Maigret and the dancer

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Maigret and the Dancer (French: Maigret au Picratt’s ) is a crime novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It is the 36th novel in a series of 75 novels and 28 short stories about the detective Maigret . The novel was written from November 30 to December 8, 1950 in Lakeville , Connecticut , and was published in April of the following year by the Paris publisher Presses de la Cité . The first German translation Maigret and the dancer Arlette by Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau was published in 1954 by Kiepenheuer & Witsch . In 1986, Diogenes Verlag published a new translation by Hainer Kober under the title Maigret, the Dancer and the Countess . In 2019 Kampa Verlag brought out a revised new edition of the translation by Wille / Klau under the title Maigret und die Tänzerin .

Arlette, a dancer at a nightclub on Montmartre , appears in the middle of the night at a police station to report the planned murder of a countess. But when Commissioner Maigret and his inspectors want to take on the case the next morning, she withdraws her statements. As soon as she is released from police custody, the dancer is murdered. While the criminal police are now looking for the murderer and the threatened countess, it is one of Maigret's inspectors who turns out to be Arlette's last guest.

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Rue Jean-Baptiste-Pigalle (until 1993 Rue Pigalle) on Montmartre

It is Monday night in a dreary Parisian winter in which it alternately rains and snows. The striptease dancer Arlette from the small Picratt’s nightclub comes to the police station on Montmartre to make a statement. During her work, while she underwent the love vows of a young man named Albert in a private room , she overheard a conversation at the next table in which a man named Oscar announced the murder of a countess. But when the young woman is transferred to the Quai des Orfèvres that morning , she doesn't want to remember anything. She returns to her apartment, where she is found strangled a few hours later.

Of all people, Maigret's young inspector Lapointe turns out to be Arlette's nocturnal guest Albert, and he is dying to solve the murder of his beloved. Maigret finds out that Arlette was working under the false identity of her friend Jeanne-Marie-Marcelle Leleu, but that the real name was Anne-Marie Trochain and came from Lisieux . Your statement from the previous evening can not be confirmed when you visit Picratt’s restaurant . Neither the landlord Fred Alfonsi nor his wife Rose or Arlette's colleagues Betty and Tania want to have guests at the next table or to know an Oscar. In the inspector, the suspicion grows that the dancer wanted to issue a warning with a fabricated statement and that she regretted it in the morning, having sobered up again.

As announced, a murdered countess is found days later, strangled like the dancer. She is the widow of the Austrian Count Hans von Farnheim, who lived with the much younger beauty on the Côte d'Azur before he died in an unexplained fall from the balcony. Since then, the Countess has brought her legacy through with drugs and young lovers and has since lived in a completely shabby apartment in Paris. In her previous life there is an Oscar Bonvoisin, at that time valet and chauffeur of the count and later her lover. Oscar comes from La Bourboule in Auvergne , the same place where Arlette was once sent for a cure.

Maigret determines Dr. Bloch, the countess's seedy family doctor, who supplied her with morphine . The local inspector Lognon, known by everyone as “inspector curmudgeon” because he is full of distrust of his colleagues from the quai, reluctantly delivers Philippe Mortemart, a homosexual drug addict who let the countess endure him, at the station. Although Philippe seems to know "Monsieur Oscar", he resists all interrogations, so that Maigret comes up with the idea of ​​using him as bait, since Oscar will want to get rid of the uncertain confidant. But Philippe's surveillance, which the inspector leads from Picratt’s , does not lead to the desired success until Maigret has the brainstorm that the perpetrator is waiting in the victim's apartment this time too. In fact, it is possible to find Oscar Bonvoisin in Philippe's shabby room. When the latter tries to flee, it is Inspector Lapointe of all people who shoots him.

After the death of the perpetrator there is no conclusive statement about the course of events, but the case is clear to Maigret: The Countess von Farnheim took care of the accident of her unloved husband, during which she was watched by the valet, who blackmailed her for part of the inheritance . Oscar, the womanizer, seduced the young Anne-Marie Trochain and went with her to Paris, where she called herself "Arlette" and he made a living from her erotic photographs. In order to finally retire, he killed the countess before her way of life could support her inheritance and stole the rest of her fortune. Arlette was privy to her lover's plan, but on her last night she was touched by the innocent love of young Lapointe, and she was ready for a moment to give up her previous life and tell her lover what she regretted in the morning and afterwards with it paid for her life. While Lapointe mourns the loss of his first love at Maigret’s side in Picratt’s as well as his first death in the police force, only Inspector Lognon is still on watch on wintry Montmartre, as nobody has informed him that the case has been closed.

interpretation

The Picratt’s nightclub is a “quasi-mythical” place in Simenon's work, which is already mentioned in many of the penniless novels from his early work published under a pseudonym, even if some of the bars are located in different places. Picratt’s also played a role in the non-Maigret novel The Man Who Watched the Trains , published in 1938 . But it is only in Maigret, the Dancer and the Countess that the nightclub becomes the central location. Although none of the crimes were committed in Picratt’s or are directly related to it, Maigret makes it his headquarters, absorbs the different atmosphere of the small, cramped club during the night and the quiet hours of the day and draws his background information from those present People.

The focus of the novel is the dancer Arlette. According to Murielle Wenger, the character is ambivalent, on the one hand radiates a strong eroticism, but on the other hand is a scared young girl, almost a child, who rebels against her origins. The figure of the countess is drawn in stark contrast to the dancer: she, who was once young and beautiful too, has fallen down in old age and is a drug addict, her neglected apartment forms the opposite pole to the clean apartment of the dancer, as does the selfish intentions of her lover Philippe contrast pure love of young Lapointe. Ullrich Wegerich sees Arlette in a much more differentiated way than the “cold and clichéd sex bombs that populate many thrillers of those years”. In contrast, the figure of the homosexual Philippe, according to Lucille F. Becker, arises from downright homophobic clichés . He is treated worse by the inspectors than their usual clientele, and Commissioner Maigret even denies him the right to "pollute" the earth.

The most mysterious character in the novel is Oscar, who remains a silhouette reduced to its outlines for long stretches. The darkness that surrounds him corresponds to the opaque power he wielded over Arlette's life. He reminds Maigret of the "shadows that are always more imposing than the reality they reflect". Oscar's violent death serves not least to drive out the obsessions for which he stands. Stanley G. Eskin spoke of an "unusually violent ending" in which Maígret felt no regrets about the death of the murderer, blackmailer and porn seller. In any case, Tilman Spreckelsen wishes to be able to erase the scene from his memory before Oscar's punishment.

Two inspectors make a prominent appearance in the course of the novel. Inspector Lapointe, who with the novel Madame Maigret's girlfriend stepped alongside the already established assistants Lucas, Torrence and Janvier, is elaborated for the first time and takes on the role he will keep for the rest of the series: that of Maigret's youngest and preferred inspector with whom the childless inspector has an almost fatherly relationship. The relationship with the envious and unfortunate Inspector Lognon, alias Inspector Griesgram, a district policeman from the 18th arrondissement , who feels notoriously cheated by his colleagues on the Quai des Orfèvres, is completely different . After a few appearances in non-Maigret novels as well as in the short story Maigret und Inspektor Griesgram , he appears for the first time in a novel in the Maigret series, where from now on he will have regular guest appearances with always the same unfortunate outcome, until he in Maigret and the ghost finally triumphs in one case.

reception

According to Peter Foord, Maigret, the Dancer and the Countess is one of the better-known Maigret novels. Kirkus Reviews described a "thinning storyline for which Montmartre offers a montage of shabby and shady characters". For Tilman Spreckelsen, “love, bondage, the tactics of the unscrupulous, powerlessness” formed a “furious vortex”, in which, however, he doubted the plausibility of the substructure: “We believe Simenon reading every figure here too. Even those that you will probably never meet anywhere. ”Ullrich Wegerich saw Simenon“ stylize Paris and the completely normal people of his time into an ahistorical stage for the general human ”, with which the author created“ a comedie humaine in a criminalistic form ”.

The novel was filmed a total of seven times. In 1967 Mario Landi directed the Italian movie Maigret a Pigalle (German: Maigret and the Strangler from Montmartre ). In addition to Gino Cervi as Commissioner Maigret, Lila Kedrova , Raymond Pellegrin , Alfred Adam , Daniel Ollier and José Greci played . In addition, there were episodes in seven TV series about Commissioner Maigret with Rupert Davies (Great Britain, 1960), Kees Brusse (Netherlands, 1964), Kinya Aikawa (Japan, 1978), Jean Richard (France, 1985), Bruno Cremer (France, 1992), Michael Gambon (Great Britain, 1993) and Rowan Atkinson (Great Britain, 2017) in the title role. In 2019 Walter Kreye read the novel as an audio book for Audio Verlag .

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Maigret au Picratt’s . Presses de la Cité, Paris 1951 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the dancer Arlette . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1954.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the dancer Arlette . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Heyne, Munich 1966.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret, the dancer and the countess . Translation: Hainer Kober . Diogenes, Zurich 1986, ISBN 3-257-21484-7 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret, the dancer and the countess . All Maigret novels in 75 volumes, volume 36. Translation: Hainer Kober. Diogenes, Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-257-23836-5 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the dancer . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau, Cornelia Künne. Kampa, Zurich 2019, ISBN 978-3-311-13036-9 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographie de Georges Simenon 1946 à 1967 on Toutesimenon.com, the website of Omnibus Verlag.
  2. ↑ a b Maigret au Picratt’s in the Maigret 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. 76.
  4. ↑ a b c d e Maigret of the Month: Maigret au Picratt's (Maigret in Montmartre / Inspector Maigret and the Strangled Stripper) on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  5. ↑ a b Good thrillers: "Maigret, the dancer and the countess" ( Memento of the original from April 12, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ullrichwegerich.de 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. in the blog mord & totschlag by Ullrich Wegerich.
  6. ↑ Lucille F. Becker: Georges Simenon . House, London 2006, ISBN 1-904950-34-5 , p. 48.
  7. ↑ Georges Simenon: Maigret, the dancer and the countess . Diogenes, Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-257-23836-5 , p. 180.
  8. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , pp. 399-400.
  9. ^ A b Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret-Marathon 36: The dancer and the countess . On FAZ.net from December 23, 2008.
  10. ↑ Lognon Special on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  11. ^ "A thinning plot line, for which Montmartre provides a montage of seedy to shady characters." In: Inspector Maigret and the Strangled Stripper by Georges Simenon on Kirkus Reviews.
  12. ↑ Maigret Films & TV on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.