best” in terms of atmosphere, plot twists and turns, and the quality of Maigret's insights. For Jochen Schmidt, however, the same novel was one of the “weaker books” in the series. Tilman Spreckelsen spoke of an "extremely difficult and opaque case", in which Maigret was characterized primarily by his "stupid tenacity". According to Welt und Wort , the commissioner "has great difficulty penetrating the confused thicket of suspicions and, above all, lies, before the motives and course of the act become clear to him."

The novel was filmed in 1978 as part of the French television series with Jean Richard as Commissioner Maigret.

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Maigret et l'affaire Nahour . Presses de la Cité, Paris 1967 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the thief . Maigret and the Nahour case. Maigret in cure . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1969.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the Nahour case . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Heyne, Munich 1970.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the Nahour case . Translation: Sibylle Powell. Diogenes, Zurich 1985, ISBN 3-257-21250-X .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the Nahour case . All Maigret novels in 75 volumes, volume 65. Translation: Sibylle Powell. Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23865-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographie de Georges Simenon 1946 à 1967 on Toutsimenon.com, the website of Omnibus Verlag.
  2. ↑ Maigret et l'affaire Nahour 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. 56.
  4. ^ A b Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret Marathon 65: The Nahour case . On FAZ.net from July 31, 2009.
  5. ^ Fenton Bresler: Georges Simenon. In search of the "naked" person . Ernst Kabel, Hamburg 1985, ISBN 3-921909-93-7 , p. 345.
  6. ↑ a b Jochen Schmidt : Gangsters, victims, detectives: a type history of the crime novel . Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 3-548-34488-7 , p. 189.
  7. ↑ a b Simenon Georges: Maigret and the thief. Maigret and the Nahour case. Maigret in cure . In: Welt und Wort , Volume 24/1969, p. 193.
  8. ^ Francis Lacassin : Maigret or: The Key to the Heart . On Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  9. ↑ Georges Simenon: Maigret and the Nahour case . Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23865-5 , p. 78.
  10. ↑ 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. 47.
  11. ↑ Georges Simenon: Maigret and the Nahour case . Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23865-5 , p. 97.
  12. ↑ Maigret of the Month: Maigret et l'affaire Nahour (Maigret and the Nahour Case) on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  13. ↑ Georges Simenon: Maigret and the Nahour case . Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23865-5 , p. 185.
  14. ↑ 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 , pp. 54, 56.
  15. ^ "It ranks - in atmosphere, in tricks and twists of plot, in the quality of Maigret's insights - among his very best." In: The New Yorker , Volume 58/1983, p. 114.
  16. ^ Films & TV on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.