Maigret and the young dead woman

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Maigret and the young dead (French: Maigret et la jeune morte ) is a crime novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It is the 45th novel in a series of 75 novels and 28 short stories about the detective Maigret . Written from January 11 to 18, 1954, the novel was published by Presses de la Cité in the same year . The first German translation by Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau was published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in 1958 under the title Maigret and the Unknown . In 1978 the Diogenes Verlag publisheda new translation by Raymond Regh under the title Maigret and the young dead .

The novel revolves around a young woman in evening dress who is found murdered in the streets of Paris at night . Nobody seems to know the dead woman. But before Maigret starts looking for the murderer, he first wants to get to know the young girl and understand her life in detail. Maigret's investigations are made more difficult by his old friend Lognon alias Inspector Curmudgeon. Despite his proverbial bad mood, he is driven by the ambition to forestall the commissioner and solve the case single-handedly.

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The Place Pigalle in the night Winter

March, Quai des Orfèvres , 3 a.m. After a 30-hour interrogation, the notorious gang of wall breakers finally confessed. Inspector Maigret and Inspector Janvier are exhausted and want to end the night with an onion soup . Then she received a call: A young dead woman was found on Place Vintimille near the entertainment district of Montmartre . There is already the local inspector Lognon, whom everyone just calls inspector curmudgeon, a man who believes he has leased all the misfortunes in the world and who lives in particular in the madness that the Quai des Orfèvres snatched away all the explosive cases, with whom he could make a name for himself. Maigret, who already knows Lognon from previous cases, treats the inspector with kid gloves, although this could not change the insulted demeanor of the curmudgeon in the least.

The young dead died after being hit on the head by a heavy object after she had been hit several times in the face. In her outfit, she looks like a young animation girl from the neighborhood, but Maigret soon realizes that she was not killed on site. She borrowed the dress that evening on site from a dealer named Mademoiselle Irène, as did a handbag, which, however, has disappeared. In the course of the investigation, it turns out that the dead woman's name was Louise Laboine, was twenty years old, rented an old lady and was so poor that she had only one dress.

Louise was originally from Nice , her mother is a former dancer and now addicted to gambling, her father, the internationally wanted con artist Julius Van Cram, left her wife and daughter when she was two months old. At sixteen she ran away from home, met a fateful companion of the same age named Jeanine Armenieu on the train to Paris, with whom she lived for a long time. But while the brash Jeanine quickly found herself in the big city and caught a rich man named Marco Santoni, Louise remained alone, frightened and intimidated, and for a long time lived on nothing but the grace of her friend. On the evening of the murder she also went to Jeanine's wedding to ask her friend for money again. There she was surprised by the news that a man had asked about her and left a letter for her in Pickwick's Bar. After that, their track is lost.

During the investigation, Inspector Lognon is always one small step ahead of his colleague Maigret, who is completely focused on empathizing with the dead woman before he even even wants to think about looking for a murderer. But all the information that Lognon has to get himself with the greatest personal commitment on long journeys in mostly pouring Parisian rain seems to come to the inspector in his office by itself, so that the inspector does not surprise him once. Suddenly, however, Lognon has disappeared, and the investigation is no longer just about the dead, but also about the fate of the curmudgeon.

The bartender at Pickwick's Bar, the convicted Corsican Albert Falconi, claims to have handed the girl his letter, after which a mysterious American stuck on her heels, of whom he only knows that the man will travel on to Brussels and in Hotel Palace wanted to stay. Maigret immediately sees through the wrong lead, but it tells him Lognon's whereabouts: The ambitious inspector traveled to Brussels on his own, where he is looking for the alleged American until Maigret orders him back. Lognon had done everything right in his investigation, but without being able to empathize with Louise, who in the end, like the inspector, believed that everyone had conspired against her. Unlike Lognon, Maigret realizes immediately that Falconi is lying to him when he describes the intimidated Louise in a strange environment as one of the open-hearted, easy-going girls who usually hang out in his bar.

It takes less than 30 hours, as with the wall breakers, until Falconi confesses: The letter was delivered by a former accomplice of Louise's father after he died in Sing Sing . In it, Julius Van Cram declared himself to his daughter and bequeathed her his stolen loot, which she should collect in New York on presentation of her ID. Falconi read the letter secretly and delivered the news to Bianchi, the head of the Corsican gang. He lay in wait for the girl that night, only to steal her ID, with which he hoped to get to Van Cram's fortune in America. But the handbag got caught unhappily on an arm chain, Falconi slapped the girl in the face, who was screaming for help, whereupon he struck with his manslaughter . For Maigret it is an irony of fate that Louise's life ultimately hung on a small chain. And he wonders what the poor girl would have done with the money that is now being paid out to a banker or his insurance company.

Maigret's method of investigation

Volker Neuhaus examined the novel from the perspective of multi-perspective narration. The focus of the investigation is the victim, who is portrayed from the different perspectives of the witnesses. With every testimony, his image gains in plasticity, for which Simenon finds the metaphor of the development of a photograph in the novel , which gradually lets the features of a person emerge more and more clearly. After all the statements have been merged into a portrait of the girl, Maigret knows the stranger, whom he has never seen before, so well that he immediately reveals the bartender that his statement does not fit the picture. Inspector Lognon, on the other hand, is lured on the wrong track because he doesn't master what, according to Simenon, no police school teaches: to put yourself in the shoes of another person. Neuhaus draws the conclusion: "This solution shows what is special about Maigret's methods."

For Stanley G. Eskin, too, the novel is “an excellent example” of the role Maigret's imagination plays in solving a case. Maigret reconstructs the life of the victim in his imagination, whereby Madame Maigret supports him with her empathy for the female psyche. In the end, his imagination even leads to Maigret being followed from fall to his dreams. For the reader, too, according to Ulrike Leonhardt, the young dead woman takes on such a lively shape that one "does not forget her, even if one has long forgotten the murderer."

reception

The literary magazine Time and Tide rated the novel in 1955 as “a no-frills crime thriller”, the story of which is “a model of economy, clarity and readability”. Stanley. G. Eskin classified Maigret et la jeune morte in retrospect under "a handful of first-class novels" from the third period of the Maigret series. For the magazine Galore , Maigret and the young dead was the "best Maigret for the beginning [...] because the Maigret method of approaching is made clear in the story of an initially completely faceless victim." Tilman Spreckelsen was happy about the "reunion ." with the unfortunate inspector Lognon ”. Given the juxtaposed fates of two young girls in Paris, however, he asked himself: "Should we call it constructed or wise?"

The novel was filmed three times as part of television productions: 1959 under the title Maigret and the Lost Life with Basil Sydney as Maigret, and in 1963 and 1973 in the Maigret television series with Rupert Davies and Jean Richard . Two German-language radio plays were produced under the title Maigret und die Unbekannte : 1959 by Südwestfunk under the direction of Gert Westphal with Leonhard Steckel , Annedore Huber-Knaus , Heinz Schimmelpfennig , Ernst Sladeck and Helmut Peine , in 1961 by Bayerischer Rundfunk under the direction of Heinz- Günter Stamm with Paul Dahlke , Traute Rose , Ulrich Beiger , Rolf Boysen and Reinhard Glemnitz . In 2006, Diogenes Verlag published a reading by Gert Heidenreich .

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Maigret et la jeune morte . Presses de la Cité, Paris 1954 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the unknown . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1958.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the unknown . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Heyne, Munich 1966.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the young dead . Translation: Raymond Regh. Diogenes, Zurich 1978, ISBN 3-257-20508-2 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the young dead . The complete Maigret novels in 75 volumes, Volume 45. Translation: Raymond Regh. Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23845-7 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the young dead . Translation: Rainer Moritz. Kampa Verlag, Zurich, 2018. ISBN 978-3-311-130451 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographie de Georges Simenon 1946 à 1967 on Toutesimenon.com, the website of Omnibus Verlag.
  2. ↑ Oliver Hahn: Bibliography of German-language editions . Georges-Simenon-Gesellschaft (Ed.): Simenon-Jahrbuch 2003 . Wehrhahn, Laatzen 2004, ISBN 3-86525-101-3 , pp. 62–63.
  3. ↑ Volker Neuhaus : Types of multi-perspective narration . Böhlau, Cologne 1971, ISBN 3-412-00871-0 , pp. 113-114.
  4. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , pp. 406-407, 414.
  5. ↑ Ulrike Leonhardt: Murder is her job. The story of the detective novel . CH Beck, Munich 1990, ISBN 3-406-34420-8 , p. 101.
  6. ^ " Maigret and the Young Girl is straightforward whodunit [...]. This story is a model of economy, vividness and readability. "In: Time & Tide Volume 36, Time and Tide Publishing 1955, p. 1300.
  7. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography , p. 414.
  8. ↑ Quoted from: Maigret and the young dead ( Memento of the original from September 14, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.diogenes.ch 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. at Diogenes Verlag .
  9. ^ Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret-Marathon 45: The young dead . On FAZ.net from March 8, 2009.
  10. ↑ Maigret and the young dead on maigret.de.
  11. ↑ Maigrets and the unknown in the HörDat audio play database .