Maigret defends himself

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Maigret defends himself (French: Maigret se défend ) is a crime novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It is the 63rd novel in a series of 75 novels and 28 short stories about the detective Maigret . The novel was written in Epalinges from July 21 to 28, 1964 and was published in November of that year by the Paris publisher Presses de la Cité , while the French daily Le Figaro published the novel in 24 episodes from November 20 to December 17, 1964. The first German translation by Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau appeared in the anthology in 1966Maigret and the crime on board and Maigret and the mysterious captain at Kiepenheuer & Witsch . In 1979 Diogenes Verlag published a new translation by Wolfram Schäfer.

When Maigret's phone rings in the middle of the night and a young girl asks the famous inspector for help with an unbelievable story, Madame Maigret immediately has a bad feeling. But her husband sets out to help those in need and lodges them in a hotel for the night. The police prefect calls him the next morning. The girl reported to the inspector that she had molested her. Maigret, dismayed by the malicious slander, offers to resign, but then he decides to defend himself.

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Palais de Justice in Paris

On a social evening in June, the doctor asks Dr. Pardon Inspector Maigret, whether he has ever met a criminal in his work who committed his deeds out of sheer malice. Ten days later, events remind Maigret of that question again. The Prefect of Police, a young careerist with no practical experience, summons the inspector and presents him with the complaint of a 17-year-old girl, Nicole Prieur, niece of Jean-Baptiste Prieur, a high-ranking rapporteur at the State Council . According to her statement, Maigret spoke to the girl in a bar the previous night, made her drunk, took her to a hotel and moved out. Just because he was scared at the last moment didn't mean she was abused.

Maigret knows the girl who rang him out of sleep last night on the pretext of having found the famous inspector's number in the phone book. Desperate, she said she came from the provinces, had visited a friend in Paris, but had fled when her fiancé turned out to be an intrusive pimp. Now she stands penniless on the street and doesn't know where to go. Although Madame Maigret immediately aroused suspicion, the inspector set out to help the young woman. As agreed, he met her in a bar and escorted her to a cheap hotel, where he put her to sleep and undressed, since she seemed unable to do so in her pretended drunkenness. So while the cornerstones of her statement coincide with reality and can thus be verified, every word that is said to have been uttered between the inspector and the girl is a lie, and Maigret is particularly outraged that the phrase is put in his mouth: "The Police, that's me! "

The police prefect, who acts on direct instructions from the Ministry of the Interior and appreciates Maigret's old-fashioned methods as little as his popularity, expects the early departure of the 52-year-old commissioner, who is about to retire, but he grimly decides to defend himself. Against the express instructions of the prefect, he investigates his own cause and lets his inspectors Lucas and Janvier in on the allegations. The question of who would benefit from getting him out of the way in this insidious way almost inevitably leads to Manuel Palmari, in whom the inspector suspects the head of a gang of diamond robbers. Maigret has had him shadowed for some time and has visited him several times in his apartment on Rue des Acacias in order to interrogate him. Almost 60-year-old Palmari is sitting in a wheelchair after an attack by rival crooks and is being cared for by his lover, the 22-year-old former prostitute Aline. Both claim to have nothing to do with the allegations. After all, Aline confides in the superintendent that a young girl like Nicole would only give in to such a hoax out of love.

Avenue de la Grande-Armée

Maigret learns details from Nicole Prieur's private life through Oscar Coutant, a distant relative of Lucas who works as a concierge at the Sorbonne . She belongs to the so-called Étoile gang , a group of rebellious young students whose meeting point is the Club des Cent-Clefs on Avenue de la Grande-Armée. When Maigret discovers that one of the members of this club is the dentist François Mélan, of all people, who runs a practice on Rue des Acacias, right across from Palmari's apartment, he becomes curious. With a pretended toothache, he goes to treatment for the 38-year-old, intelligent but extremely shy Mélan. That Maigret is on the right track is confirmed when the head of the criminal investigation department, Roland Blutet, summons him to his office after a visit to the dentist and gives him leave, apparently again on direct instructions from Prieur, whose niece must have contacted the doctor.

About Professor Vivier, a friend of Dr. Pardon, Maigret learns more about the personality of the dentist, who has been traumatized since his sister was raped by German soldiers in World War II , never entered into a relationship with a woman and, with his high but introverted intelligence, seeks the most complicated solution to every problem. Maigret confronts Mélan's assistant Motte with the suspicion that the dentist is performing illegal abortions after work . In fact, during such an operation, he met the young Nicole, who fell in love with the doctor. The police surveillance of Palmaris and the repeated appearances of Maigret at his window, from which one can look into the doctor's office, Mélan referred to himself and decided to set a trap for the inspector with the help of the girl.

Maigret suspects that the dentist was not only concerned with covering up his illegal sideline activity, and indeed in Mélan's garden there are the buried bodies of three women who the dentist raped in his practice under an anesthetic overdose. Maigret accompanies Mélan to the Quai des Orfèvres , where the dentist makes a confession. After his reputation has been restored, the commissioner naturally takes over the investigation and hopes to expose Palmari as the mastermind behind the robberies. At least it makes it easier for him that he did not get to know a thoroughly malicious person again, but someone who committed all of his deeds, including the slander of Maigret, out of fear.

interpretation

At the beginning of the novel Maigret defends himself there is the question of unprovoked evil , a question that Simenon threw up before in Maigret, a defeat . Maigret's characteristic refusal to condemn another person wavers in the course of the intrigue against him, and he is ready for moments to believe in thoroughly malevolent intentions. When he finally realizes that the perpetrator was acting out of fear rather than hate, he refrains from this idea and even offers himself as a witness. According to Lucille F. Becker, the novel illustrates Simenon's thesis that the killer is ultimately an unhappy creature. But he also demonstrates Maigret's completely different understanding of male and female perpetrators, because while the inspector can understand the inner pain of the mentally deranged dentist, he only shows anger and contempt towards the girl who played the bait.

For Paul Mercier, it is not just slander against which the commissioner has to defend himself in the novel. It is also about a defense of his form of investigation against the police prefect. The commissioner has to justify himself to his supervisor for his outdated methods. Els Wouters even speaks of a real "war" between the commissioner and the judiciary that runs through the Maigret series. It is typical that Maigret's opponents, such as the examining magistrate Coméliau, always come from the bourgeoisie . The "disgusting Prefect" plays tennis , a sport that, according to Stanley G. Eskin, represents the upper class as much as the game of boules is for the common people. In general, the sphere of politics plays only a subordinate role in Simenon's novels, but according to Josef Quack it is always determined by corruption . The prefect and interior minister in Maigret, defending themselves only through intrigue, got into their offices and exploited them for their personal gain.

Despite the allegations made against him, Commissioner Maigret does not lose his composure and relentless logic. He wants to finish the path he once embarked on at any cost, even if it could mean the end of his career. When he is on leave from his supervisor, he then drinks a mandarin curacao . This drink, which is rather unusual for Maigret, is reminiscent of his entry into the criminal investigation department, which he celebrated with the same liqueur in Maigret's memoirs . Maigret's investigation is entirely focused on researching the personality of those involved in the case. It is more important to him to understand the perpetrator than to convict him. He even allows himself to be treated by the dentist he suspects was the mastermind behind his slander, in order to meet him face to face. The signs of the police investigation are reversed: The inspector puts himself in the hands of the murderer and becomes a potential victim himself in his treatment chair. In the end Maigret, according to Stanley G. Eskin, “comes to an understanding of the highly neurotic, albeit brilliant, mind of a perverted person whose problems stem from sexual fears”. For Tilman Spreckelsen, however, there is a good deal of vulgar Freudianism behind the “caricature of an uptight dentist”.

background

The abandoned Maison de Simenon in Epalinges (2013; demolished 2016/2017)

Georges Simenon wrote Maigret defends himself in June 1964 as the first novel after he moved from Echandens to the villa he designed himself in Epalinges in December 1963. In the rest of 1964, only one more novel was written, Der kleine Heilige in October 1964, which was for the prolific writer Simenon is a decidedly low record. In his intimate memoirs , Simenon described in retrospect: “Writing was my job. I felt the need for it. I had been unfaithful to my machine for too long. ”For Simenon's biographer Fenton Bresler, the title of the novel Maigret defends itself against the retreat of its author to his new domicile“ is not without deeper meaning, if you equate Maigret with Simenon's alter ego . ”The novel was that last edited by Simenon's official proofreader Françoise Doringe, who died shortly after completion at the age of 83.

What is unusual for the Maigret series is that the successor Maigret takes time to form a continuation of the plot. In the last sentence from Maigret defends himself it says: “You should see Maigret often in the Rue des Acacias.” In fact, the street becomes the setting again in the next novel, Maigret meets the paralyzed Manuel Palmari and his lover Aline Bauche again, and he does solves the case around the diamond cluster. In the previous novel, Maigret and the Ghost , Simenon had already prepared the plot of robberies by a motorcycle gang on Parisian jewelers, which here form the starting point of the plot as a closed case. Simenon adopted the surname of the youngest member of the motorcycle gang, Jean Bauche, for Palmari's lover Aline.

Simenon's biographer Stanley G. Eskin sees the figure of the dentist Mélan, who also performs gynecological interventions on his patients, as a swipe at a guest of Simenon's mother, who rented out furnished rooms to students. In the autobiographical novel Pedigree ( family tree ), Simenon let that guesthouse appear under his real name. The latter sued Simenon's account and in particular the claim that he had become a dentist because he had failed to study medicine. Later editions of Pedigree lead the figure of the budding dentist under the pseudonym "Monsieur Bernard".

reception

The Publisher's Trade List Annual summarized the novel: “The famous detective is accused of moral depravity and almost forced into early retirement.” In any case, The Spectator was “shocked to read that the respected Maigret is wrong - at his age and with a young girl. ”In his defense Maigret had to use all his weapons, which he succeeded well under the given circumstances. For The New Yorker , Maigret was accused for no apparent reason of seducing and stripping the teenage niece of an influential figure. It is an "extraordinary case, and one of its most fascinating". The Enlightenment is done with a "sophistication that is remarkable, even for Maigret or Simenon."

Oliver Hahn from maigret.de read the story "with great discomfort". As a loyal Maigret reader, one feels “personally attacked” when the author pushes his protagonist into a corner “in a tricky, perhaps hopeless situation”. Tilman Spreckelsen, on the other hand, was pleased: "Here he is finally being attacked directly, and the way he defends himself has class". However, he regretted the poorly designed opponent and some sentimentalities: “What a shame about the actually interesting book.” Reclam's crime novelist would have wished, after the rebuttal of the allegations, to witness the humiliation of the superior and the punishment of the girl, “but Simenon limits himself to Color in Maigret's humiliation. In spite of this, or precisely because of it: best Simenon. "

The novel was filmed six times. In addition to a British television film with Rupert Davies (1969), Jan Teulings (Netherlands, 1967), Gino Cervi (Italy, 1968), Jean Richard (France, 1984), Bruno Cremer (France, 1993) and Michael Gambon (Great Britain, 1998) played the Commissioner Maigret in the context of TV series.

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Maigret se défend . Presses de la Cité, Paris 1964 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the crime on board . Maigret and the mysterious captain . Maigret defends himself . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1966.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret defends himself . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Heyne, Munich 1967.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret defends himself . Translation: Wolfram Schäfer. Diogenes, Zurich 1979, ISBN 3-257-21117-1 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret defends himself . Complete Maigret novels in 75 volumes, volume 63. Translation: Wolfram Schäfer. Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23863-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographie de Georges Simenon 1946 à 1967 on Toutesimenon.com, the website of Omnibus Verlag.
  2. ↑ Maigret se défend 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. 79.
  4. ^ A b Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , p. 395.
  5. ↑ 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 , pp. 62–63.
  6. ↑ Lucille F. Becker: Georges Simenon . House, London 2006, ISBN 1-904950-34-5 , pp. 47-48.
  7. ↑ Paul Mercier: La reluctance de Maigret Maigret se dans Défend . In: Cahiers Simenon 8 , 1994.
  8. ↑ 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. 68.
  9. ^ Els Wouters: Maigret: Je ne déduis jamais. La méthode abductive chez Simenon . Ed. du Céfal, Liège 1998, ISBN 2-87130-062-3 , p. 27.
  10. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , pp. 401-402.
  11. ↑ 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. 28.
  12. ↑ Sylvie Lausberg: The author of the naked man always wrote unadorned . In Le Soir Illustré No. 2986, September 14, 1989.
  13. ↑ 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. 63.
  14. ↑ Maigret's Drinks on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  15. ↑ Lucille F. Becker: Georges Simenon. House, London 2006, ISBN 1-904950-34-5 , p. 47.
  16. ↑ Dominique Meyer-Bolzinger: Une méthode clinique dans l'enquête policière: Holmes, Poirot, Maigret . Éditions du Céfal, Brussels 2003, ISBN 2-87130-131-X , pp. 89-90.
  17. ^ A b Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret-Marathon 63: Maigret defends himself . On FAZ.net from July 10, 2009.
  18. ↑ a b Maigret of the Month: Maigret se défend (Maigret on the Defensive) on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  19. ^ Georges Simenon: Intimate Memoirs and the Book of Marie-Jo . Diogenes, Zurich 1982, ISBN 3-257-01629-8 , p. 710.
  20. ^ Fenton Bresler: Georges Simenon. In search of the "naked" person . Ernst Kabel, Hamburg 1985, ISBN 3-921909-93-7 , p. 345.
  21. ^ Pierre Assouline : Simenon. A biography . Chatto & Windus, London 1997, ISBN 0-7011-3727-4 , p. 354.
  22. ↑ Georges Simenon: Maigret defends himself . Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23863-1 , p. 175.
  23. ↑ Maigret of the Month: Maigret et le fantôme (Maigret and the Ghost, Maigret and the Apparition) on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  24. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , p. 53.
  25. ↑ "The famous detective is accused of moral turpitude and almost forced into premature retirement." Quoted from: The Publisher's Trade List Annual Volume 2, 1982, p. 87.
  26. ↑ "We are shocked to read that the respected Maigret has been misconducting himself - at his age, and with a young girl." Quoted in: The Spectator Volume 216, Edition 2, 1966, p. 605.
  27. ↑ “It is a strange case, and one of his most fascinating. […] The solution is arrived at with an ingenuity that is remarkable even for Maigret, or Simenon. ”Quoted from: The New Yorker Volume 57, Issues 24–32, 1981, pp. 160–161.
  28. ↑ Maigret defends himself on maigret.de.
  29. ^ Armin Arnold, Josef Schmidt (Ed.): Reclams Kriminalromanführer . Reclam, Stuttgart 1978, ISBN 3-15-010279-0 , p. 312.
  30. ↑ Maigret Films & TV on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.