Aunt Jeanne belongs to the subset of Simenon’s dysfunctional family novels, among which can be counted The Others, The Fate of the Malous, Strange Inheritance and Uncle Charles, to name but a few. The novel opens with the return, after an absence of 36 years, of overweight, alcoholic, world-weary Jeanne to her childhood home. The … Continue reading Aunt Jeanne
Notes on Simenon
The Mahé Circle
In The Mahé Circle, Simenon presents us with François Mahé, an overweight, thirty-five-year-old doctor, who lives with his wife, two children, and his mother, who still wakes him in the morning and tells him ‘when to change his underwear.’ The novel is mainly set on Porquerolles, a small island in the Mediterranean, where the Mahés … Continue reading The Mahé Circle
The Blue Room
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
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
Red Lights
Steve Hogan and his wife, Nancy, leave New York on Labor Day to drive to Maine to collect their children from summer camp. Steve feels himself ‘going into the tunnel’, an expression he uses privately to describe his desire to go on a drinking binge. Steve suffers from feelings of inadequacy due to the fact … Continue reading Red Lights
Inquest on Bouvet
Inquest on Bouvet is a curiosity – a Maigret novel in form and setting, but one from which the Inspector himself is absent. The plots concern the death of the title character, an old print collector who has lived quietly for twenty years in an apartment by the Seine. Over the course of the novel … Continue reading Inquest on Bouvet
Graeme Macrae Burnet 