Adrianslont wrote:Georges Simenon - you’ve never read any Maigret? A bit more straightforward than the above two authors but solid. I like the sense of place and characterisation. Police procedural combined with Maigret’s domestic life.
Reading a Maigret is like watching a magic trick to me. Maigret goes there, comes back, eats, drinks, goes somewhere else, smokes, grumbles and suddenly the murder is solved. It always feels like he isn't doing much. They're not action-packed books, Simenon real force lies in the way he makes the surroundings almost palpable to the reader, but without engaging in page-long descriptions. With just a few sentences, you can see the brasserie, smell the choucroute and the beer, feel the rain pouring down on Maigret.
The other great force of the Maigret books is Maigret's humanity and empathy. He has to barge into people's lives unannounced but he knows that's how he'll solve the crime, by understanding the victim as a human being. And he needs it not just to solve the crime but for himself too, he needs to be able to understand the whole situation on a human level. His investigation is more about the people, more about the how we got there in the first place than about the how it was done. He likes people and it shows.
For instance, the last one I read starts with a guy being stabbed to death in a dead-end street. Immediately the
juge d'instruction goes for "he was probably killed for his money, nothing to see here". But Maigret is intrigued by the dead man's shoes. Not that they're weird shoes in themselves but Maigret feels their color just doesn't really match the dead man's trade/social position (1950s France, when this type of things would be more noticeable). So already you see that Maigret is interested in the murder not because of some clue
à la Sherlock Holmes, like the shoes not being of the right size or the like, but because he wants to understand why such a man would wear such shoes. Maigret spends most of the book reconstructing the dead man's life, questioning his wife, his children, his ex-coworkers, painting a full picture of a man in an unhappy marriage, crushed by unemployment and his wife's social ambitions. Nothing crazy, just a piece of everyday 1950s human drama: he's only a
magasinier while his in-laws have the distinction of working for the SNCF (French National Railway Company)! They have job security and will get a pension, and his wife resents him for not being like her sisters' husbands.
In the end, the crime is not solved along those family lines and there's an exchange between Maigret and the
juge d'instruction highlighting this (basically "Just killed for his money, as you thought, M. le Juge.") but you can feel that in Maigret's mind the judge, despite being technically right, has missed on the most important/interesting aspect of the whole thing.
Frederic Dard - more crime fiction from 1950s to 1980s I think. Hundreds of them. I’ve only read two and I find them a bit hard because he uses less common slang and even makes up a lot of his own. But he’s fun. I will read more as my reading improves.
I've read about a dozen San Antonios last year. That was quite the reading experience. The womanising part hasn't exactly aged well in this post-Me Too era but, language wise, they are fascinating books.
Just the other day, I bookmarked some pages I thougt I could post about here to draw attention to the books. I think they may be the most untranlatable French books ever written, something like French literature's ultimate frontier. Understanding all the schoolyard puns, dad jokes, allusions, etc., would be near impossible but it certainly makes them a good place to stretch your French.