How could he guess that he was to live through this scene ten times, twenty times, more times indeed than he could count? The Blue Room opens with Tony Falcone and his mistress, Andrée – ‘light-headed, their bodies still tingling’ – on a post-coital high following their monthly tryst at the Hôtel des Voyageurs. Tony … Continue reading The Blue Room
Author: Graeme Macrae Burnet
One Way Out
In their most passionate moments . . . her body was taught and quivering like a stretched wire, her pupils rigid as a sleepwalkers. One Way Out tells the story of a doomed relationship between Bachelin, a hot-headed young clerk, and Juliette, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a comfortably bourgeois cashier in the provincial town of … Continue reading One Way Out
Strike Out Where Not Applicable / Nicolas Freeling
Strike Out Where Not Applicable finds Van der Valk newly installed as Commissioner of Police in the provincial town of Lisse, centre of the tulip growing region. The countryside is, ‘Nothing to look at. Flat like all of Holland.’ And the town? Walls white; painted, plastered, roughcast. Metal window-frames painted grey. Huge windows washed and … Continue reading Strike Out Where Not Applicable / Nicolas Freeling
Belle
It sometimes happens that a man at home moves about the house, goes through familiar motions, everyday motions, his expression unguarded, and, suddenly raising his eyes, he notices that the curtains have not been drawn and that people are watching him from outside. The opening of Belle describes a state of being characteristic of a … Continue reading Belle
Double Barrel / Nicolas Freeling
Van der Valk is dispatched to the small town of Zwinderen in the north-east of Holland, where a series of poison pen letters have been sent to residents and two women have committed suicide. The local police are (of course) baffled. Freeling’s Amsterdam inspector is a close cousin of Simenon’s Maigret. Both detectives like to … Continue reading Double Barrel / Nicolas Freeling
Tropic Moon
Try as he might, he could not account for it, this feeling of depression and foreboding that had taken possession of him. This is the feeling that weighs upon young Frenchman Joseph Timar on his arrival in Libreville, Gabon, to take up a position on a logging concession in the interior of the country. Finding … Continue reading Tropic Moon
The Lodger
The snow had melted. Fields and forests were black as ink. The whole visible world was saturated with moisture, exuding a cold, dank vapour. The backdrop to The Lodger is a dismal, wintry Belgium. First Brussels, then the bleak mining town of Charleroi, where the protagonist, Elias Nagear, holes up in a dreary boarding house … Continue reading The Lodger
Café Céleste / Françoise Mallet-Joris
Café Céleste tells the story of the intertwined lives of the inhabitants of a shabby Montparnasse apartment block above the eponymous bar. Among these characters are the ‘malodorous’ Mme Prêtre, the all seeing concierge who dreams of setting up her daughter as the lover of a rich man and living off the proceeds; Dr Fisher, … Continue reading Café Céleste / Françoise Mallet-Joris
The Girl with a Squint
The Girl with a Squint is unusual - if not unique - in Simenon in that its central relationship is between two women. The protagonists are Sylvie and Marie (the one with the squint), childhood friends who we first encounter as teenagers in 1922, working the summer season at a seaside pension in Fouras. They … Continue reading The Girl with a Squint
The Girl in His Past
The Girl in His Past opens like a B-movie. A man drives through a rain swept forest, breaks down, finds his way to a country inn, and then, as the locals eavesdrop, telephones the operator: ‘I’d like to speak to the police, Murder Division.’ Alberte Bauche, a twenty-eight-year-old journalist, has killed his employer – and … Continue reading The Girl in His Past
Graeme Macrae Burnet 