Maigret and the Saturday client

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Maigret and the Saturday Client (French: Maigret et le client du samedi ) is a crime novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It is the 59th novel in a series of 75 novels and 28 short stories about the detective Maigret . The novel was written from February 21 to 27, 1962 in Echandens and was published from November 15 to 8/9. Pre-published December 1962 in 21 episodes by the French daily Le Figaro . The book edition was published at the same time in November of that year by the Paris publisher Presses de la Cité . The first German translation by Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau was published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in 1963 as Maigret and his Saturday visitor . In 1985 Diogenes Verlag published a new translation by Angelika Hildebrandt-Essig under the title Maigret and the Saturday Client .

For weeks now, every Saturday on the Quai des Orfèvres, there has been an inconspicuous man who the inspectors nicknamed "Saturday Client". Apparently he wants to speak to Commissioner Maigret, but he has always disappeared before the Commissioner finds time for him. One Saturday evening he visits Maigret in his apartment after work to announce that he will kill his wife and her lover.

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Rue Tholozé in Paris

It's a Saturday evening in January in Paris . Maigret is looking forward to the evening with Madame Maigret, her Quiche Lorraine and the newly acquired television. But there is already a guest waiting for him in his apartment who is familiar to him from the Quai des Orfèvres. For two months now, the man with the nickname “Saturday client” has been regularly showing up at the police station on Saturdays, requesting Commissioner Maigret to speak, so that he can change his mind at the last minute and quickly leave the police station again. In Maigret's apartment, too, the man hesitated for a long time before revealing the reason for his visit: he was planning to kill his wife and her lover.

Léonard Planchon is an inconspicuous man in his mid-30s whose only external peculiarity is a harelip that suffered from for a lifetime. When he met 18-year-old Renée nine years ago, she was the first woman who was ready to accept him. They both married soon and had a daughter named Isabelle. When the owner of a small painting company hired the handsome, self-confident foreman Roger Prou, the idyll of the supposedly healthy family life fell apart. Prou became Renée Planchon's lover. Both soon lived their relationship so openly that the foreman moved in with the Planchons and pushed Léonard out of the marriage bed onto a couch in the next room. The young, purposeful man also seized the company more and more. The shame-filled planchon spent the evenings away from home and got drunk regularly. But just as regularly he returned to his house at night for fear of losing his wife and company as well as his daughter. He secretly fled with intent to murder the unfaithful wife and his rival, which, however, have so far remained without consequence.

Maigret listens patiently to the painter's life confession. But when he asks what reaction Planchon expects from him, the latter has no answer. The commissioner, for example, arranges regular telephone calls with his guest, through which he hopes to keep the precarious situation under control. At the same time he sends his inspectors Janvier and Lapointe out to secretly scout Planchon's house, which is at the end of Rue Tholozé on Montmartre . On Monday there was one last phone call, during which Planchon was disappointed with Maigret's behavior. Then the painter disappeared from one day to the next.

Maigret interrogates the missing person's wife and her lover. Both claim that Planchon left with two suitcases on Monday evening after Prou ​​bought the company from him for 30,000 francs, for which they can present a contract. But Planchon was way too drunk that evening, his signature turned out to be forged, and the money was found under a loose hallway in Isabelle's room during a house search. Days later, the painter's corpse is found in the Seine with his skull smashed and the lovers arrested on suspicion of murder, whereupon both feelings soon turn from love to hate, and each only tries to accuse their partner of the crime. Ironically, Maigret's testimony before the jury , in which he has to confirm Planchon's intentions to murder, ensures attenuating circumstances in the conviction of the perpetrators. In the end, Maigret feels that she has betrayed the Saturday client.

interpretation

In Maigret and the Saturday client, Simenon breaks many of the rules of the classic crime novel . As in Maigret has scruples, there is no crime at the beginning, but an indefinite declaration of intent, on the basis of which Maigret penetrates into the milieu of the action without official authority. According to Murielle Wenger, he takes on the role of confessor rather than that of a police officer. Stanley G. Eskin also sees Maigret in the novel as a mixture of priest and psychiatrist, whose guest pours his heart out, while Madame Maigret's quiche spoils in the kitchen. In a sense, Planchon seeks advice from the inspector as to whether or not to kill his wife and her lover. Even if he cannot get the desired answer to this, Maigret's sympathy goes out to him, which is always bestowed on the weak and “little people”. His sympathetic reaction is accompanied by numerous personal details: from the wrong clocks in the police station, the police officer starting to catch a cold, to watching TV in the evening in front of the newly purchased TV set. Maigret's connection to the "Saturday client" goes so far that he feels a traitor when he has to testify against the victim in court, much like he feels like a failure after his final testimony in Maigret and the Nahour case .

For Tilman Spreckelsen, Léonard Planchon is a typically Simenonian victim whose whole worldview is based on the constant injustice being inflicted upon them. If there seems to be a brief phase of happiness in her life, as is the case in Planchon's family idyll after marriage, the pendulum of fate then only swings back all the more strongly in the direction of unhappiness. The characters remain completely passive in their suffering, so that the reader's pity is mixed with astonishment at their tolerance. However, the contrast is also typical of Simenon, and so the painter's desolate "family misery" is contrasted with the family happiness of Maigret's friend Dr. Sorry, whose daughter is expecting her second child. In any case, Gavin Lambert goes so far that Planchon, who announces to the commissioner that he wants to kill two people, is actually trying to be killed himself, which he is working towards with his surrender and the escape into alcohol. The painter would rather lose his life than his wife.

reception

Kirkus Reviews described the short novel Maigret and the Saturday Client as "unobtrusive, rapidly progressing, psychologically astute and consistently captivating". For Publishers Weekly , it was "a pleasure to follow the Commissioner through Montmartre as he patiently questions Parisian prostitutes, bartenders and others about Plachon's whereabouts". With each encounter, the commissioner lifts the veil over the crime a little more, until the novel ends in a "carefully drawn, but strangely disappointing resolution". "Unpleasant, very unpleasant," said Tilman Spreckelsen, in any case, the initial position of the novel, and "[what] hides behind it is only more bleak."

The novel was filmed twice as part of television series about Commissioner Maigret: In 1978 Kinya Aikawa played the title role on Japanese television, and in 1985 Jean Richard Maigret played in a French television series.

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Maigret et le client du samedi . Presses de la Cité, Paris 1962 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and his Saturday visitor . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1963.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and his Saturday visitor . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Heyne, Munich 1976, ISBN 3-453-12054-X .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the Saturday client . Translation: Angelika Hildebrandt-Essig. Diogenes, Zurich 1985, ISBN 3-257-21295-X .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the Saturday client . Complete Maigret novels in 75 volumes, volume 59. Translation: Angelika Hildebrandt-Essig. Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23859-4 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographie de Georges Simenon 1946 à 1967 on Toutesimenon.com, the website of Omnibus Verlag.
  2. ↑ Maigret et le client du samedi 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. 72.
  4. ↑ Maigret of the Month: Maigret et le client du samedi (Maigret and the Saturday Caller) on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  5. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , pp. 396, 398.
  6. ↑ 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. 56.
  7. ^ A b Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret-Marathon 59: The Saturday client . On FAZ.net from June 18, 2009.
  8. ^ Gavin Lambert: The Dangerous Edge . Grossmann, New York 1976, ISBN 0-670-25581-5 , p. 185 (also online ).
  9. ^ "This brief novel, published in the US for the first time, is low-keyed, swift-moving, psychologically acute, and absorbing throughout." Quoted from: Maigret and the Saturday Caller on Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 1991.
  10. ↑ “It's a pleasure to follow the inspector through Montmartre as he patiently questions Parisian prostitutes, bartenders and others as to Planchon's whereabouts, stripping away a bit more of the mystery's camouflage with each encounter, arriving finally at a meticulously plotted but strangely disappointing denouement. “Quoted from: Maigret and the Saturday Caller in Publishers Weekly, April 29, 1991.
  11. ↑ Maigret Films & TV on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.