Maigret and the mysterious captain

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Maigret and the mysterious captain (French: Le port des brumes ) is a crime novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It is the 15th novel in a series of 75 novels and 28 short stories about the detective Maigret . The manuscript was written in Cap d'Antibes in March 1932 , with Simenon himself claiming to have written the novel in October 1931 on board his boat Ostrogoth in Ouistreham . After a preliminary publication in 31 episodes from February 23 to March 24, 1932 in the French daily Le Matin , the book was published in May of that year by the Paris publisher Fayard . The first German translation Nebel über dem Hafen by Hans Fraenkel was published by the Wiesbaden Detective Club in 1952 . Further translations under the title Maigret and the Mysterious Captain were published in 1966 by Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in Cologne and in 1984 by Annerose Melter by Diogenes Verlag in Zurich .

An unknown man is found in Paris with a head wound and a lack of memory and language skills. His traveling housekeeper identifies the smiling mute as a retired captain . Commissioner Maigret goes to his hometown, the misty seaside resort of Ouistreham in Normandy , to find out the story of the mysterious captain.

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Port of Ouistreham in an oil painting by André Mare (1931)
Hôtel de ville of Ouistreham

On the Grands Boulevards of Paris a mentally ill man is taken up, which is not able to speak. He is identified as Yves Joris, a retired captain who works as a harbor master in the village of Ouistreham in Calvados . The captain has a head wound that has received careful medical attention. In his pockets there is a bank transfer about 300,000 francs and roe from cod that a connection to Norway have. In the hope of finding out more about the condition of the mute man, Inspector Maigret accompanies the captain to the Norman seaside resort, which no longer has any seasonal guests in October. He leaves the confused in the care of his caring housekeeper Julie Legrand, only to find him dead that morning: poisoned by strychnine in his water glass.

It turns out Julie didn't spend the night alone with the captain. Her brother, the previously convicted sailor Louis, called Grand-Louis because of his height, was also in the house and left a warning that the captain's life was in danger. But whoever interrogates Commissioner Maigret, the housekeeper, the mayor and shipowner Ernest Grandmaison or the new harbor master Delcourt, all of them are obstinate and seem to know more than they want to reveal. When Louis' ship, the Saint-Michel , calls into port, Maigret does not hear a word from Grand-Louis and his captain Yves Lannec.

Instead, a series of strange events take place that the Commissioner has been unable to figure out for a long time. With a dinghy, the Saint-Michel dropped off an unknown passenger who stayed overnight in a dredger so as not to be seen in town. He turns out to be Jean Martineau, a wealthy Norwegian shipowner of French descent who seems interested in buying the Saint-Michel . Grand-Louis, on the other hand, goes to the mayor and beats him up without him defending himself against his attacker or reporting him afterwards. When Maigret tries to arrest the sailor, he is overwhelmed and left tied up by the crew of the Saint-Michel . The ship runs out, but is stranded on a sandbar , whereupon Martineau breaks down and meets Grandmaison's wife Hélène, who calls him "Raymond".

With the case uncovered, Ernest Grandmaison shoots himself in his office in Caen . Only now does Jean Martineau, who turns out to be Grandmaison's cousin Raymond, reveal the background. He once loved Hélène, but when he stole money from his cousin's cash register, Ernest took the opportunity to force Raymond to leave France and marry his pregnant wife. Raymond built up a fishing empire in Norway and only recently learned of the existence of his son, whom he wanted to kidnap with the help of the crew of the Saint-Michel and the harbor master Yves Joris. The kidnapping went wrong, Joris was shot and looked after by Raymond, but after his return he was killed by Ernest, who feared that his son would be exposed. Then the two cousins ​​faced each other in a stalemate in which no one could accuse the other without betraying themselves. Maigret withholds the true course of the crime and blames the murder on a strange seafarer. He leaves Ouistreham with sadness and longs for life on board the Saint-Michel .

interpretation

As in the previous novels Maigret and the Yellow Dog and Maigret at the Newfoundland Drivers' Meeting, Maigret and the mysterious captain focus on a small town by the sea. Almost all of the figures appearing have something to do with seafaring or maritime trade. The port forms the universe of the city, even the port hotel in which Maigret stays is called L'Hôtel de l'Universe . But the small town is divided in two by class barriers: the working class gathers around the port of Ouistreham , while the villa suburb belongs to the bourgeoisie . The small town magnate Grandmaison and the simple seaman Grand-Louis, whose names symbolically contrast size through possession with size through physical presence, form a pair of opposites. An intermediate position is taken by Captain Joris, who keeps his distance from both the dockworkers and the upper class. The same applies to his housekeeper Julie, who is eyed with suspicion from all sides because of her social advancement at the captain's side.

The class society is presented as a barrier in the pursuit of individual happiness and simple justice. Madame Grandmaison, in particular, is the prisoner of her class barriers, for which she has to pay with an unhappy life at Ernest's side. Maigret, on the other hand, takes a position outside of class society and embodies pure humanism , for which human qualities stand above all social classes, but also above the democratic rules of the game of the Third Republic . His intervention frees Madame Grandmaison from her marriage yoke and opens a life with the beloved Raymond, and both Grand-Louis and Julie succeed in social advancement through unexpected material prosperity. But the social changes are limited to individual fates. The class society around the seaport as such remains unaffected by Maigret's intervention.

According to Tilman Spreckelsen , Simenon's characterization of his character as “a man of the people” runs like a red thread through the novel. The poor in Maigret and the mysterious captain all turn out to be inexperienced but honest people who do good even when they have got money. The rich mayor, however, is held accountable and beaten up by the angry disenfranchised. Josef Quack sees the novel as the breakthrough to the intuitive approach that became famous as Maigret's method. At one point it says explicitly: “Maigret had an inspiration. Inspiration is the right word, because within a second his keen intellect reconstructed the event. ”As proof of the existential dimension of Simenon's worldview, Quack mentions a passage that opens up the world of the individual to the widest possible horizon on Joseph Conrad remembered: “Maigret couldn't move. How lifeless he lay in a puddle of water on the shores of the infinite sea. ” Pierre Assouline, on the other hand, confirms the title“ writer of the atmosphere ”, which Simenon was often given, purely statistically with the occurrence of the word“ atmosphere ”16 times in a good 200 Pages of the novel.

background

Urban warfare at Ouistreham on D-Day , June 6, 1944

Simenon knew the Ouistreham area from his own travels. He spent the last months of his two-and-a-half-year voyage through the French canals in the village before selling his boat Ostregoth in Caen , fifteen kilometers away, in November 1931 . During his time in Ouistreham, Simenon wrote the novels Maigret and the Spy and Maigret and the Little Country Pub . The novel Maigret and the Mysterious Captain , on the other hand, was written a few months later in February / March 1932 at the opposite end of France in Cap d'Antibes on the Côte d'Azur , where the writer had rented the Villa Les Roches Grises .

At the beginning of the fourth chapter, Simenon describes memories of his stay in the city at the beginning of the 1930s: “Ouistreham was just some village at the end of a street with young trees. The only thing that counted was the port: a lock, a lighthouse, Joris' house, the pub. ”Thirteen years later, the area around the tranquil fishing village and the Caen Canal became more difficult due to the Second World War and the landing of Allied troops on Sword Beach completely changed. For Klaus N. Frick , Simenon “set a monument to the fishing village of Ouistreham”.

reception

In Maigret and the mysterious captain , Simenon succeeded in "creating a small-town, maritime atmosphere" for Stanley G. Eskin, but the plot was "very confused": "a tough, dark story about passion, provincial snobbery and petty-bourgeois thinking". A typical violation of the conventions of the crime novel genre for the author is that no culprit is arrested in the end. In the judgment of the New York Times Book Review , the novel was “even better than most Maigret adventures, and that says a lot.” The New Yorker concluded: “Georges Simenon is second to none, and don't believe anyone who tells you says he wouldn't be. "

According to Klaus N. Frick , Maigret and the mysterious captain were "quite extensive by Simenon standards" and there was even "a lot of action". His conclusion was: “Again a strong novel.” In contrast, Tilman Spreckelsen found, despite some echoing descriptions: “Simenon has written better books than this one, which has a list of sentimentalities.” Joachim Feldmann conveyed the feeling to Simenon as an “extremely economic narrator” “To learn a lot more than what is actually written in the text. That is true mastery. "

The novel was filmed a total of three times as part of television series about Commissioner Maigret. The main roles were played by Rupert Davies (Great Britain, 1961), Jean Richard (France, 1972) and Bruno Cremer (France, 1996).

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Le port des brumes. Fayard, Paris 1932 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Fog over the harbor. Translation: Hans Fraenkel . Detective Club, Wiesbaden 1952.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the crime on board . Maigret and the mysterious captain. Maigret defends himself . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1966.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the mysterious captain. Translation: Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau. Heyne, Munich 1967.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the mysterious captain. Translation: Annerose Melter. Diogenes, Zurich 1984, ISBN 3-257-21180-5 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the mysterious captain. Complete Maigret novels in 75 volumes, volume 15. Translation: Annerose Melter. Diogenes, Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-257-23815-0 .

literature

  • Bill Alder: Maigret, Simenon and France: Social Dimensions of the Novels and Stories . McFarland, Jefferson 2013, ISBN 978-0-7864-7054-9 , pp. 81-89, 102-106.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Le port des brumes in the Simenon bibliography 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 , pp. 56-57.
  3. ^ Bill Alder: Maigret, Simenon and France: Social Dimensions of the Novels and Stories , pp. 81, 85-88.
  4. ^ Bill Alder: Maigret, Simenon and France: Social Dimensions of the Novels and Stories , pp. 89, 102-106.
  5. ↑ Georges Simenon: Maigret and the mysterious captain. Diogenes, Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-257-23815-0 , p. 97.
  6. ^ A b Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret Marathon 15: The mysterious captain . On FAZ.net from July 18, 2008.
  7. ↑ Georges Simenon: Maigret and the mysterious captain. Diogenes, Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-257-23815-0 , p. 90.
  8. ↑ Georges Simenon: Maigret and the mysterious captain. Diogenes, Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-257-23815-0 , p. 164.
  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 , pp. 33, 63.
  10. ^ Pierre Assouline : Simenon. A biography . Chatto & Windus, London 1997, ISBN 0-7011-3727-4 , p. 344.
  11. ↑ Georges Simenon: Maigret and the mysterious captain. Diogenes, Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-257-23815-0 , pp. 60-61.
  12. ↑ To section: Maigret of the Month: Le Port des Brumes (Death of a Harbourmaster) on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  13. ↑ a b A memorial for a fishing village . In Klaus N. Frick's blog from November 8, 2011.
  14. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography. Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , p. 165.
  15. ^ "A story that is even better than most of the Maigret adventures, and that is saying a great deal." Quoted from: The New York Times Book Review Volume 2, 1942, p. 63.
  16. ↑ "Georges Simenon is unsurpassed, and don't believe anyone, who tells you he isn't." Quoted from: The New Yorker of August 8, 1942, p. 56.
  17. ↑ Joachim Feldmann: Murder & manslaughter 50 . In: Am Erker 50 from November 2005.
  18. ↑ Maigret Films & TV on Steve Trussel's website.