Georges Simenon

<h3>Product Description</h3><p>To protect the reputation of his beautiful and selfish wife, Jonas tells a small lie. She had often gone off with younger men since their wedding. In fact her family, most of the neighbours all knew this. So how could Jonas, the timid little bookseller foresee the dumb hostility and suspicion, the police inquiries, the ugly discoveries his little lie would provoke. Jonas is a Russian-Jewish immigrant who believes he has been accepted in the community of the market square where he has settled, and which he thinks of as home. But the hatred and resentment he has to endure as suspicion mounts reveal his true, terrifying isolation. </p><h3>About the Author</h3><p>Georges Simenon was born in Liege in 1903. He published over 160 books and his work has been admired by almost all the leading French and English critics. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages and more than 40 have been filmed. Simenon died in Switzerland in 1989. </p>

Madame Maigret's trip to the dentist brings surprising insight to a baffling case. On rue de Turenne, two human teeth are found in the furnace of a Flemish bookbinder, who is quickly taken into custody. Blood stains a blue suit hanging in the suspect's closet, yet he denies ownership. A strangely heavy suitcase found in his workshop vanishes. A neighboring shoemaker is willing to talk but changes his story with successive trips to the local tavern. It seems that a crime has been committed, but without a corpse the case seems impossibly perplexing until Madame Maigret leaves her kitchen to lend the Chief Inspector an able hand.

### Language Notes Text: English, French (translation) ### About the Author Georges Simenon (1903-1989) was born in Lie`ge, Belgium. As a young man he worked as a baker, journalist, and bookseller and published his first novel at seventeen. He went on to write more than two hundred novels, becoming one of the world's most prolific and bestselling authors. His books have sold more than 500 million copies and have been translated into fifty languages.

While committing what he intends to be his last burglary, "Sad Freddie" discovers something completely out of his line: the body of a dead woman, her chest covered in blood, holding a telephone in her hand. Inspector Maigret is called in to solve the crime, and after an exhaustive search, a psychological duel, a marathon interrogation, and innumerable glasses of Pernod, wine, cold beer, and brandy--a sure sign that this is no easy case--the famous French sleuth triumphs. Maigret is a registered trademark of the Estate of Georges Simenon ### Review "Simenon is ... in a class by himself." -- *The New Yorker* "Maigret...ranks with Holmes and Poirot in the pantheon of fictional detective immortals."-- *People* ### Language Notes Text: English (translation) Original Language: French

The Inspector must enter the unsavory world of politics to help a conscientious politician.Maigret is secretly summoned by a distraught cabinet minister who needs help in recovering a document - the Calame report, an engineering study that warned that a government-funded children's sanitarium was of unstable design. The study was hushed up, the report stolen, and the disaster made reality - with 128 children killed in the building's collapse. Now Maigret must plumb the depths of government corruption to find the thief and the report - and let the compromised government fall where it may.

Após ter sido alertado pela Interpol para a iminente chegada de Pietr, o Letão, um criminoso internacional, Maigret vai esperar o comboio que o trará à Gare du Nord, tendo em seu poder apenas uma descrição detalhada do indivíduo. Reconhece-o com facilidade, é certo, mas a descoberta quase imediata de um cadáver no comboio vai baralhar o inspector: é que o morto também corresponde fielmente à descrição do criminoso! Os golpes de teatro sucedem-se: Pietr parece estar em mais de um sítio ao mesmo tempo, dos mais selectos e elegantes ambientes aos antros mais miseráveis. Não havendo uma explicação aparente para a maior parte dos movimentos do criminoso, estaremos perante um caso de dupla personalidade?

When a lovelorn factory girl with an illegitimate child disappears, the townspeople believe Joseph Peeters, the suspected father of her child, committed murder to free himself to marry another. Maigret must use his instincts to disprove Joseph's alibi or explain Germaine's disappearance. ### Language Notes Text: English (translation) Original Language: French

Guided by his intuition and his special talent for putting himself in other people's shoes, Inspector Maigret plows through a frustrating maze of seemingly unconnected suspects and only the most fragmentary clues to find the murderer of fortuneteller Mademoiselle Jeanne. ### Language Notes Text: English (translation) Original Language: French

You'd have said that Louis Jeunet was a down-at-heel layabout, but he was packeting up over 30,000 francs when Maigret first spotted him in Brussels. When he posted the money, unregistered, as 'Printed Matter', Maigret followed him for fun. He took a train for the north. At the German frontier Maigret switched suitcases, in a spirit of idle curiosity, but when Jeunet discovered his loss at Bremen he took out a gun and shot himself, and Maigret was left to cope with his own culpability.

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Mondays are nobody's favorite day, but when Maigret's week begins with a corpse found stabbed to death in a Parisian alley, the Inspector immediately sees a flaw. Murders are rarely committed on Mondays. That clue, along with the victim's strange recent behavior, leads Maigret to the cause of this nasty crime-and reveals the tale of a deadly marriage. Maigret is a registered trademark of the Estate of Georges Simenon. ### Review "Maigret...ranks with Holmes and Poirot in the pantheon of fictional detective immortals." -- *People* "Simenon is ... in a class by himself." -- *The New Yorker* ### Language Notes Text: English, French (translation)

The attempted suicide of the glamorous Countess Paverini at the luxury Hotel George V is reported to the Police Judiciaire; a few hours later, in his suite on the same floor of the same hotel, the thrice married multi-millionaire David Ward, who was known to be the Countess's lover, is found dead in his bath. Maigret's investigations take him behind the glittering facade of the world-famous hotels of Paris, Monte Carlo and Lausanne into the private, often bewildering, world of the very rich. Whatever the motive, passion or self-interest, the stake were high, but who had most to gain from Ward's death?

When Maigret receives an urgent call from his friend Dr. Pardon he responds immediately, despite the late hour; it seems that the doctor has just treated an apparently wealthy woman for a suspicious gunshot wound, but before he could notify the authorities she diappeared with her companion. The doctor's story gains some perspective when the same woman turns up at the house on Avenue du Parc-Montsouris where Felix Nahour has just been found - shot to death. This is a masterful exploration of the twin passions of love and hate as they mingle in the shadowy mind of a criminal.

**Library Journal** In all three of these stories adapted by Frederick Spoerly, Maigret is involved in the domestic problems of the wealthy. The title story involves a man murdered in his home; his family is reluctant to discuss the matter. When Chief Inspector Maigret is called in to investigate the homicide, family members are interviewed, and the motive is discovered. Although one-dimensional in characterization, the story holds the reader's interest. In "Maigret Hesitates," the Inspector receives a letter that a murder is about to take place. He traces the stationery and investigates a wealthy household where the homicide will occur; however, he cannot prevent it from happening. "Maigret in Society" has the inspector investigating the death of an elderly comte found shot to death in his study. This is the best developed of the trilogy and offers an effective surprise ending. Spoerly understands the feel of French language and thought. The actors do an excellent job with pronunciation and vocal inflection. Recommended for public library collections, especially where Simenon (Maigret and the Killer, LJ 4/15/98) is popular.Jacqueline Seewald, Red Bank Regional H.S., Little Silver, NJ **AudioFile - Carolyn R. Angus** Simenon's popular detective, Chief Inspector Maigret, employs his skills at methodical sleuthing to solve three crimes in Maigret and the Reluctant Witness, Maigret Hesitates and Maigret in Society. In the title mystery, the son of the owner of a declining biscuit factory is found shot in the family's derelict mansion. It takes Inspector Maigret to see beyond an apparent murder at the hands of a burglar and shift the investigation to a host of relatives with motives based on financial desperation, jealousy and estrangement. Frederick Spoerly's adaptations of Simenon's mysteries are excellent. Nothing is missing from the plots and character development. The use of familiar theme music and sound effects enhances the full-cast production. A not-to-be-missed audio production for Maigret fans and for those who like their sleuths to have a philosophical bent. C.R.A. cAudioFile, Portland, Maine

Léonard Planchon, a tense man with a harelip, goes to Maigret with an unusual problem. He wants to kill his wife, or perhaps his wife and her lover, who for two years now have been making him sleep on a cot in the dining room. He has even worked out a plan to hide their bodies in concrete. Uneasily investigating a murder that has not yet been committed, Maigret explores the bistros of Montmartre and uncovers a peculiar--and pathetic--ménage à trois. Maigret is a registered trademark of the Estate of Georges Simenon ### From Publishers Weekly The redoubtable chief inspector is startled when Leonard Planchon, a desperately unhappy fellow with a harelip, confesses to Maigret that he wants to kill his wife and Roger Prou, her virile young lover. For two years they have tormented him, forcing him to turn over his business, his home, and his half of the bed (he has been relegated to a cot in the dining room). In this first American edition of a 1962 procedural by French master Simenon, Planchon disappears shortly after signing a document turning the business entirely over to Prou, and Maigret, already investigating a jewel robbery and battling an incipient flu, begins digging into a crime that may not have happened. It's a pleasure to follow the inspector through Montmartre as he patiently questions Parisian prostitutes, bartenders and others as to Planchon's whereabouts, stripping away a bit more of the mystery's camouflage with each encounter, arriving finally at a meticulously plotted but strangely disappointing denouement. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. ### Review "Maigret...ranks with Holmes and Poirot in the pantheon of fictional detective immortals." - *People* "Simenon is ... in a class by himself." - *The New Yorker*

While interrogating a penniless delinquent about a sordid crime, Maigret is called to the scene of an utterly different murder, one of the richest wine merchants in Paris is dead. "Georges Simenon's Chief Inspector Maigret belongs to the Paris of today as surely as Holmes did to gaslit London." (The New York Times) ### Language Notes Text: English, French (translation) ### From the Publisher 5 1-hour cassettes

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Chief Inspector Maigret investigates the murder of a Jewish diamond-merchant, the suspicious death of a businessman, and the killing of an unlucky commercial traveller

It's closing time at the Gai Moulin, and Jean Chabot and René Delfrosse are planning to rob the till to pay of their debts. To their surprise, they stumble upon a dead body. What at first seems to the police an open and shut case proves more complicated when the body turns up next at the zoo, stuffed into a wicker basket. Into the puzzlement steps Maigret, who makes one of the most dramatic and colorful entrances of his career as he sorts out the tangled web of deceit. Maigret is a registered trademark of the Estate of Georges Simenon. ### From Publishers Weekly First published in 1931 in France and brought out in the U.S. nine years later, this early story by prolific Simenon (1903-1989) takes place in Liege, the author's birthplace. Two Belgian teenage boys hide out in the Gai-Moulin, a nightclub, after closing time in order to steal from the till. Sneaking up to the bar, however, they see the body of a man on the floor and flee in panic. The next day, the body is found in a wicker basket on the lawn of the zoo. The dead man, a rich Greek, had hired Maigret to follow and protect him, but then eluded the inspector. The police arrest one of the boys while the other hides. Puzzled about why the victim had been in Belgium, Maigret helps the Liege Surete unravel a deeper plot and shows how a boyish prank evolves into serious trouble. Simenon's genius shines in this simple but exciting story. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. ### From Kirkus Reviews In this brief novel, first published in 1940, Inspector Maigret goes undercover to solve a murder in the Belgian city of LiŠge, where the body of Greek playboy Ephraim Graphopoulos has been found, stuffed in a wicker basket, at the town zoo. The local police have focused their investigation on the Gai-Moulin, a seedy nightclub where the victim spent his last night in the company of bar-girl AdŠle, enviously watched by teenaged would-be rou‚s Jean Chabot and Rene Delfosse--now the chief suspects in the murder. There are complicating factors unknown to the police that have brought Maigret into his unaccustomed role, adding to the near- farcical confusion. Not one of Maigret's more brilliant triumphs but interesting for its penetrating character studies--especially of those teenagers in deep trouble. -- *Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.*

Simenon spins a masterful tale of aristocrats fallen on hard times and of a profligate son who in the final hour finds unexpected strength of character, regaining the dignity and the nobility of his ancestors. ### From Publishers Weekly Inspector Maigret returns to his boyhood home, Saint-Fiacre, where an unsigned note warns that a crime will be committed in the church on All Souls' Day. During the services, the Countess de Fiacre dies of an apparent heart attack but Maigret suspects foul play. "Baldick's translation is rather elliptical," PW said, "but Inspector Maigret makes his presence felt"; the final twist is "stunning." Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. ### From Library Journal Another installment in the multivolume Maigret series, this was originally published in France in 1931. The current translation was first published in the United States in 1967. Collections containing titles such as last year's Maigret on the Riviera ( LJ 5/1/88) should welcome this to their shelves.-- MR Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In a great courtroom drama, Maigret has to explain why he does not believe that Gaston Meurant was capable of slitting his aunt's throat for money and smothering a small child. But in saving him from the gallows, Maigret must expose some dark secrets about Meurant's life. This is a painful story of an oppressive domestic tragedy and the compassionate insight of a remarkable detective. 'A truly wonderful writer ...marvellously readable - lucid, simple, absolutely in tune with that world he creates of run-down hotels, cold, dark barges, quayside canal-taverns, lurking prostitutes, pot-bellied burghers, taciturn youths, slippery barmen' - Muriel Spark, "Sunday Times". ### Language Notes Text: English, French (translation) ### About the Author Georges Simenon was born at Liege in Belgium in 1903. He published over 160 books and his work has been admired by almost all the leading French and English critics. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages and more than 40 have been filmed.

"Maigret . . . ranks with Holmes and Poirot in the pantheon of fictional detective immortals."-P E O P L E Human appetites clash with small-town respectability when a teacher in a prim Dutch village is murdered. On his latest case, Maigret finds himself in the town of Delfzijl investigating the murder of a teacher. He is presented with two clues-a sailor's cap in the bathtub and a Manila cigar butt-and a gaggle of suspects, including a flirtatious farmer's daughter, an angry lawyer, a larcenous ship owner, an unaccountably frightened cadet, and a pompous criminologist with a revolver. The Inspector, in turn, is preoccupied with a suspicious pathway lit by a lighthouse beam, which leads him to wonder if this is the kind of spot where secret lovers might be discovered. "Captivating."-T H E N E W YO R K T I M E S B O O K RE V I E W Georges Simenon (1903-1989) was born in Liege, Belgium. He published his first novel at seventeen and went on to write more than two hundred novels, becoming one of the world's most prolific and bestselling authors. His books have sold more than 500 million copies and have been translated into fifty languages. Maigret is a registered trademark of the Estate of Georges Simenon

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In his suit and bowler hat, Inspector Maigret feels out of place among the palm trees, bright colors, and half-clad, tanned vacationers on the Cote d’Azur, in this deft, psychologically fascinating story of men who kick over the traces-and men who don’t. Translated by Geoffrey Sainsbury. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book ### From Publishers Weekly In Simenon's latest mystery to be published here, a poignant tale deftly translated by Sainsbury, his famed detective Maigret must resist the beguiling vistas of the resort paradise of Antibes to concentrate on the murder of William Brown, a retired Australian sheep rancher. For 10 years after deserting his wife and children, Brown had lived with his mistress Gina Martini and her meddlesome mother. Maigret discovers that Brown got money regularly from his son Harry, manager of the family business. When the two women divulge that their late "protector" periodically disappeared and squandered the checks on drink, Maigret traces Brown to a sleazy bar where he finds two more women in the dead man's lifebuxom, overdressed, Fat Jaja and a young prostitute named Sylvie. Maigret resorts to his fine-tuned intuitions to solve this unerringly told mystery. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. ### Language Notes Text: English, French (translation)

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### From Publishers Weekly First published in 1950, this make-believe autobiography harks back to the late 1920s. The account starts with Georges Sim's arrival at the Paris Police Judiciaire to soak up atmosphere for his crime novels by dogging the footsteps of Inspector Maigret. The detective is irritated by the audacious young writer who names "my character" Maigret. The inspector argues with Sim also for oversimplifying, in his fiction, the intricate duties of the police investigating a case. Four-square, honorable, compassionate Maigret "sets the record straight," telling how he's different from the invention, about his courtship and marriage to his beloved Louise. She is the person largely responsible for the firm friendship that grows between the novelist and her husband. The book moves through the years, while Sim works his way up to "semi-literature" and begins to sign his works with his full patronymic. The "memoirs" amount to a very short volume, but it is ingenously amusing and tender. Fans of the enormously popular author with appreciate it. U.K. rights: Hamish Hamilton. November 8 Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc. ### Language Notes Text: English, French (translation)

After a frightened young man steals Maigret's revolver from his home and something macabre is discovered in a trunk at a railroad station, Maigret realizes that the young man will use the stolen gun to exact a measure of retribution. ### Language Notes Text: English, French (translation)

On an errand of mercy, Maigret travels to a provincial village whose crafty inhabitants nearly foil the sleuth. Translated by Helen Thomson. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book. ### Language Notes Text: English, French (translation) ### About the Author Georges Simenon (1903-1989) was born in Lie`ge, Belgium. As a young man he worked as a baker, journalist, and bookseller and published his first novel at seventeen. He went on to write more than two hundred novels, becoming one of the world's most prolific and bestselling authors. His books have sold more than 500 million copies and have been translated into fifty languages.

Georges Simenon's chilling portrayal of tragic love, persecution and betrayal. *'One sensed in him neither flesh nor bone, nothing but soft, flaccid matter, so much so that his movements were hard to make out. Very red lips stood out from his orb-like face, as did the thin moustache that he curled with an iron and looked as if it had been drawn on with India ink; on his cheekbones were the symmetrical pink dots of a doll's cheeks.'* People find Mr Hire strange, disconcerting. The tenants he shares his building with try to avoid him. He is a peeping Tom, a visitor of prostitutes, a dealer in unsavoury literature. He is also the prime suspect for a brutal murder that he did not commit. Yet Mr Hire's innocence will not stand in the way of those looking for a scapegoat as tragedy unfolds in this quietly devastating and deeply unnerving novel. 'The *romans durs* are extraordinary: tough, bleak, offhandedly violent, suffused with guilt and bitterness, redolent of place . . . utterly unsentimental, frightening in the pitilessness of their gaze, yet wonderfully entertaining' John Banville Georges Simenon was born in Liège, Belgium, in 1903. Best known in Britain as the author of the Maigret books, his prolific output of over 400 novels and short stories have made him a household name in continental Europe. He died in 1989 in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he had lived for the latter part of his life.

One of the world’s most successful crime writers, Georges Simenon has thrilled mystery lovers around the world since 1931 with his matchless creation Inspector Maigret. In *The Bar on the Seine* , Maigret must visit a prisoner he arrested and bear the news that his reprieve has been refused and he will be executed at dawn. But when the condemned man tells Maigret a story, his investigations lead him to the Guinguette a Deux Sous, a bar by the River Seine, and into the seamy underside of bourgeois Parisian life.

On the shore of the Black Sea, on the edge of the Soviet Union, a little city has a new Turkish consul. Adil Bey - alone in an alien land - has taken the job after the mysterious death of his predecessor. Receiving only suspicion and hostility, he soon becomes reliant on his secretary, Sonia, for any taste of intimacy. They begin a quiet love affair, and from his window at the consulate, he watches her and her family go about their lives in the room across the way. But this is Stalin's world before the war, and nothing is as it seems. . . Georges Simenon's most starkly political work, The People Opposite is a tour de force of slow-burn tension and existentialist meditation.

'Read him at your peril, avoid him at your loss' Sunday TimesCaptain Lannec has finally managed to buy his own ship with the financial help of his in-laws, the Pitards - and they've never let him forget it. When his temperamental wife Mathilde insists on coming along on the ship's first voyage, Lannec becomes increasingly unnerved by her presence, especially when he receives an anonymous note saying he won't make it back to port. As they hit a storm in the Atlantic, jealousy, spite, snobbery and suspicion are churned up in the boat's stiflingly close quarters...First published in 1935, The Pitards was one of the first novels Simenon wrote when he shelved his famous Maigret series in order to strike out in a new direction and make a name for himself as a literary writer. This gripping evocation of life at sea revolves around class and the tense unravelling of relationships, powerful themes that Simenon would return to throughout his writing career.

Restored to print for the first time in more than forty years, The President was hailed by the New York Times as a “tour de force”At 82, the former premier lives in alert and suspicious retirement—self exile—on the Normandy coast, writing his anxiously anticipated memoirs and receiving visits from statesman and biographers. In his library is the self-condemning, handwritten confession of the premier’s former attaché, Chalamont, hidden between the pages of a sumptuously produced work of privately printed pornography—a confession that the premier himself had dictated and forced Chalamont to sign. Now the long-thwarted Chalamont has been summoned to form a new coalition in the wake of the government’s collapse. The premier alone possesses the secret of Chalamont’s guilt, of his true character—and has publicly vowed: “He’ll never be Premier as long as I’m alive... Nor when I’m dead, either.” Inspired by French Premier Georges Clemenceau, The President is a masterpiece of psychological suspense and a probing account of the decline of power.

“A writer as comfortable with reality as with fiction, with passion as with reason.” —John Le CarréA gripping domestic tragedy starring Inspector Maigret and set in Simenon’s very own neighborhood“One by one the lighted windows went dark. The silhouette of the dead man could still be seen through the frosted glass like a Chinese shadow puppet. A taxi pulled up. It wasn't the public prosecutor yet. A young woman crossed the courtyard with hurried steps, leaving a whiff of perfume in her wake.”Summoned to the dimly-lit Place des Vosges one night, where he sees shadowy figures at apartment windows, Maigret uncovers a tragic story of desperate lives, unhappy families, addiction and a terrible, fatal greed.

“A writer as comfortable with reality as with fiction, with passion as with reason.” —John Le CarréIn this brilliant new translation of Georges Simenon’s classic novel, a young man descends into a brutal world of crime “And always the dirty snow, the heaps of snow that look rotten, with black patches and embedded garbage . . . unable to cover the filth.” Nineteen-year-old Frank—thug, thief, son of a brothel owner—gets by surprisingly well despite living in a city under military occupation, but a warm house and a full stomach are not enough to make him feel truly alive in such a climate of deceit and betrayal. During a bleak, unending winter, he embarks on a string of violent and sordid crimes that set him on a path from which he can never return. Georges Simenon’s matchless novel is a brutal, compelling portrayal of a world without pity; a devastating journey through a psychological no man’s land.

'There were some weeks that were painful, nerve-racking. At the office or at home, in the middle of a meal, he would suddenly find his forehead bathed in sweat, a tightness in his chest, and at those times, feeling everyone's eyes on him was unbearable.'During a chance meeting on the train from Venice to Paris, a stranger asks Justin Calmar to deliver a briefcase for him to an address in Switzerland. Soon this ordinary family man will become hopelessly, fatally, ensnared in a world of guilt, lies and paranoia. Originally published in 1965, shortly after Simenon moved into the new home he had built in Épalinges, Switzerland, this chilling novel is a powerful exploration of the fragility of the human psyche.

The Widowis the story of two outcasts and their fatal encounter. One is the widow herself, Tati. Still young, she’s never had an easy time of it, but she’s not the kind to complain. Tati lives with her father-in-law on the family farm, putting up with his sexual attentions, working her fingers to the bone, improving the property and knowing all the time that her late husband’s sister is scheming to kick her out and take the house back. The other is a killer. Just out of prison and in search of a new life, Jean meets up with Tati, who hires him as a handyman and then takes him to bed. Things are looking up, at least until Jean falls hard for the girl next door. The Widowwas published in the same year as Camus’The Stranger, and André Gide judged it the superior book. It is Georges Simenon’s most powerful and disturbing exploration of the bond between death and desire.

“A writer as comfortable with reality as with fiction, with passion as with reason.” —John Le CarréA gripping mystery from Georges Simenon in which Inspector Maigret must go up against small town suspicion—and revengeIn a small, seaside town in the northwest of France, the local wine dealer is wounded by a gunshot while retuning home drunk from a hotel bar. Maigret, who is heading up a mobile squad of the Paris police force, is called in by the mayor to solve the crime. But upon settling down in the hotel, Maigret quickly discovers a curious cast of characters awaits him there—and they all have something to hide. In the course of this strange case, a customs official is shot, a retired journalist is lost and found, and a vagrant is attested, but through it all Maigret has his sights set firmly in the direction of the truth, even as a strange yellow dog haunts the neighborhood. Fast-paced and wholly unpredictable, The Yellow Dog is a sharp mystery set against the cutthroat backdrop of small town politics.

'For personal reasons, or for reasons I don't know myself, I began feeling old, and I began keeping notebooks. I was nearing the age of sixty'Georges Simenon's autobiographical notebooks, in which he recorded his observations, experiences, anxieties and 'all the silly ideas that pass through my head', are one of the most candid self-portraits of a writer ever put to paper. Here, as the celebrated author ruthlessly examines his tortuous writing methods, his past, his fame, his intimate relationships and his fears of ageing, the result is an unsparing, often painfully revealing insight into a man trying both to find and to escape himself. 'As revealed in these notebooks, Simenon's is a shrewd, lucid mind ... the balance tips toward the real, the immediate, the mysteries of human complexity above all ... Utterly unpretentious' The New York Times