Maigret and the Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien

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Maigret and the Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien (French: Le Pendu de Saint-Pholien ) is a crime novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It was written between the summer of 1930 in Morsang-sur-Seine and the autumn of 1930 in Beuzec-Conq and was published in February of the following year by Verlag Fayard together with Maigret and the late Monsieur Gallet . The two novels formed the prelude to the 75 novels and 28 short story series about the detective Maigret . The first German translation by Harold Effberg was published by the Schlesische Verlagsanstalt in 1934 under the title Der Schatten . In 1966 Heyne Verlag published the translation Maigret under the Anarchists by Joachim Nehring . In 1981 Diogenes Verlag published a new translation by Sibylle Powell under the title Maigret and the Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien .

On a whim, Maigret pursues a suspicious man and swaps his suitcase. When the stranger then commits suicide, Maigret feels complicit in the death. In the dead man's suitcase there is only a worn suit full of blood stains and an ID card with a false identity. The search for further traces leads the commissioner to Bremen , Paris , Reims and Liège . But in every place he meets a man who is always one step ahead of him.

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Bremen Central Station in 1920

Maigret is on a business trip in Liège in late autumn . His work is already done, he is while he is in a café when he notices a poor tramp who is handling 1000 franc notes. The inspector follows the stranger to the post office, where he sends the banknotes in an envelope to an address in Paris. When the man buys a suitcase, Maigret does the same on a whim. He also follows him on the train journey to Bremen and swaps the suitcases at a favorable moment. Only in the hotel does the stranger realize that the contents of his suitcase have disappeared. On the spur of the moment, he pulls out a revolver and shoots himself in the head.

Maigret is struck by the fatal consequences of his prank. In the swapped suitcase there is nothing but a forged identity card in the name of Louis Jeunet and a blood-stained suit that is a few sizes too big for the dead man. But a man appears in the Bremen morgue who seems to know the dead person: the Belgian sales representative Joseph van Damme, who tries to question the inspector with his jovial manner. Back in Paris, several witnesses report a photo of the deceased being published. His wife Jeanne Jeunet describes her husband as a drinker who was thrown off course and left her two years ago. Another picture paints Armand Lecocq d'Arneville, who recognizes his brother Jean in the dead, a well-read, ambitious young man with whom all contact has been broken for ten years.

Another lead leads Maigret to Reims , where the deceased is said to have been seen together with the deputy bank director Maurice Belloir. In his house Maigret not only meets Jef Lombard, a photo engraver from Brussels, and the Parisian sculptor Gaston Janin, but also Joseph van Damme. The sales representative tries to push Maigret into the Marne with a flat tire near Luzancy , but Maigret anticipates the attack and is able to save himself. When he visits Lombard in Liège, he not only comes across countless paintings of the hanged in his studio, but also van Damme again. Maigret always stays one step ahead of him and destroys the articles on an incident on February 15 ten years ago in the archives of all Brussels newspapers. In the end, Maigret finds out that on that day a young painter named Émile Klein hanged himself at the gate of the Saint-Pholien church .

Church Saint-Pholien in Liege

Maigret meets van Damme, Lombard and Belloir again in Klein's shabby studio near the church. And here at last the events ten years ago come to light. It was seven young people who formed a conspiratorial group called The Apocalyptic Kumpane : the three artists Lombard, Janin and Klein and the students van Damme, Belloir, Lecocq d'Arneville and Willy Mortier. The latter, coming from a wealthy family, was the only one who kept mocking distance from the group of self-proclaimed geniuses who philosophized, joked, drank and smoked until dawn at their meetings in Klein's studio. The apocalyptic cronies read the apocalypse , were drawn to anarchism , and raised the question of what crimes they were capable of. Klein, in particular, got into the idea of ​​murder. And one Christmas Eve he stabbed Mortier, who did not want to give the group any drinks, in the stomach, whereupon Belloir stepped in and strangled the injured man.

The dead man was thrown into the flood of the Meuse and never found again. But the act left its mark on everyone involved. The group broke up, all of them left Brussels in the following weeks except for Lecocq d'Arneville and Klein, who committed suicide two months later. While van Damme, Belloir and Lombard succeeded in repressing the past through work and building a new life in the following ten years, Lecocq d'Arneville was never able to free himself from the memory of Mortier and Klein. Three years ago he began blackmailing his ex- pals , not for the money he burned but to ruin them. The blood-stained suit that Belloir had worn on the evening of the crime served as leverage. Maigret, who got to know the families of the bourgeois anarchists in the course of the investigation and calculated that five children are involved in the incident, traveled back to Paris after the confession and filed the case.

background

After Simenon had invented his detective Maigret in the winter of 1929/1930 and wrote the first novel Pietr-le-Letton , the following three Maigret novels, Monsieur Gallet, décédé , Le Charretier de la "Providence" and Le Pendu de Saint-Pholien in quick succession in the summer of 1930 in Morsang-sur-Seine , where he was anchored with his boat. In February 1931, Simenon's house publisher Fayard , in which the writer had mainly written penny novels under a pseudonym, published the first two Maigret novels in a double pack in order to increase the impact. Monsieur Gallet, décédé and Le Pendu de Saint-Pholien were selected to kick off the series . To promote the new series, Simenon, who published under his own name for the first time, organized a large costume ball with 400 invited and 700 other uninvited guests in the Boule Blanche nightclub on Montparnasse . The Bal Anthropométrique , named after the identification department of the Paris Criminal Police, became the talk of the day all over France and made Commissioner Maigret known before anyone had even read any of his books.

The events of the novel have a real background in Simenon's life. Many of the locations, not least the Saint-Pholien church , can be found in Liège, the city where Simenon grew up. In his youth, the writer himself belonged from June 1919 to an artist and anarchist group called La Caque around the painter Luc Lafnet , in which he also met his first wife Régine. Simenon later described: “We were an elite. A small group of geniuses brought together by chance. ”One sat around an oil lamp, drank wine and schnapps, slept with women, discussed philosophy, called on God and Satan alike, the views were“ inevitably either gloomy or desperate ”. The motif of the hanged man hanging on the gargoyle of a church was of particular importance to the painters of the group. One of the pictures later became the cover picture of Simenon's novel.

In fact, there was one death in the group. In March 1922, after an excessive night at La Caque , a young drug addict painter named Joseph Jean Kleine was found hanged on the door knocker of the gate of the Saint-Pholien church . Simenon himself had been one of the friends who accompanied little ones home because he was no longer able to walk. Despite unanswered questions about how Kleine could have hanged himself in this condition, the police concluded their investigation with the suspicion of suicide. As a result, La Caque dissolves. Simenon later wrote: “I consider ourselves not guilty [...] At least we acted without intent [...] We did not know the true state of the 'petit little one'. But in the end, didn't we kill him? ”The murder of Willy Mortier is invented in the novel. Many other details match the reality at the time, right down to the modified names - for example, an actual friend of Simenon's from “La Caque” was called Jef Lambert. For Lucille F. Becker, Simenon exhibited absolution for his own feeling of guilt in the grace that Maigret finally grants his apocalyptic cronies . In 1937 Simenon took up the incident about "K.", as it is abbreviated there, in an autobiographical novel in The Crimes of My Friends .

interpretation

Photograph by Dostoevsky from 1863

Stanley G. Eskin describes Maigret and the Hanged Man from Saint-Pholien as a Dostoyevsky cut and explains: “Maigret wades through a sense of guilt, hypocrisy and faint-hearted fear and in the end arrives at a communal corpse in all the cellars.” The scenario reminds him the later Maigret novel Maigret sets a trap . The "corpse in the cellar" of the apparently decent citizens is a frequent motif in Simenon's work, whereby these corpses often turn out to be "relatives of corpses in Simenon's own cellar", which the writer kept at a distance in his actual life but to investigate them in his works with all the greater interest. Josef Quack also draws a comparison with the ideological questions in Dostoyevsky's novels. The group of intellectual nihilists went over to active nihilism, which called into question the most elementary values ​​of humanism , with the question of under what circumstances one would be willing to kill a person . Shortly afterwards, Simenon took up the motive of killing for his own sake again in Maigret Fights for the Head of a Man . In both novels, it is Maigret's own form of “manhunt”, his persistent shadowing of the suspects until he has worn them down through his mere presence, that ultimately leads to the resolution of the case.

For Thomas Narcejac , Maigret and the Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien is an example of how in the early Maigret novels the novelist and the crime writer get in the way of one another, and how the crime story stands in the way of the novel and is partly pushed into the background, to give the atmosphere more space, which in turn softened the drawings of the figures. Julian Symons calls the behavior of Commissioner Maigret at the beginning of the novel "more than unlikely". Simenon's art, however, lies in shaping the improbable in such a way that the reader will accept it and, in spite of all unbelievability, end up reading “interesting convincing novels”. John Raymond refers to Maigret's “extraordinary and general act of forgiveness” at the end of the novel, which is typical of the character of the commissioner who, in solving his cases, seeks to understand rather than to judge. According to Dominique Meyer-Bolzinger, Maigret often takes the place of his opponent in his investigations, which is symbolized in Maigret and the Hanged Man by Saint-Pholien in the exchange of suitcases between the inspector and the suicide. In the end, "a detective novel without a crime, without a victim and ultimately also without a culprit, an empty investigation, brought to an end by fate."

reception

The first Maigret novels were an instant hit. In August 1931, Simenon was named bestseller of the year by publisher Hachette . In 1931, Le Divan magazine recommended Le Pendu de Saint-Pholien as "one of the best detective stories you can get to read". The first English translation of the novel in 1932 was also one of the "above-average stories" for the Saturday Review .

More than three quarters of a century later, Tilman Spreckelsen wrested the sigh in his Maigret marathon : “Mannmannmann, what a crude story!” After a rapid start, the plot becomes “more confused and confused”. He asked himself "why Simenon relies on name change as a cover-up panacea in his third novel". For Frank Böhmert , on the other hand, it was “one of the best Maigret novels”: “Tight, tight, haunting. As always. ”He particularly emphasized“ the nasty entanglement that Maigret is responsible for someone's death herself and then gets on the trail of an unpunished murder. ”

The novel was filmed three times: in the television series with Rupert Davies (1961), Jan Teulings (1968) and Jean Richard (1981). In 2003 SFB - ORB , MDR and SWR produced a radio play adapted by Susanne Feldmann and Judith Kuckart . The speakers included Christian Berkel , Friedhelm Ptok and Christian Brückner .

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Le Pendu de Saint-Pholien. Fayard, Paris 1931 (first edition).
  • Georg Simenon: The shadow. Translation: Harold Effberg. Schlesische Verlagsanstalt, Berlin 1934.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret among the anarchists. Translation: Joachim Nehring . Heyne, Munich 1966.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the hanged man of Saint-Pholien. Translation: Sibylle Powell. Diogenes, Zurich 1981, ISBN 3-257-20816-2 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the hanged man of Saint-Pholien. Complete Maigret novels in 75 volumes, volume 3. Translation: Sibylle Powell. Diogenes, Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-257-23803-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Notice bibliographique on Le pendu de Saint-Pholien on the Maigret page by Yves Martina.
  2. ↑ Oliver Hahn: Bibliography of German-language editions. In: Georges-Simenon-Gesellschaft (Ed.): Simenon-Jahrbuch 2003 . Wehrhahn, Laatzen 2004, ISBN 3-86525-101-3 , p. 57.
  3. ^ Fenton Bresler: Georges Simenon. In search of the "naked" person. Ernst Kabel, Hamburg 1985, ISBN 3-921909-93-7 , pp. 120-123.
  4. ↑ In the footsteps of Simenon ( Memento of the original from March 7, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.liege.be archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Map of the city of Liège in German. (pdf; 911 kB)
  5. ↑ Patrick Marnham: The Man Who Wasn't Maigret. The life of Georges Simenon. Knaus, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-8135-2208-3 , pp. 12, 112-125, citations pp. 114, 116.
  6. ↑ Patrick Marnham: The Man Who Wasn't Maigret. The life of Georges Simenon. Pp. 12, 135-143, citation p. 142.
  7. ↑ Maigret of the Month: Le Pendu de Saint-Pholien (Maigret and the hundred gibbets) on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  8. ↑ Lucille F. Becker: Georges Simenon. House, London 2006, ISBN 1-904950-34-5 , p. 49.
  9. ↑ The crimes of my friends on maigret.de.
  10. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography. Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , pp. 158-159.
  11. ↑ 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. 58, 61.
  12. ^ Thomas Narcejac : The Art of Simenon . Routledge & Kegan, London 1952, p. 102.
  13. ↑ Julian Symons : Simenon and his Maigret. In: Claudia Schmölders , Christian Strich (Ed.): About Simenon . Diogenes, Zurich 1988, ISBN 3-257-20499-X , p. 125.
  14. ^ "Strange and general act of pardon". In: John Raymond: Simenon in Court . Hamilton, London 1968, ISBN 0-241-01505-7 , p. 158.
  15. ↑ "un roman policier sans crime, sans victime et finalement sans coupable, une enquête vide et menée par le hasard". In: Dominique Meyer-Bolzinger: Une méthode clinique dans l'enquête policière: Holmes, Poirot, Maigret . Éditions du Céfal, Brussels 2003, ISBN 2-87130-131-X , pp. 105, 112.
  16. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography. Pp. 149, 168.
  17. ↑ "better than average stories". In: Saturday Review. Volume 9, 1932, p. 133.
  18. ↑ Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret Marathon 3: The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien . On FAZ.net from April 26, 2008.
  19. ↑ Read: Georges Simenon, Maigret and the Hanged Man from Saint-Pholien (1930) ( Memento of July 10, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ) in Frank Böhmert's blog .
  20. ↑ Maigret Films & TV on Steve Trussel's website.
  21. ↑ Maigret and the Hanged Man from St. Pholien in the HörDat audio play database .