Maigret and the man on the bench

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Maigret and the Man on the Bench (French: Maigret et l'homme du banc ) is a crime novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It is the 41st novel in a series of 75 novels and 28 short stories about the detective Maigret . Written from September 11 to 19, 1952 in Lakeville , Connecticut , the novel was published in January of the following year by the Paris publisher Presses de la Cité and at the same time printed in 29 episodes from January 31 to March 3, 1953 in the daily Le Figaro . The first German translation by Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau was published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in 1954 as the first volume in the newly started Maigret series. In 1978 Diogenes Verlag published a new translation by Annerose Melter.

A man is found on the Parisian boulevards who was murdered from behind by a knife. For the examining magistrate Coméliau, one thing quickly became clear: it can only be an uninteresting robbery . But the victim's colorless, orderly life as a small warehouse manager and an oppressed husband does not seem to match his dandy-like appearance. Inspector Maigret finds out that the dead man was hiding a secret. Instead of working, he spent his days on the benches in downtown Paris.

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View from the Place de la République onto the Boulevard Saint-Martin

It was Monday, October 19, the birthday of Madame Maigret's sister, when a dead man was found in a back alley on Paris' Boulevard Saint-Martin with the murder weapon, a commercially available knife, in his back. The murdered man's papers identify him as Louis Thouret, in his mid-40s, living in Juvisy-sur-Orge and a warehouse manager at the Parisian trading company Kaplan & Zanin. But even though the company had shut down three years ago, Louis would leave his apartment every morning, supposedly to go to work. However, his wife Emilie would never have allowed him to wear such an eye-catching tie as the dead man's or his dandy-like yellow shoes, color “duck poop”.

Maigret soon finds out about the dead man's double life . After his wife told him for a lifetime that she could not keep up with the successful husbands of her two sisters, he withheld his resignation from her. With borrowed money, he fooled his family into continuing to receive salaries until he suddenly seemed to have actually become wealthy, although he spent his days idly on the benches on the Grands Boulevards . In Paris he had taken a furnished room with Mariette Gibon, a former prostitute who mostly housed women from the milieu. Here he hid the elegant clothes he wore during the day from his wife, and here he met his lover Antoinette Machère, a police widow and packer from his previous company.

Bank in the Jardin du Luxembourg

In contrast to his wife, Thouret's daughter Monique soon discovered her father and blackmailed him together with her young friend Albert Jorisse, who has disappeared since Thouret's death. To do this, the police find Jef Schramek alias "Fred the Clown", a petty criminal who also looms in the streets of Paris and was seen together with the murdered man. It turns out that both of them are responsible for a series of thefts on Grands Boulevards. Thouret watched the local shops from a bank until he identified the weak points in the daily routine of the employees. Schramek then had himself locked in the shops during his lunch break and stole the cash register. While the "clown" quickly gambled away his share in horse races, Thouret hid his part of the booty in the cupboard of his Parisian hideout. However, the cash box has disappeared.

Eventually Jorisse is picked up, but he turns out to be a naive fellow full of lofty plans, whom Maigret only describes as a “crook” at the beginning and later simply as an “idiot”. Jorisse had Monique hired her for the blackmail, believing that his girlfriend was expecting a child and needed the money to take him to South America, where they could marry without their parents' consent. Only a comparison with Monique, who was never pregnant and has lost all interest in her companion without any financial incentive, robs him of his illusions. The murderer, however, was a completely different one: Marco, the young lover of the landlady Mariette Gibon, had killed her lodger to prevent the robbery of Thouret's money from being exposed.

interpretation

For Murielle Wenger, the focus of the novel is the “man on the bench”, a “poor soul” typical of Simenon who develops longing for a different, better life out of the ordinaryness of her existence, which she can in part realize, however for a limited time only. The fact that Maigret finds out about the original life at all assumes Thouret's violent demise because of his position as detective inspector of the homicide squad. Such a "gentle middle-aged slipper hero" is typical of many of Simenon's works. However, compensating for job losses through an ingenious method of robbing department stores makes Thouret appear more like a "more eccentric version" of the Simenon type. Wenger refers to a very similar plot in the Maigret story Man Does Not Kill Poor People , where the victim also escapes an unhappy marriage through a double life, which is expressed not least in special clothing. One of the early novels in the Maigret and the late Monsieur Gallet series also shows a family constellation in which the protagonist suffers from his wife and is blackmailed by his own offspring.

In order to track down the crime, Inspector Maigret has to empathize with the victim, which leads so far in the novel that he begins to imitate Thouret's behavior, gestures and facial expressions, until Madame Maigret hardly more than hers when she goes to the cinema in the evening Able to recognize spouses. Such intense empathy can be found in numerous novels of the Maigret series, for example in Maigret and the maid , Maigret and the dancer and Maigret and the young dead woman . The bond between the inspector and the victim is also symbolized by his yellow shoes, which evoke long-forgotten longings in Maigret from the days when he was newly married and wanted to put on a raise in such shoes, which Madame Maigret did not agree to. For Thouret, the yellow shoes are a sign of freedom, prosperity and a new life and almost take on the dimensions of a fetish. A second thing symbol in the novel is the public bank. It initially marks the hero's social status as an impoverished outsider who no longer belongs to bourgeois society. But it also makes Thouret a modern stroller and gives him the leisure to observe the company from the outside. At the bank, Thouret developed a new, sharpened view of the goings-on in the shops, for him it became a portal to prosperity and freedom. Finally, a third sign of particular importance is the Parisian rain, which sets the tone and atmosphere of the novel and determines individual scenes such as the funeral of the murder victim. It is no coincidence that a raincoat shop across from his home bank started Thouret's criminal career.

Stanley G. Eskin refers to the autobiographical background of Maigret and the man on the bench . So Simenon transferred the bourgeois petty bourgeoisie, which he always accused of his mother, to the figure of Madame Thouret, and even the motif of the canary , which does not sing because a female was turned on instead of a male, goes back to a childhood experience from Simenon's mother. For Tilman Spreckelsen , Juvisy-sur-Orge and Paris form the poles of the plot between the hero's family prison and his dream of freedom. In the connection between the suburbs and the capital, he is reminded of a picture by Paul Almásy : Nocturnal road traffic between Paris and Juvisy , which depicts the bond between the cities through the traffic lights in an open photo aperture.

reception

Rupert Davies in Murder on Monday (1962)

For Murielle Wenger, the strength of the novel Maigret and the man on the bench lies in the mixture of a rather sad, gray mood with various light, comical elements, including Simenon's Corsican assistant Santoni and the petty criminal Schrameck. A group of well-drawn figures twine around the central figure, the man on the bench. Tilman Spreckelsen finds his fate sad and ridiculous at the same time, which is surrounded by a “touch of duck poop”.

Oliver Hahn from maigret.de judged: “A gripping tale that you can read through in one go.” Kirkus Reviews compared with a precision instrument: “Good Simenon - like a pulsar watch, easy to read and deviates in the four months between publication dates not a second. ”The Stuttgarter Nachrichten drew the conclusion:“ A big city novel? Maybe. A detective novel? Yes. From Simenon. So more than that. "

The novel was filmed a total of five times. The first implementation was the episode Murder on Monday in the British television series with Rupert Davies from 1962. Further television episodes were made in the Maigret series with Jean Richard (France, 1973), Boris Tenin (Soviet Union, 1973), Kinya Aikawa (Japan , 1978) and Bruno Cremer (France, 1993). In 1955, the Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation produced the radio play adaptation by Peter Glas , The Yellow Shoes of Mr. Berthier . Speakers included Fritz Straßner , Charlotte Scheyer-Herold , Eva-Ingeborg Scholz , Hans Clarin , Elisabeth Goebel , Kurt Meisel and Otto Wernicke as an unnamed commissioner.

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Maigret et l'homme du banc . Presses de la Cité, Paris 1953 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the man on the bench . Translation by Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1954.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the man on the bench . Translation by Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Heyne, Munich 1968.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the man on the bench. Annerose Melter in Romanian. Diogenes, Zurich 1978, ISBN 3-257-20504-X .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the man on the bench . (= All Maigret novels in 75 volumes. Volume 42). Annerose Melter in Romanian. Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23841-9 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographie de Georges Simenon 1946 à 1967 on Toutesimenon.com, the website of Omnibus Verlag.
  2. ↑ Maigret et l'homme du banc on the page of Yves Martina.
  3. ^ Günter Häntzschel, Adrian Hummel, Jörg Zedler: German-language book culture of the 1950s. Fictional literature in sources, analyzes and interpretations. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2009, ISBN 978-3-447-05656-4 , p. 176.
  4. ↑ Oliver Hahn: Bibliography of German-language editions. In: Georges-Simenon-Gesellschaft (Ed.): Simenon-Jahrbuch 2003 . Wehrhahn, Laatzen 2004, ISBN 3-86525-101-3 , pp. 67-68.
  5. ↑ a b c Maigret of the Month: Maigret et l'homme du banc (Maigret and the Man on the Bench, Maigret and the Man on the Boulevard) on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  6. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , p. 399.
  7. ↑ Michel Lemoine: The method of investigation according to Maigret: A methodical absence of method? on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  8. ↑ Michel Lemoine: Félicie est là. In: Robert Frickx, Raymond Trousson (eds.): Lettres françaises de Belgique. Dictionnaire of the oeuvre. I. Le roman . Duclout Paris 1988, ISBN 2-8011-0755-7 , p. 190.
  9. ^ David Platten: The Pleasures of Crime. Reading Modern French Crime Fiction . Rodopi, Amsterdam 2011, ISBN 978-90-420-3429-7 , pp. 56-58.
  10. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , pp. 43, 393.
  11. ↑ Nocturnal road traffic between Paris and Juvisy. ( Memento from February 18, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ) Paul Almasy, around 1948.
  12. ↑ a b Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret Marathon 41: The man on the bench . On FAZ.net . January 25, 2009.
  13. ↑ Maigret and the man on the bench on maigret.de.
  14. ^ "Good Simenon - like a Pulsar watch, easy to read and it doesn't vary more than a second in four months between appearances." In: Maigret and the Man on the Bench at Kirkus Reviews.
  15. ↑ Georges Simenon: Maigret and the man on the bench. ( Memento of November 14, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) at Diogenes Verlag .
  16. ↑ Maigret Films & TV on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  17. ↑ The yellow shoes of Mr. Berthier in the ARD radio play database .