Maigret and his scruples (radio play, 1961)

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Maigret and his scruples
(orig. Les scrupules de Maigret )
Radio play from Germany
original language French
Year of production 1961
publication 2001
genre Thriller
Duration 59:50 min
production BR
Publisher / label The audio publishing house
Contributors
author Georges Simenon
Machining Gert Westphal
Director Heinz-Günter Stamm
music Herbert Jarczyk
speaker

Maigret und seine Skrupel is a radio play based on the detective novel Maigret hat Skrupel (1958) by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon , which was realized by Bayerischer Rundfunk in 1961 with Paul Dahlke in the title role after a translation from 1959 by Hansjürgen Wille .

The original radio play announcement from 1961 read: "Maigret has scruples"; this title was also used as a working title, but was behind the official naming within the series, since all other titles were named after the pattern "Maigret and ...". From the beginning, Maigret had a pangs of conscience in this “upside-down case” because he got to know the motives that were initially revealed before the actual act and initially did not want to take them seriously due to absent-mindedness. When he realizes the amalgamations behind it, however, it is too late to prevent the actual crime, which in a sense hits "the wrong person" in two respects.

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Quai des Orfèvres as seen from the Seine

The radio play will be played in Paris at the beginning of January . One late afternoon, Maigret's colleagues in the Quai des Orfèvres suffer from boredom in the absence of investigations and pass the time playing card games. For his part, Commissioner Maigret was able to answer the call of his wife's doctor, Dr. Pardon, distracted, although his diagnosis - light diet due to circulatory fluctuations - can actually reassure him.

He received an unexpected visit from a well-dressed man in his mid-40s with the first name Xaver (in the original Xavier). Because the inspector hardly listens to him at first and he threw away the registration form of his officers, Maigret embarrassingly lacks his last name, which further delays the subsequent investigation. Xaver introduces himself as the 1st salesman in the toys department and an expert in the field of electric trains at the Louvre department store . The extremely nervous man, whose statements are accompanied by constant snapping of his fingers as if by Tourette's syndrome , reports his suspicion that his wife wanted to poison him with zinc phosphide and speculates that she wanted to do it out of a mental confusion. But he himself was demonstrably not mentally disturbed, as his wife made a visit to the well-known neurologist Dr. Steiner confirmed. Nevertheless, he refrains from reporting. When Maigret has to leave the office for a moment, his visitor leaves.

The Grands Magasins du Louvre in Paris , workplace of Xavier Martons

As a result, the police inspector felt remorse due to his negligence and tried in vain to find out more by calling this neurologist. But the doctor, who invokes medical confidentiality , does not reveal more than the surname Marton .

To Maigret's surprise, the wife of his visitor, Gisèle Marton, appears a little later, an elegant and self-confident figure with crocodile leather shoes , matching handbag and fur coat , who presents the opposite of her nervous husband in her controlled manner. The partner in the fashionable Harris corsetry shop on Rue Saint-Honoré near the Jardin des Tuileries had evidently followed her husband and upheld Maigret's suspicions. She played down the situation and presented the whole thing as part of a mental breakdown , triggered by the professional overload, the competitive pressure from an aspiring young salesman and the gradually manifesting paranoia or neurasthenia of her husband. She explains zinc phosphide as the plague of rats that is rampant in the backyards of her business . Since such pests have now also appeared in her residential area on Avenue de Châtillon, she has kept a bottle of it at home. She, too, refrains from taking any further steps, while Maigret is faced with a double dilemma . In which direction should he investigate since he actually has no case?

At least after insisting with his superiors and the public prosecutor, in addition to the experienced inspector Janvier, he can also put the young colleague Lapointe on the case, who bring out interesting new details. The Martons 'household also has Gisèles' younger sister, Jenny, a young widow whose husband, an American engineer, was killed in an industrial accident. In contrast to her cool sister, this Jenny is an extremely attractive young lady, who, according to Janvier, would immediately inflame any man and, due to her delicate gentleness, arouse the protective instinct. Indeed, both Monsieur Marton and his young sister-in-law seem to be facing each other. Madame Marton also evidently has a relationship with her partner, Maurice Torrence, who, like her, once worked at the Grands Magasins du Louvre. In addition, both spouses, who have been married for twelve years, have a high level of mutual life insurance .

In order to clarify the question of whether Monsieur Marton actually suffers from mental disorders, Maigret consults a handbook on neuroses, psychoses and paranoia in the presence of his wife, but in view of the reality of his case he realizes that they cannot help him at all . Enervated, he puts the book down and prefers to turn to the plum brandy offered by his wife.

When Marton visits Maigret again in the Quai des Orfèvres and the latter confronts him with his thoughts, he does not deny his affection for his sister-in-law, who is so different from his wife, who is like most of the women he knows: cold, dominant- and money addict and career obsessed. In addition, he does not hide his intention to shoot Gisèle with a hidden revolver if he notices in time that she is administering the rat poison to him. Gisèle, on the other hand, coldly replies to the inspector that she knows how to defend herself.

The next morning Maigret received a call very early: Xaver Marton was found dead in his apartment, poisoned. His wife also struggled with symptoms of poisoning during the night, but only had to vomit violently. While she found her husband lying on the floor in the living room, his hand still on the revolver but unable to raise it at her, Gisèle simply retired to the bedroom to let him die there. Since Jenny remained in her room in panic and with obvious feelings of guilt, despite the noise in question, until the police arrived, Maigret comes to the decision to arrest Jenny for the attempted murder of her sister Gisèle and the killing of her brother-in-law:

Jenny had wanted to kill Gisèle with a heavy dose of zinc phosphite in the evening tea to free Xaver from his bondage. However, he had wanted to kill his wife himself by pouring a light dose of poison intended for himself into her cup. Since both spouses would already compulsively swap the cups shortly before drinking, he would now have the slightly poisoned cup, could plausibly show the symptoms of poisoning during the night and thus shoot his wife in supposed self-defense , which would have made the previous puzzling visits to Maigret her sense . However, the intervention of his sister-in-law had killed him himself, while his wife is now emerging from the matter free of guilt.

Maigret still has certain scruples because the only person, i.e. Gisèle, whom he would have thought capable of a cold-blooded murder in this matter, remains unpunished and successfully, while he has to arrest the naive sister for the mistaken murder of her lover. But despite all the dissatisfaction, he declares the case closed under the law.

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The novel was created from December 9 to 16, 1957 in Echandens , the work was pre-published from May 23 to June 17, 1958 in 22 issues of the daily Le Figaro , before the book was finally published in June of that year by Presses de la Cité appeared. The first German translation by Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau was published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in 1959 . In 1986 the Diogenes Verlag published a new translation by Ingrid Altrichter in the anthology Christmas with Maigret .

  • Georges Simenon: Les Scrupules de Maigret . Presses de la Cité, Paris 1958 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret has scruples . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1959.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret has scruples . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Heyne, Munich 1966.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret has scruples . In: Christmas with Maigret . Translation: Ingrid Altrichter. Diogenes, Zurich 1986, ISBN 3-257-01729-4 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret has scruples . All Maigret novels in 75 volumes, volume 52. Translation: Ingrid Altrichter. Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23852-5 .

background

Street of the Rue Saint-Honoré

In contrast to most of the other radio plays in the series, the role names were also given German. From Xavier so was Xavier . The introduction went so far that the inspectors clearly audibly played Skat and not a rather French card game, and a little later Madame Maigret presented her always culinary delicacies (in this novel, besides the usual pipe, they are sloe schnapps and cognac ) an onion roast , unusual for French standards , the radio play version prefers to speak of the common plum schnapps . The compulsive snapping of Martons fingers was clearly incorporated into his musical interludes by the composer Herbert Jarczyk, and in the end, for the melancholy mood of Maigret, the recording of an unnamed French chanson was chosen as an exception .

Both German-language radio play adaptations from 1959 and 1961, which were recorded by different radio stations and speakers, were based on Willes' translation and Gert Westphal's adaptation . The latter version featured Dahlke, Rolf Boysen and Wolfgang Büttner more prominently and is still the only one available on phonograms, as Audio Verlag published it in a special edition in 2005 together with four other Maigret radio plays. The series from 1959 was produced by the then SWF under the direction of Gert Westphal. The speakers were Leonard Steckel as Maigret , Annedore Huber-Knaus as Madame Maigret and Heinz Schimmelpfennig as Inspector Lucas .

On the cover of the special edition of Weltbild Verlag ( ISBN 3-8289-7926-2 ) with 3 CDs, there was a serious editorial mistake in the summary: Gisèle allegedly dies.

Ingrid Pan , who took over the part of Jenny Marton , was the wife of the radio play director Heinz-Günter Stamm at the time , who cast her in many radio play roles.

review

“You could find this case banal and at the same time deliberately curious: the man who is afraid of his wife, the woman who accuses her husband the next day, that's the fun part. And the alienation of the couple, since the woman has had the success that the man denies, would be the banal element. The only difference is that Simenon is still playing with the reader by placing extremely suggestive figures in front of his nose, which one believes he understands, until the abysses appear. "

In connection with the radio play adaptations, the underlying calm of the cases described was praised: “The delightful thing about Simenon's works is the calm they radiate. Simenon has never written action crime novels. The narrative style resembles a slowly flowing river. Here the people involved have enough time to develop clearly before the eyes of the reader. "

Other voices compared the adaptation more to the style of the contemporary Paul Temple adaptations of Francis Durbridge's crime novels with René Deltgen : “ Inspector Maigret, who is played by the well-known actor Paul Dahlke, is a rather unpleasant contemporary. His appearance shows less of the manners of a gentleman like Paul Temple, but rather of the kind of 'Me boss - you nothing'. The person Maigret is not conveyed through emotions, because Maigret even keeps a bitter distance from his own wife, as he always addresses her as 'Frau Maigret'. The stories themselves are entertaining and all extend over a CD. So it is of course not surprising that the plot does not get a great deal of depth and that the circle of people is kept relatively manageable and small. Although it is not possible to predict who will be the culprit in the end, there is no real surprise either. Maigret's cases manage without blood, with a few shots and with unspectacular corpses. "

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographie de Georges Simenon 1946 à 1967 on Toutesimenon.com, the website of Omnibus Verlag.
  2. ↑ Les Scrupules de Maigret on the page of 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. 59.
  4. ^ Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret-Marathon 52: Maigret has scruples . On FAZ.net April 24, 2009. Retrieved July 2, 2012.
  5. ↑ http://www.meinebuecher.net/2011/05/georges-simenon-maigret-die-besten-falle/
  6. ↑ Review of the radio play. On: www.der-hoerwurm.de. August 8, 2005 ( memento from December 17, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ). Retrieved August 2, 2012.