Maigret and the knife knife

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Maigret and the stabber (French: Maigret et le tueur ) is a crime novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It is the 70th novel in a series of 75 novels and 28 short stories about the detective Maigret . The novel was written in Epalinges from April 15 to 21, 1969 and was pre-published in 23 episodes from July 31 to August 29 of that year by the French daily Le Figaro . The book was published in October 1969 by the Paris publisher Presses de la Cité . The first German translation Maigret und der Mörder by Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau was published in 1970 by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in an anthology with Maigret and his childhood friend and Maigret hesitates . In 1990 Diogenes Verlag published a new translation by Josef Winiger under the title Maigret und der Messerstecher .

An attack with seven knife wounds on a young student destroyed the cozy evening that Commissioner Maigret spent with his friend Dr. Pardon wanted to spend. The victim is a son from a wealthy family who indulged in the unusual hobby of recording strangers' voices with his cassette recorder. Maigret wonders whether the voice of the knife can be heard among the numerous recordings of the deceased.

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Rue Popincourt in the 11th arrondissement of Paris
Quai d'Anjou on the Île Saint-Louis

It is a March evening and freezing rain showers have been falling over Paris for days. Maigret is visiting his friend Dr. Pardon me on Boulevard Voltaire when a neighbor calls the doctor to Rue Popincourt, where a man was stabbed seven times with a knife. Antoine Batille, a 21-year-old student and the son of Gérard Batille, the owner of the famous Parisian cosmetics brand Mylène, dies while he is in the hospital emergency room . Inspector Maigret, who happened to be present, took the difficult walk to the Quai d'Anjou on the Île Saint-Louis , where he informed his parents of the murder of their son and had to witness their collapse.

Antoine Batille was a loner who was obsessed with just one passion: to roam the streets of Paris with his cassette recorder and to record conversations between people in various locations. He meticulously archived the recordings in an extensive collection, which he kept in a notebook entitled My Experiences . On his last tape there is a recording of a mysterious conversation from the Café des Amis at the Porte de Versailles, in which three men seem to be planning a criminal coup. Details of the conversation lead to an investigation, at the end of which a gang of art thieves is unearthed. But Commissioner Maigret shows no interest in professional criminals and is happy to leave them to his colleague Grosjean from the National Police . Although there is an obvious connection between the overheard conversation and the subsequent murder of Batille, Maigret cannot imagine that professional criminals stab her victim seven times, but in the end leave the incriminating cassette recorder at the scene.

When the newspapers open with a picture of one of the art thieves and the headline “Is he the murderer?”, This lures the real perpetrator out of his reserve. First he turns to the press and protests against their misrepresentations. Then he calls Maigret personally, and a bond of trust immediately develops between the inspector and the murderer. While the caller is still reluctant to turn himself in, Maigret refrains from prematurely going public with photos of the perpetrator, which he won at Batille's funeral, in order not to drive his disturbed caller into suicide. Instead, he spends a harmonious weekend with his wife in Meung-sur-Loire , which is only clouded by a faint remorse that Maigret could be wrong and that the murderer could find a new victim.

In the following week, the stranger ventures out of his cover and looks for the inspector in his apartment on the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir. There he makes his confession over white wine and cold cuts. His name is Robert Bureau, he is a small insurance clerk of 30 years and comes from Saint-Amand-Montrond , where his sheltered life went off the rails at an early age. At the age of 14, the boy stabbed a classmate to death because he had kissed his youthful crush. The crime went unpunished, but Bureau was never able to let go of what had happened in his mind. Several times he was close to confessing what he had done or to commit another murder in order to get relief. On that March evening under the heavy rainfall, he could no longer control himself and stabbed Antoine Batille, who was a random victim. During his conversation with Commissioner Maigret, Bureau first experiences the understanding that he knows will not be given to him in court. In fact, they do not know what to do with the disturbed psyche of the perpetrator and, like any ordinary murderer, sentenced him to 15 years in prison.

interpretation

According to Murielle Wenger, the novel Maigret and the Stabber falls into two parts: In the first part, different milieus of Paris are presented at the beginning: that of the common people, craftsmen and shopkeepers, where the inspector is at home, that of the upper class on the Île Saint- Louis , to which the Batilles belong, and that of the cafés around the Place de la Bastille with their seedy guests. Subsequently, the arrest of the robber gang leads to suspense and action like in an American harboiled crime thriller. Maigret himself cannot avoid ridiculing the lavishly staged police action as a “cinema”. From the 5th chapter the tone of the novel changes completely. He becomes quieter and more serious; the knife gradually moves into the center of the plot. The gradual approach to the perpetrator is interrupted by an almost carefree excursion by the Maigrets to their weekend house, which seems as if Maigret - like the author Simenon - has to gather momentum for the final interrogation of the murderer. His tragic admission and the subsequent futility of his condemnation leave the reader with a bitter aftertaste.

According to Lucille F. Becker, Maigret intuitively feels that the band of robbers cannot be responsible for the student's death. By stylizing them as murderers in front of the press, he sets a trap for the real perpetrator, who immediately intervenes in protest. Inspector Maigret understands that the stabber is eager to be caught, and when he confesses not only the crime, but his whole life story, Maigret shows his typical understanding that does not judge people. The sympathy of the reader is also turning more and more away from the victim and towards the perpetrator. Through the character of the commissioner, Simenon asks questions about the perpetrator's responsibility for his act, his insanity and possible treatment options. Such questions, which today refer to the field of forensic psychiatry , were not widespread when the novel was written in the late 1960s.

Murielle Wenger sees Maigret and the stabber like Maigret has scruples , Maigret hesitates and Maigret is determined far more by psychological questions before the jury court than by the criminal investigation of a classic crime novel. For Stanley G. Eskin, Maigret plays a mixture of psychiatrist and confessor for the Murderer's Bureau in the novel, much like for the horned planchon in Maigret and the Saturday client . Although the Murderer's Bureau puts his fate in the hands of Maigret, the self-proclaimed “mender of fates”, in the end he receives no help and no prospect of a cure, but is sentenced to an ordinary prison term. In this way, Simenon shows Wenger the senselessness of the judiciary, which is unable to give an answer to the fundamental question of human responsibility. Maigret refrains from commenting on the judgment. But his disappointment is expressed in the final picture in his drooping shoulders, on which he seems to be carrying a heavy load. For Tilman Spreckelsen, the inspector seems to "mourn almost more for those captured than for those who were stabbed."

reception

According to the American monthly magazine The Critic , Maigret and the stabber have arrived in prosperity: He owns a car that he is afraid to drive, a television on which he likes to watch films with Gary Cooper , and a weekend house on top of that Country. The actual story is completely uninteresting compared to the insights into the inspector's life: “Maigret is pursuing a mentally disturbed murderer who gives up mainly because he listens to him on the phone. If you've read a Maigret, you know them all. ”That doesn't mean, however, that you don't expect the next novel impatiently and hope that Madame Maigret and her husband won't have an accident on their trips to the weekend house by then.

The Saturday Review described the novel as "another small triumph for Maigret and Simenon". The salt in the soup is a killer for which the reader is concerned. For Kirkus Reviews , however, the case was reduced to "almost nothing". Maigret only has to wait while anonymous letters and calls lead to a voluntary confession. There is little in the novel beyond Maigret's sad and resigned insight into his daily duties.

The novel was filmed twice as part of television series about Commissioner Maigret. Both films are from 1978. The title roles played Jean Richard (France) and Kinya Aikawa (Japan). In 2019 Walter Kreye read an audio book for Audio Verlag .

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Maigret et le tueur . Presses de la Cité, Paris 1969 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the murderer. Maigret and his childhood friend . Maigret hesitates . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1970.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the murderer . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Heyne, Munich 1971.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the knife cutter . Translation: Josef Winiger . Diogenes, Zurich 1990, ISBN 3-257-21805-2 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the knife cutter . All Maigret novels in 75 volumes, volume 70. Translation: Josef Winiger. Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23870-9 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the knife cutter . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau, Cornelia Künne. Kampa, Zurich 2019, ISBN 978-3-311-13070-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographie de Georges Simenon 1968 à 1989 ( Memento of the original from October 30, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The 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. on Toutsimenon.com, the website of Omnibus Verlag. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / toutsimenon.placedesediteurs.com
  2. ↑ Maigret et le tueur 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. 69.
  4. ↑ a b c Maigret of the Month: Maigret et le tueur (Maigret and the Killer) on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  5. ↑ 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. 22.
  6. ↑ Lucille F. Becker: Georges Simenon . House, London 2006, ISBN 1-904950-34-5 , pp. 44-45.
  7. ^ Maigret of the Month: Les scrupules de Maigret (Maigret Has Scruples) on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  8. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , pp. 402, 406.
  9. ↑ 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. 16.
  10. ^ Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret-Marathon 70: The knife setter . On FAZ.net from September 11, 2009.
  11. ↑ "Maigret persuades a mentally deranged killer to give himself up, mostly by listening to him on the telephone. You read one Maigret, you've read them all. But that doesn't mean that we won't eagerly await the appearance of the next one ". Quoted from: The Critic , volumes 30-31, Thomas Moore Association 1972, p. 90.
  12. ↑ "Here is another small triumph for Maigret and Simenon. The extra something is supplied by a murderer for whom you'll feel concern." In: Saturday Review , Volume 54, 1971, p. 168.
  13. ↑ "Actually the case reduces to next to nothing (Maigret has only to watch and wait) and anonymous phone calls and letters lead to a voluntary confession. There's not much here beyond Maigret's saddened and faintly tired acceptance of what he does and must do from one day to the retributive next. "In Kirkus Reviews ( [1] )
  14. ^ Films & TV on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.