Exactly a century ago today, on February 13th, 1903, Georges Simenon, the creator of Inspector Maigret, was born in Liège, a dreary industrial city in eastern Belgium. Even with his date of birth, an element of make-believe crept in, as it did with so much of Simenon's life.
His domineering and religious mother, Henriette, who came from stern Dutch and Prussian stock, gave birth to Georges at 10 minutes after midnight on February 13th that year, but made a false declaration that he had been born on the 12th, so that he would not be registered with an unlucky date.
The young boy's upbringing was strict and petit-bourgeois. His father, Désiré was an accountant for an insurance firm and his mother worked in a store. Georges was an avid reader from about eight years of age: Balzac, Dickens, Dumas, Stevenson, anything he could get his hands on. He was educated by the Jesuits, but soon rebelled against both school and Church. For his whole life, he also found it extremely difficult to get on with his mother.
Childhood seduction
In 1915, when he was just 12. While on holiday, he was seduced by a young girl called Renée, (who was three years older then himself. He went on to become extremely promiscuous for most of his life. By his own claim, he had sex with 10,000 women. Many of them were prostitutes; as a young man, he had a penchant for the low life of Paris.
Another key moment for the young Simenon came in 1919, when he was just 16. He got a job in the office of the local weekly paper, the Gazette de Liège. So many of its staff had been killed in the Great War that when he asked the editor for a transfer to reporting duties, his wish was granted immediately. The young apprentice reporter covered the usual round of local events, everything from the courts to dignitaries' funerals.
This introduction to everyday city life, including its seedier elements, was seminal to his later writings. He also joined a group of artists in Liège who called themselves La Caque (The Cask). They drank, took drugs and talked endlessly about art and philosophy.
Simenon spent four years at the paper before leaving for Paris, where his first job was as secretary to a writer and politician with extreme right-wing views. Paris also saw him having his first big affair, with Josephine Baker, the wonderfully sexy black performer from Missouri, who scandalised even 1920s Paris with her nightclub act wearing nothing but a bunch of bananas.
Simenon's young wife, Régine Renchon, nicknamed "Tigy", an artist in her own right, turned an unseeing eye to his many indiscretions.
Simenon became wealthy as a result of the masses of pulp fiction he produced under many pseudonyms. He and his wife moved to an apartment in the stylish Place des Vosges, where they had a secretary, a chauffeur and a cook. He mixed socially with such artists as Picasso and Vlaminck.
During the 1930s, not only did Simenon continue his womanising with great enthusiasm, but he also became an inveterate wanderer. He and his wife lived at many addresses throughout France and travelled many of the country's canals and rivers, as well as visiting much of Europe, Turkey and Africa.
Arrival of Maigret
The publication in 1931 of the first Inspector Maigret book was astonishing for its publicity, the invention of Simenon himself. The launch took place in a nightclub in Montparnasse and guests had to come dressed either as gangsters or prostitutes. Next day, Parisian papers devoted hectares of space to this new character of detective fiction.
Over the next 40 years new investigations by the fictional French policeman appeared at an average rate of around 2.5 a year. Simenon, who started work each day at around 4 a.m., wrote a total of 450 novels and novelettes. He never wrote the "big novel" that some critics expected, but produced more than 50 serious books, some of them profound psychological studies that had nothing to do with Maigret. After his mother died, late in his life, he wrote Lettre à ma Mere, an incomparable study of the mother-son relationship. However, it is for the French detective with his hat, trench coat and pipe that Simenon will always be remembered.
The archetypical on-screen Maigret was Rupert Davies, who played the detective for 51 episodes on BBC television between 1960 and 1963. Exactly 30 years later, the Dublin-born actor Michael Gambon played Maigret in 12 TV productions by Granada. Many others portrayed the detective on cinema and television screens, including Charles Laughton and Richard Harris. The character was immensely popular, with Maigret books translated into 50 languages and over 500 million copies sold.
During the second World War, when much of France was occupied, Simenon and his family lived near La Rochelle in western France, where he continued to write for publication. When the war ended, he narrowly escaped being punished as a collaborator. Then he and his family went to live in the US. He divorced his wife in Reno, Nevada and next day the same magistrate presided as Simenon wed a French Canadian woman, Denyse Ouimet, over 20 years his junior.
Return to Europe
For several years they lived in an idyllic rural setting in Connecticut, before Simenon made a disastrous decision to return to Europe. They settled in various locations in and near Lausanne in Switzerland, where his wife's mental health deteriorated sharply. Years later, when Simenon's 25-year-old daughter Marie-Jo killed herself with a gun, Simenon blamed Denyse. In 1961, Simenon took up with the last woman in his life, an Italian chambermaid called Terese Sburelin.
After Maigret was "retired" in 1972, Simenon still wrote vigorously until his health gave way in the last years of his life. He died during the night of September 3rd to 4th. He was cremated, without any religious ceremony, and his ashes were mingled with those of his beloved daughter, Marie-Jo, and scattered beneath a huge tree in the back garden of his last home in Lausanne.