Maigret and the headless corpse

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Maigret and the Headless Corpse (French: Maigret et le corps sans tête ) is a crime novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It is the 47th novel in a series of 75 novels and 28 short stories about the detective Maigret . The novel was completed on January 25, 1955 in Lakeville , Connecticut , and published in June of the same year by the Paris publisher Presses de la Cité . The first German translation Maigret und der Kopflose by Ernst Sander appeared in 1957 by Kiepenheuer & Witsch . In 1980 the Diogenes Verlag published a new translation by Wolfram Schäfer under the title Maigret and the headless corpse .

In the middle of Paris , severed parts of a man's body are found in a canal . Only the head of the corpse has disappeared, and so the identity of the dead person remains unclear for a long time. In the cafes and bars around the canal lock, Commissioner Maigret lets his instinct run wild. The investigation is hindered only by Maigret's intimate enemy, the examining magistrate Coméliau, who demands that the commissioner give quick results.

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Canal Saint-Martin overlooking the Quai de Valmy
Les Récollets lock in Paris

It's Tuesday morning, March 23rd, and the first harbingers of spring are in the air in Paris. The brothers Jules and Robert Naud, two canal boatmen , fish the severed arm of a man from the Canal Saint-Martin in front of the lock Les Récollets . Subsequent dives reveal further separated body parts that have only been in the canal for a few days. Only the head of the corpse remains untraceable.

Coincidence leads Inspector Maigret to the gloomy Chez Calas bar on his first visit to the Quai de Valmy , where the guest is served by Aline Calas, a bad-tempered and apathetic alcoholic. Her husband Omar allegedly left last Friday to get white wine from the Poitiers area and has not returned since then. The more details become known about the body of the deceased, the more condensed the suspicion for the inspector that it must be about the missing host. It literally spoils Maigret's joy in the investigation that the pieces of the puzzle fall into one another so easily from the start.

A first suspicion is directed against the 18-year-old delivery boy Antoine Cristin, who shows a peculiar interest in the dives and then shows up in the bar, where he turns out to be a lover of the landlady, who is more than twice her age. He wasn't the only man Aline was cheating on her husband with. The widower Dieudonné Pape, a peace-loving warehouse manager with gentle blue eyes, has been in love with the landlady for years. But neither Inspector Maigret nor examining magistrate Coméliau, who, as usual, shows himself not very enthusiastic about Maigret's deliberate investigation methods and arrests all the suspects without further ado, succeeds in persuading Aline or her lovers to make a statement. It was not until the notary Canonge from Boissancourt-par-Saint-André, a small town in the Loiret between Montargis and Gien , who had traveled to Maigret, to reveal the background to the crime.

Aline Calas was born in de Boissancourt and grew up in the castle of a wealthy country nobility, but learned to hate her father at an early age and revolted against him on all occasions. At the age of 17 she was impregnated by the house servant Omar Calas, with whom she left for Paris. For decades she endured the soon-to-be-broken marriage only with alcohol and her pride, which prevented any return to the family. When the notary brought her father's death notice a few days ago, she rejected the inheritance without hesitation. But Omar Calas found out about the lost assets and did everything possible to force his wife to accept the inheritance. Maigret suspects that he became violent in the process, until the gentle Pape stepped in and killed him, whereupon Aline and her lover together cut up and disposed of her husband's corpse. The depressed inspector is glad that after the arrest it is no longer his job to interrogate the unhappy lovers until one of them breaks down and confesses. Investigating magistrate Coméliau, on the other hand, does not have such scruples and so in the end he can triumphantly attribute the clarification of the case to himself.

interpretation

For Tilman Spreckelsen , Maigret and the headless corpse are permeated by a "touch of spring, including dust dancing in the sunshine". Maigret's first encounter with Aline Calas is also influenced by the impression of a spring-like white wine. As in Maigret and his dead man , the inspector has to put himself in the shoes of the small bars and pubs in order to trace the victim's life. But this time, stronger than the victim, it is the perpetrator who exerts an indescribable fascination on Maigret. The emaciated woman is characterized by the absence of any emotional response. The disappearance of her husband, dead or alive, affects her as little as her pronounced alcoholism or indiscriminate sexuality with various lovers.

From the first moment Maigret senses that Aline Calas does not fit into the atmosphere of the bar, that her excessive alcohol consumption is due to a painful past. It touches on the sympathy of Commissioner Maigret, who already wanted to take up a profession in his youth in which he “repaired fates”, which he now sees realized in the work of a psychoanalyst . At the same time, she embodies a human puzzle that he wants to get to the bottom of with a scientific interest. But Aline closes herself off from Maigret's research. She proves to be a stubborn, equal opponent, and the argument between the inspector and the suspect turns more and more into a personal affair. After Maigret has long resisted arresting his opponent, in the end he doesn't know what else to do than to hand her over to the examining magistrate in order to forcibly rid himself of her charisma. After that she remains present in his thoughts, but she no longer meets him physically.

Only through the notary's story does Maigret learn to understand Aline Calas. In the middle of the conversation, he sees Aline as a young girl, and for the first time has a complete picture of her personality in mind. At the same time it is clear to him that he will never be able to explain this personality image to a man like the judge Coméliau with his preconceived ideas. When Maigret perceives a deep idealism behind the self-humiliation of the Calas, for example, this is a realization that is far beyond the horizon of the bourgeois judicial officer. Likewise, the judge cannot understand the importance of the cat that the detainee left for the inspector to care for. The cat is a kind of "good soul" in the dark bar, but its phlegmatism also reflects the nature of its owner. While Maigret had previously given up Coméliaus, his frivolous claim that a person like Inspector Maigret could not waste his time looking after a cat, even if he had previously promised to do so, is unforgivable for the Inspector: "Maigret should do that Resent Judge Coméliau all his life. "

background

Maigret and the Headless Corpse was the last novel Simenon wrote on the American continent. He lived and worked from 1950 to 1955 at Shadow Rock Farm in Lakeville , Connecticut , where he had written his last non-Maigret novel with Les Témoins ( The Witnesses ) in September 1954 . The period until the completion of Maigret and the headless corpse on January 25, 1955 was unusually long for the writer. He was irritable, dissatisfied with his personal situation and worried about the psychological state of his second wife Denyse. On the occasion of his departure, however, there was an interview with the journalist Hamish Hamilton, in which Simenon did not find a satisfactory answer to the question of why he lived in America. On the spur of the moment and with no clear idea of ​​his future residence, Simenon returned to France, where his subsequent works were created in Mougins and Cannes , before settling in Switzerland in 1957.

Half a year after Maigret and the headless corpse , the next Maigret novel Maigret sets a trap was created in France , whereby Fenton Bresler emphasizes that the radical spatial and biographical change between their creation is not noticeable in the two novels. In any case, Tilman Spreckelsen is impressed how Simenon managed, from America, "to see the petty-bourgeois décor from across the Atlantic so precisely that he can describe it so masterfully". Maigret and the Headless Corpse takes place in a narrowly enclosed space around the Canal Saint-Martin , which is bordered by the Quai de Valmy and the Quai de Jemmapes. The locations between which Maigret moves range from the Gare de l'Est to the Hôpital Saint-Louis . In the 21st century, the cityscape of that time can hardly be found again due to extensive renovation work. However, the restaurant L'Atmosphere , the model of Chez Popaul in the novel, still stands . For Chez Calas, however, there is no real equivalent.

reception

Publishers Weekly sums up Maigret and the headless corpse in one sentence: "The inspector finds a body in a Paris canal, reconstructs the crime and reluctantly blames the perpetrator." Best Sellers describes Maigret prowling around the quay in a nearby bar Drinks white wine and tries to fathom the identity of the headless corpse as well as the motives of the dazedly staring wife. “Maigret fans won't need any further information; those who have the acquaintance ahead of them should be warned that Maigret can be addicting. ”For the Saturday Review , Maigret“ almost finds his master when the owner of a Parisian bistro refuses to talk. ”Thomas Lask sees in the New York Times at least not the police work at the center of the novel, but the character of the landlady. “With his flawless sense of form, Simenon gives the story just the right length. The mystery of the human personality can be even more mysterious than an unsolved crime. "

The novel was filmed a total of four times as part of television series about Commissioner Maigret. The title roles were played by Rupert Davies (Great Britain, 1961), Jean Richard (France, 1974), Kinya Aikawa (Japan, 1978) and Bruno Cremer (France, 1992). In 1997, the Éditions Claude Lefrancq published a comic version Maigret et le corps sans tête with texts by Odile Reynaud and drawings by Frank Brichau. In 2010, Bettina Kaps took the novel Maigret and the headless corpse for Deutschlandradio Kultur as the starting point for a report about Simenon's literary scenes and the Quai des Orfèvres of the present.

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Maigret et le corps sans tête . Presses de la Cité, Paris 1955 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the Headless . Translation: Ernst Sander . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1957.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the Headless . Translation: Ernst Sander. Heyne, Munich 1966.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the headless corpse . Translation: Wolfram Schäfer. Diogenes, Zurich 1980, ISBN 3-257-20715-8 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the headless corpse . Complete Maigret novels in 75 volumes, Volume 47. Translation: Wolfram Schäfer. Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23847-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographie de Georges Simenon 1946 à 1967 on Toutesimenon.com, the website of Omnibus Verlag.
  2. ↑ Maigret et le corps sans tête 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. 64.
  4. ↑ a b c Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret-Marathon 47: The headless corpse . On FAZ.net from March 23, 2009.
  5. ↑ a b c d e Maigret of the Month: Maigret et le corps sans tête (Maigret and the Headless Corpse) on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  6. ^ Gavin Lambert : The Dangerous Edge . Grossmann, New York 1976, ISBN 0-670-25581-5 , p. 184. (also online )
  7. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , p. 407.
  8. ↑ 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. 40.
  9. ↑ Georges Simenon: Maigret and the headless corpse . Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23847-1 , p. 204.
  10. ^ Pierre Assouline : Simenon. A biography . Chatto & Windus, London 1997, ISBN 0-7011-3727-4 , p. 294.
  11. ^ Fenton Bresler: Georges Simenon. In search of the "naked" person. Ernst Kabel, Hamburg 1985, ISBN 3-921909-93-7 , pp. 290-291.
  12. ↑ Murielle Wenger: Visit to Paris on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  13. ↑ Literary places. Georges Simenon's novel: "Maigret and the headless corpse" . Broadcast manuscript on Deutschlandradio Kultur from March 21, 2010.
  14. ^ "The Inspector finds a body in a Paris canal, reconstructs the crime, and reluctantly charges the culprits." Quoted from: Publishers Weekly Volume 193, 1968, p. 28.
  15. ↑ "Maigret fans will need no further information; those who have yet to make his acquaintance are warned that Maigret is habit-forming. ”Quoted from: Best Sellers . From the United States Government Printing Office , Vol. 27, 1967, p. 457.
  16. ^ "French Sûreté ace almost meets his match when the proprietress of a Paris bistro won't talk." Quoted from Saturday Review Volume 51, 1968, p. 43.
  17. ^ "With his immaculate sense of form, Simenon makes the story just long enough. The secret of the human personality can be even more puzzling than an unexplained crime. "Quoted from: Thomas Lask: The Hunters and the Hunted . In: The New York Times, April 27, 1968.
  18. ↑ Maigret Films & TV on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  19. ↑ tape Dessinées: Éditions Claude Lefrancq on the Maigret page of Steve Trussell.
  20. ↑ Bettina Kaps: Maigret and the headless corpse . In: Deutschlandradio Kultur from March 21, 2010.