Maigret and the crazy widow

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Maigret and the crazy widow (French: La folle de Maigret ) is a detective novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It is the 72nd novel in a series of 75 novels and 28 short stories about the detective Maigret . The novel was written in Epalinges from May 1 to May 7, 1970 and was published by the Paris publisher Presses de la Cité in November of that year , after the French daily Le Figaro had published an advance publication in 23 episodes from October 19 to November 13, 1970. The first German translation Maigret und die Spinnerin by Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau was published in 1972 by Kiepenheuer & Witsch . In 1988 Diogenes Verlag brought out a new translation by Michael Mosblech under the title Maigret and the Crazy Widow .

An old widow goes to the police station Maigret to report a mysterious threat: allegedly she is being followed by strangers, and objects in her apartment change their place as if by magic. It is difficult for Maigret not to mistake her for one of the innumerable lunatics who turn to the police station every day with similar stories. He pays her his attention only because of her trusting trust in his person. But when he wants to take a look at the apartment of the "crazy widow", he comes too late.

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Quai des Orfèvres as seen from the Seine
Quai de la Mégisserie in the 1st arrondissement

It is a sunny May in Paris . A small, old woman has been sneaking around the Quai des Orfèvres for days and tries to get admitted to Inspector Maigret. But the story she dished out to the young inspector Lapointe made the young inspector quickly come to the conclusion that she was “a madwoman”: she felt she was being followed by strangers on the street, and objects in her apartment were repeatedly rearranged without anything being stolen. When she checks in with the inspector after work, he is so touched by her trusting expectation that he at least promises to see if the opportunity arises. But something comes up several times, and when the old lady is found dead in her apartment, suffocated by a pillow or scarf, Maigret feels remorse. The superintendent is doing everything in his power to solve the murder of his visitor.

Léontine Antoine de Caramé, 86 years old and widow of two, had been living alone in her apartment on the Quai de la Mégisserie for ten years. Her first husband, Jean de Caramé, a dignified office manager at the Hôtel de Ville , died young of a heart attack. Her second husband, Joseph Antoine, was a small employee and a passionate inventor who often withdrew to his private studio to work on his inventions. Since his death, Léontine has only had contact with her niece Angèle Louette and her son Billy. The latter is a young hippie who plays the guitar in a pop band called Les Mauvais Garçons and was regularly so burned that he had to scrounge his great-aunt for money. The former is a rough, unsightly masseuse who only waited for the death of her aunt in order to fulfill the dream of a cottage in the country with the inherited fortune. She lives with a young gigolo named Marcel Montrond, known to Maigret as the Great Marcel , a petty criminal and former pimp who is now a lover of older women.

The only tangible evidence of the murder is a sheet of paper in Léontine's bedside table with a grease stain on it, which forensics identifies as gun fat. In fact, her great-nephew Billy confirms that the old widow owned a revolver that has disappeared since she passed away. When Marcel left for Toulon and contacted the crime boss Pepito Giovanni there in order to present him with a “sample” and to propose a profitable deal, Maigret suspected that it must be the same revolver. He travels to the Côte d'Azur himself and reveals to Giovanni, who is concerned about his reputation as an impeccable businessman, networked in the highest political circles, that the revolver is involved in a murder case. Thereupon the criminal immediately removes the incriminating weapon and punishes his business partner for having drawn him into his criminal machinations. Marcel is fished from the Toulon harbor basin with a hole in his head the size of a professional killer.

When Maigret Angèle announces the death of her lover, her resistance collapses and she confesses. Shortly before his death, her uncle Antoine had designed a revolver with a built-in silencer , which he hoped would be a great commercial success. Angèle casually mentioned the weapon to her lover Marcel, who immediately caught fire and wanted to distribute the invention in organized crime circles. In Léontine's absence, they searched her apartment several times for the prototype, but it wasn't until the day of her death, when Angèle was prevented from having a massage with a customer, that Marcel found the revolver, was surprised by Léontine, who returned unexpectedly early, and killed her. After the murderer has already been judged and Angèles' alibi stands up to scrutiny, all that remains is to accuse her of covering up the crime. Maigret, however, although he couldn't muster any sympathy for the masseuse before, tore up the arrest warrant in the end and let her go blameless.

interpretation

In the novels of the Maigret series, the humanity and compassion of Commissioner Maigret are shown, among other things, in his easy accessibility. In contrast to what the superintendent's hierarchical position in the police apparatus might suggest, he always has an open ear for the people who turn to him and makes their needs his own. One of the few cases in which he has to turn away those looking for help includes Maigret, who loses an admirer , Maigret and the crazy widow . In both cases he retrospectively regrets the rejection. Since he is unable to recognize the real threat to old Léontine among all the crazy people who turn to the police station every day, Maigret feels particularly obliged to clear up the case. He takes her death personally and in turn delivers her murderer to the knife. Although he warns the big Marcel about the threatening reckoning of the gang boss, he knows exactly that the smug criminal will not listen to him. Only at the end does the inspector regain his sympathy and let the accomplice go.

Murielle Wenger describes the novel as a mixture of lightness and weight. The descriptions of Maigret's surroundings, the Quai des Orfèvres, his meals and a Sunday excursion with his wife in the Parisian spring exude a loving tenderness. A much heavier weight weighs on the actual murder plot and in particular the living conditions of the plump masseuse, which are almost reminiscent of Simenon's “hard novels” without Maigret. For Tilman Spreckelsen the intimate togetherness of the Maigrets serves as a counter-model to a world full of greed and cold heart. However, the young hippie, who makes Inspector Maigret want to have his own son, also touches a sore point of the Maigrets, their childlessness. In the asexual marriage of the inspector, it is already an emotional climax when he whispers to his wife: "I would like to kiss you again, but there are just too many people around us." Ira Tschimmel sees the scene as an "emancipatory low." because the limitations of Maigret's petty-bourgeois world manifest themselves. "

The novel references some of the Commissioner's past cases. For example, an investigation in Porquerolles is cited, which forms the background of the novel My Friend Maigret , and the Commissioner, on his trip to the Côte d'Azur, repeats the experience of the almond blossom in Provence at that time, which Simenon himself had witnessed in the spring of 1926. Other details of the plot also have a biographical origin. The inventor Antoine is reminiscent of a grandfather of Simenon's first wife Régine Renchon, who after an early patent tried in vain the rest of his life to develop new inventions. The old widow's habit of calling herself Antoine de Caramé after both deceased husbands corresponds to the behavior of Simenon's mother, who for a while appeared under the surnames of her second and deceased first husband as “Madame André Simenon”.

reception

For many critics, the last novels of the Maigret series are not among the most successful works by Simenon, whose literary streak, in their opinion, has dried up in the end. Murielle Wenger nevertheless saw the novel Maigret and the Crazy Widow among those pearls that were worth noting. All in all, it is a "typical Maigret". On the other hand, a critic of L'Actualité magazine judged: “You have to have the courage to speak it out, which is all the worse for the faithful who will shout out protests, but there is no longer Commissioner Maigret! Georges Simenon, exhausted from countless books, and modern mass society, which, like the police, only works with the help of computers, killed him! "

The New York Times Book Review described the plot: “A frightened old woman seeks the commissioner's help. But before he intervenes, she will be murdered, and his own guilt leads the inspector into a particularly frustrating investigation. ”According to The New Yorker , a“ daunted Maigret ”will face a small number of suspects. He solves the case "in its best and most entertaining, clumsy, busy, muddling way". The American magazine Best Sellers found that Maigret fans should not be urged to follow the Commissioner's latest case. But it is also a good introduction for those, if they even existed, who do not yet know Maigret. Kirkus Reviews saw the commissioner less subdued than in his previous books. All in all, it is a "good" representative from the continuity of the series, "where everything is simply presented and reaches its origin - and the Seine flows calmly."

The novel was filmed twice as part of TV series. In 1975 Jean Richard played Commissioner Maigret in the French series Les Enquêtes du Commissaire Maigret . In 1992 Michael Gambon took the title role in a British television production.

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: La folle de Maigret . Presses de la Cité, Paris 1970 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the spinner. Maigret and the wine merchant . Maigret and the Pole . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1972, ISBN 3-462-00851-X .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the spinner . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Heyne, Munich 1972, ISBN 3-453-12096-5 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the crazy widow . Translation: Michael Mosblech. Diogenes, Zurich 1990, ISBN 3-257-21680-7 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the crazy widow . Complete Maigret novels in 75 volumes, volume 72. Translation: Michael Mosblech. Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23872-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographie de Georges Simenon 1968 à 1989 ( Memento of the original from October 30, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The 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. on Toutsimenon.com, the website of Omnibus Verlag. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / toutsimenon.placedesediteurs.com
  2. ↑ La folle de Maigret 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 , pp. 77-78.
  4. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , p. 398.
  5. ^ A b c Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret-Marathon 72: The crazy widow . On FAZ.net from September 25, 2009.
  6. ↑ and the crazy widow on maigret.de.
  7. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , p. 397.
  8. ↑ a b c Maigret of the Month: La folle de Maigret (Maigret and the Madwoman) on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  9. ↑ Georges Simenon: Maigret and the crazy widow . Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23872-3 , p. 168.
  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 , p. 64.
  11. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , p. 130.
  12. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , pp. 41, 87-88.
  13. ↑ Quoted from: Fenton Bresler: Georges Simenon. In search of the "naked" person . Ernst Kabel, Hamburg 1985, ISBN 3-921909-93-7 , p. 346.
  14. ^ "A frightened old woman seeks the Inspector's help. But before he's moved to action, she's murdered, and his own guilt drives Maigret to a most frustrating investigation. "Quoted from: The New York Times Book Review Volume 2, 1972, p. 55.
  15. ↑ "Sheepish Maigret [...] Maigret solves it in his best, and most entertaining, plodding, doddering, muddling manner." Quoted from: The New Yorker Volume 48, Edition 4/1972, p. 135.
  16. ↑ "Maigret fans will need no urging to follow this latest of Maigret's cases. And it is a good introduction for those (if any) who do not yet know him. "Quoted from: Best Sellers Volume 32, United States Government Printing Office 1972, p. 242.
  17. ↑ "A good one in this continuity where everything is simply stated and reaches its source - and quiet flows the Seine." Quoted from: Maigret and the Madwoman at Kirkus Reviews .
  18. ^ Films & TV on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.