THE BEST OF MAIGRET

thought, ‘My main character is going to be someone like that, not like me.’”

Perhaps the power of the Maigret books derives from the tension between Maigret’s ordinary surface – he’s a placid, pipe-smoking petit-bourgeois who goes home for lunch with his wife every day – and the radical compassion his bohemian creator projected on to him. Maigret listens to murderers and tries to help them, reflecting Simenon’s stated belief that “there are no criminals”.

“He is the mender of destinies, that was my father’s description of Maigret, and this is what my father wished he had been able to do and Maigret heads to his creator’s home city, Liège in Belgium, for a case based on the mysterious real-life death of a painter who had been in a group of radicals with the young Simenon. A superb evocation of springtime Paris, as a guilty Maigret races around the city to avenge the murder of a man whose pleas for help he had dismissed as crank calls. A jeu d’esprit in which Maigret tells his own story for once, and even takes Simenon to task for the inaccurate portrayal of him in his novels (“Did you really have to simplify me…?”). Maigret pretends to be on holiday but remains in Paris secretly keeping an eye on his colleagues in a book that throws a funny and touching light on the Maigrets’ marriage. JK

be in life,” says John. “I think, for example, he worked very hard to save his relationship with my mother, but she expected too much from life and from him. She was extremely unstable and her condition deteriorated over time. He really tried to be a mender of destiny, and it was something that was not in his hands. Real life is not like a novel.” Simenon and Denyse separated in 1964.

“It was the same with my sister.” Simenon’s treasured daughter, Marie-Jo, committed suicide in 1978, aged 25. “What made it even more of a tragedy for him is that he constantly saw it coming. One of his books, The Disappearance of Odile [his 1971 novel about a suicidal 18-year-old girl], can be read as an attempt to exorcise that doom that he saw coming. He couldn’t.”

John insists that his father’s promiscuity did not contribute to the break-up of his marriage: “He was very open and it had been totally accepted from the beginning.” It was John, then working in film production, who arranged for his father to conduct an interview with Federico Fellini in 1977 to promote Fellini’s film Casanova, and so was present when Simenon stole Fellini’s

ohn admits that, as a teenager, he did not care for his father’s work. “He always said that he acted like a sponge, absorbing everything he had seen and using it all in his books. One day, when I was 16, I recognised myself. I read a description of a young boy that used a lot of my traits to describe him. That was when I stopped reading his books,” he recalls, laughing.

But when he picked up a copy of his father’s The Snow Was Dirty

20 years later, “my experience as a teenager was just turned around 180 degrees. In that book there’s a sentence, ‘Being a man is difficult’, and I was raised on him saying that sentence all my life, and all of a sudden here I find it in what I consider one of the most extraordinary books I’ve ever read. So the link with my upbringing became a very rich and positive one, instead of a negative one. And that was the beginning of a new relationship with his work.”

He thinks it was his father’s spongelike receptiveness to his surroundings that made the various settings of his books so vivid, and that drove him to live in so many places around the world: “He would suck everything from a place like a tree, and then need to move on.” Eventually Simenon settled in Switzerland and, when he was 70, announced his retirement from writing fiction.

“He just ran out of energy. For him the act of writing was a physical exercise as much as an intellectual one. He wrote in a sort of trance and would lose about a litre of sweat every day. That is the reason he never wrote long books: he did not have the energy to write for longer periods. And eventually I think he felt spent.”

John thinks his father was contented in his final years, even getting over his frequently expressed disappointment at never

Simenon once claimed, ‘since the age of 13 and a half, I have had 10,000 women’