Maigret and the lazy thief

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Maigret and the lazy thief (French: Maigret et le voleur paresseux ) is a crime novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It is the 57th novel in a series of 75 novels and 28 short stories about the detective Maigret . The novel was written in Echandens from January 17 to 23, 1961 and was pre- published in 20 parts from September 5 to 27, 1961 by the French daily Le Figaro . The book was published in November of that year by Presses de la Cité . The first German translation by Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau was published in 1965 by Kiepenheuer & Witsch . In 1988 Diogenes Verlag published a new translation by Stefanie Weiss.

When a man is found murdered in the wintry Bois de Boulogne , Inspector Maigret recognizes a thief in the dead who has accompanied him through his police career for many years. The inspector has respect and almost amicable feelings for the old school criminal, who carefully planned his deeds, always only stole from the rich and never resorted to violence. Maigret racked his brains when the lazy thief got so angry that he hit his head.

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The Lac Inférieur in the wintry Bois de Boulogne

It's a cold January in Paris . Commissioner Maigret is two years before his retirement without being particularly saddened by the fact that he is about to be phased out, as times have changed on the Quai des Orfèvres since restructuring . Maigret's investigation methods are considered out of date, the criminal police now only serve as the stooge of the public prosecutor's office, whose elite lawyers have no practical relevance. The administration is constantly issuing new regulations that must be followed to the letter, and officials spend most of their time on paper rather than on duty.

Even when a man with a smashed skull is found in the Bois de Boulogne, Maigret is not investigated, although Maigret immediately recognizes an old friend in the murder victim: the thief Honoré Cuendet, whom he himself convicted and arrested once. Cuendet was an old-school criminal. He always worked alone and only robbed the wealthy upper class, whose property he explored in detail for weeks. His special modus operandi consisted in unnoticed break-ins in the presence of the owners, apparently to share in their privacy. Maigret felt respect and almost friendship for his old companion on the other side of the law.

Rue La Fayette in Paris

However, the public prosecutor recognizes that the murder of the convicted person is only an account among gangsters and quickly files the case. Only the local inspector Aristide Fumel from the 16th arrondissement , a well-behaved but unsuccessful police officer with notoriously unhappy relationships with women, is allowed to continue to deal with the case and reports the results of the investigation to his colleague Maigret. Like all available forces, the Commissioner must concentrate on a modern gang of criminals whose series of robberies is weighing on the balance sheets of banks and insurance companies. After her last attack on Rue La Fayette, which was followed by a shooting with injured and dead, access to the gang leader Fernand is finally possible, but Maigret is not interested in the following interrogations of the professional criminals.

Instead, he questions Cuendet's mother, who is dependent on her son's regular income, and his inconsolable friend Éveline Schneider, who he advises to hide a suitcase full of stolen goods so that it does not fall to the public prosecutor's office in a later house search. Maigret is certain that he knows what happened: Cuendet broke into the city ​​palace of Florence Wilson, the divorced wife of the rich American Stuart Wilton, who is under the special protection of the French authorities. Here he surprised Florence with her lover, who is of all things Wilton's son. The two killed the thief in order not to let their relationship become public, as both are dependent on Stuart's money. In earlier times Maigret would have summoned the vicious lovers to the quay and interrogated them until they confessed to the murder. But today, such a practice is against the law, and the prosecutor would just laugh at him with his meager clues - two hairs from a now discarded wildcat fur from Wilson's sports car that was used to transport the body. The murder of Cuendet remains unsolved, and only Inspector Fumel takes care of the grieving Éveline, but now for private reasons.

interpretation

According to Josef Quack, Maigret and the lazy thief is “from the first to the last sentence a criticism of criminal law ”, which is denounced as “criminal law of the ruling and possessing social class”. Simenon made his Commissioner Maigret stand unusually clear about the understanding of his profession, whose first priority was not the conviction of criminals: “In reality, our main task is to first protect the state and the incumbent government and institutions, as well as capital , public and private property, and then, at the very end, the life of every single citizen ... "The novel in which the entire police apparatus deals with a series of robberies while a single inspector is assigned to investigate the murder of a petty thief, is conceived as confirmation of this thesis.

A Commissioner Maigret, on the other hand, does not distinguish between innocent citizens and criminals. For him the victim is a human being like any other, and his killer has to be held accountable. On the contrary, it is precisely the "little people" who own Maigret's heart, and so the question of who was able to kill a small, innocent thief in this way is at the beginning of the investigation. He is outraged that the victim was killed to avoid scandal in high society and how his body was carelessly disposed of in the Bois de Boulogne as if it were the carcass of a dead animal. Maigret's sympathy for the dead goes so far that he helps to suppress the stolen goods in order not to rob the thief's mother of the illusion that her good boy will look after her after his death. For Ira Tschimmel, Maigret follows class justice through this act : According to his idealized understanding of justice, he only favors petty bourgeoisie and people from lower social classes against the privileged upper class. It turns out to be a modern Robin Hood or Schinderhannes .

Ulrich Schulz-Buschhaus sees two types of investigations juxtaposed in the novel: On the one hand, the modern search for a band of robbers, in which the entire police apparatus is involved, has a social relevance to which every single police officer has to submit. In contrast to this is Maigret's unofficial, individual investigation, which Maigret carries out out of purely personal sympathy with the victim. With his old-fashioned approach, the Commissioner feels like a personal anachronism in the new era . Nevertheless, it is precisely his special method, in which he slips into the victim's skin, billets himself in his hotel room and dines in the same restaurant as the latter on his last evening, that enables Maigret to solve the case. For Tilman Spreckelsen , Simenon is “continuing his great project of similarity” in that the detective shows the same taste as the murder victim in numerous things, ranging from the furnishings of the house, the eating habits to the rejection of an offer from a prostitute in whom both men are the same Show facial expression. When Maigret finds out in the end that there is also a woman in the life of the thief, who initially appears as a shy loner, with whom he had a happy relationship for years, this is almost a relief for him and the wives are very sympathetic .

reception

Oliver Hahn from maigret.de counted Maigret and the lazy thief to the five best crime novels of Simenon with his inspector Maigret. For The Pittsburgh Press , the novel was "a jewel of a story". Detlef Richter drew the conclusion: "Another atmospheric, moody novel with the likeable Maigret." He particularly emphasized the art of how Simenon creates an atmosphere with simple descriptions in which the conjured winter cold makes the whole novel shiver. Newgate Callendar emphasized the "sharp, economical, realistic" spelling that was as typical of Simenon as his "ability to capture the reader and keep his interest awake". Tilman Spreckelsen was particularly impressed by the end: "What Maigret is doing here on the very last pages to get a witness to the massive embezzlement of stolen property, that has something."

For Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac , Maigret and the lazy thief showed how the aging commissioner and his creator merge more and more together later in the series. The qualitative differences between the Maigret novels and Simenon's generally more highly valued non-Maigret novels, both of which are an essential part of their author's oeuvre, are lost. Between a novel like Maigret and the lazy thief and the famous non-Maigret novel Le Train (filmed as Le Train - Just a Touch of Luck with Jean-Louis Trintignant and Romy Schneider ), written in the same year, there are no essentials in this respect Differences.

The novel was filmed three times: as part of the television series with Rupert Davies (Great Britain, 1962), Kees Brusse (Netherlands, 1964) and Jean Richard (France, 1988).

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Maigret et le voleur paresseux . Presses de la Cité, Paris 1961 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the lazy thief . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1962.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the lazy thief . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Heyne, Munich 1967.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the lazy thief . Translation: Stefanie Weiss. Diogenes, Zurich 1988, ISBN 3-257-21629-7 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the lazy thief . Complete Maigret novels in 75 volumes, volume 57. Translation: Stefanie Weiss. Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23857-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographie de Georges Simenon 1946 à 1967 on Toutesimenon.com, the website of Omnibus Verlag.
  2. ↑ Maigret et le voleur paresseux 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. ↑ Georges Simenon: Maigret and the lazy thief . Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23857-0 , pp. 29-30.
  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. 29.
  6. ↑ Ira Tschimmel: Detective novel and representation of society. A comparative study of the works of Christie, Simenon, Dürrenmatt and Capote. Bouvier, Bonn 1979, ISBN 3-416-01395-6 , p. 77.
  7. ^ Mary Evans: The Imagination of Evil. Detective Fiction and the Modern World. Continuum, London 2009, ISBN 978-1-84706-206-2 , p. 101.
  8. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , p. 399.
  9. ^ A b Francis Lacassin : Maigret or: The Key to the Heart . On Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  10. ↑ Ira Tschimmel: Detective novel and representation of society. A comparative study of the works of Christie, Simenon, Dürrenmatt and Capote. Bouvier, Bonn 1979, ISBN 3-416-01395-6 , pp. 82-83.
  11. ^ Ulrich Schulz-Buschhaus : Forms and ideologies of the crime novel. An essay on the history of the genre . Athenaion, Frankfurt am Main 1975, ISBN 3-7997-0603-8 , p. 178.
  12. ^ Gavin Lambert : The Dangerous Edge . Grossmann, New York 1976, ISBN 0-670-25581-5 , p. 179. (also online )
  13. ^ A b Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret-Marathon 57: The lazy thief . On FAZ.net from May 29, 2009.
  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 , p. 67.
  15. ↑ The five best on maigret.de.
  16. ↑ "a jewel of a story". Quoted from: Press Book Shelf . In: The Pittsburgh Press, April 7, 1973.
  17. ↑ Maigret and the Lazy Thief (Georges Simenon); Volume 57 by Detlef Richter on leserwelt.de.
  18. ↑ "the writing here is sharp, economical, realistic [...] his ability to involve the reader and continue to keep him interested" In: Newgate Callendar: Criminals At Large . In: The New York Times, March 4, 1970.
  19. ↑ After: Pierre Assouline : Simenon. A biography . Chatto & Windus, London 1997, ISBN 0-7011-3727-4 , p. 356.
  20. ↑ Maigret Films & TV on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.