Jack Wilson (0:01)

The History of Literature podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio. Have you ever had the urge to sneak behind the cordoned off areas of a museum or roam the halls after closing time? The Smithsonian's flagship podcast, Side Door, will sneak you behind the scenes of the world's largest museum and research complex. Come learn about the ghosts that supposedly walk the museum halls after dark. How a train robbery gave rise to criminal forensics, why leeches are actually the coolest thing ever, and how to get away with murder in the Arctic. Maybe you'll discover stories of history, science, art and culture you won't find in a display case you can listen to Side Door wherever you get your podcasts or find us online at si Edu Sidedoor This Friday from Disney, the musical movie event of the year arrives in theaters. My name is Snow White. Flawless. Exquisite. Get tickets now. Waiting on a wish. Snow White will have you on your feet. I think that's a wonderful idea. And cheering for more. I was thinking the same thing. Experience the magical story. Magic mirror on the wall. Who's the fairest one of all? Snow White. Disney. Snow White. Only in theaters Friday. Rated pg. PR Guidance Suggested tickets on sale now. Hello. Belgian born French writer Georgia Siminon once said, quote, writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don't think an artist can ever be happy. End quote. And yet he embraced this vocation of unhappiness like a desperate man crossing the Sahara might embrace a bottle of Evian. 200 books of pulp fiction under 16 different pseudonyms. Westerns and adventure books and racy romances or spicy stories as he called them, etc. There were also 136 psychological novels and 83 books featuring the beloved Parisian police inspector Jules Magre. All told, Simenon produced 425 books or so that were translated into 50 some languages and have sold more than 600 million copies around the world. Was he happy doing all of that? And if not, what drove him to do it? We look at the life and work of an astonishing figure, Georgia Simenon, today on the history of literature. Okay, here we go. This is going to be a fun one. We have Simenon, an immensely absorbing life lived by that man. And we'll we're going to look at this in three parts. First we'll look at his biography, who he was, where he grew up, what he did, and so on. Then we'll look at Maghre, just Maghre, the detective that I think will be Siminon's legacy. Maghre was a different kind of detective. And finally, we'll look at Simenon's conception of writing and himself, as revealed in some interviews that he gave Georges. Simenon was born in 1903 in Belgium and died 86 years later in Switzerland. He spent most of his adult life in France, though he also lived in the United States and Switzerland for a stretch. His parents were middle class, his father an accountant at an insurance company. His father had an admirable temperament. It was said, and later Georges said, that he modeled his patient Detective Maghre on his father. Other sources have said that his father could be strict and distant at times, which had an effect on Georgia that perhaps he didn't fully come to grips with. His mother apparently preferred Georges younger brother Christian, which Georgia naturally resented. His mother had a famous ancestor, the notorious Gabriel Bruhl, a robber who preyed upon the good people of Limburg for more than 20 years. It's a rare robbery who winds up being hanged, but that's what happened to Gabriel Brule. He then became part of literary history, as Simenon often used the name Brule as a character in his or a character name in his works. Siminon, as a young child, liked to read Balzac, Dumas, Dickens. He was later compared with Balzac both for his incredible literary output and the content of his books, the settings and context and psychological insight. Their style, though, was somewhat different, as we will see. Roughly speaking, Balzac was a putter inner and Siminon was a taker outer. Siminon also liked girls, and we have as a child, I mean, as a boy, he liked girls, and we kind of have to stop and clear our throat at this point, clear our throat and mop our forehead. We are going to see his relationship with women later. To make ends meet, the Siminone family took in lodgers, including German soldiers, during World War I. Simenon's father disapproved of this, but his mother insisted. Simenon was a good student, especially in French and in literature, but he was also learning lessons about life, including from his mother and his father's relationship. He started shoplifting to get things that were otherwise hard to buy during the war, like pastries. He skipped school and eventually dropped out at the age of 15. Everyone in those years cheated, he later said. My father cheated, my mother cheated everyone. He started his professional career at age 15, reporting for a newspaper and quickly moving to the crime beat. And on top of that, he wrote opinion pieces, gossip columns, interviews with famous people, and so on he took a course in forensic science to learn more about police methods. In barely a year he started writing fiction. Short stories for his newspaper at first, and then a few novels, one of which he self published. At age 18, he was part of a group of bohemian writers calling themselves the Herring Barrel, who spent nights in feverish discussions of art and philosophy, fueled by alcohol and experiments with drugs like morphine and cocaine. One of Siminon's friends in that group hanged himself, which affected him deeply. You can see seedlings of Siminon's later observational powers and interests. His view that crime exists, that people commit them for all sorts of reasons. Circumstances that are mysterious and then maybe not so mysterious. And this is how life is. He fell in love with a painter. He embarked upon his required year of military service and his father passed away. He was still writing for the newspapers at this point. When he finally finished his military service, he got married and relocated to Paris. Things really started motoring forward at this point. The year now is 1921. Simenon starts submitting stories for a magazine headed up by the famous writer Colette, who gives him the advice that his work is too literary. Less literary, she says. Make it less literary. We'll hear him discuss this in part three today. He also develops this idea that he should write pulp novels in order to train himself to write more serious fiction. In the end, he just writes all of it, all of the above and more. You might think he locks himself in the attic in order to produce this kind of like Balzac in his Garret. Siminon writes novels in weeks, sometimes in days, once even in a single day. It was said like a 25 hour stretch. But he's also. At the same time he also lived a kind of crazy whirlwind life. We're still now in Siminon's late teens and early twenties. Siminon is married. His wife hires a woman to be their maid. She becomes like part of the family. And then Siminon has an affair with her that lasts 39 years. He also somehow becomes the lover of Josephine Baker, of all people. And then he becomes her assistant and the editor of her magazine. Here's a description from Wikipedia of Simenon, aged 24 and 25, after he's fled Paris and the world of Josephine Baker in order to try to find some peace and quiet. This is the Wikipedia sentence. It's astonishing. Without the distractions provided by Josephine Baker, Siminones novels increased from 11 in 1927 to 44 in 1928. End quote. Okay, let's just look at that sentence. First of all, without the distractions provided by Josephine Baker. Already I'm imagining my body giving out. A single distraction provided by Josephine Baker would have done me in, I'm sure. And look at then what he did with, with, with, by removing those distractions. Well, even with those distractions, he wrote 11 novels in a single year, almost one a month. And then without those distractions, he wrote 44 novels, almost one a week. But that life, and life without distraction. Okay, so he's subtracted the substrate, the distractions of Josephine Baker. But he still was married and having an affair with the live in housekeeper. Everyone cheated. My mother, my father, everyone. This was basically Siminon's life. It's kind of reminds me of John Le Carre, influenced by his father, a great con man, seeing duplicity up close, knowing that you yourself have inherited some of those skills and tendencies and pouring it into your life and your fiction. For Le Carre, it was secrets and spycraft and living double lives, concealing lovers and concealing things from friends almost for its own sake. Almost like he was practicing his skills or trying them out, testing them to see how the, the psychological impact they would have on him. For Siminone, it wasn't secrets in spycraft. It was just cheating. Departing from norms, bending rules always, and breaking them now and then and, and writing like a madman. That man in the desert that we described earlier as he's crawled his way past the Evian bottle and found a fire hydrant to knock over. The mother of a friend of mine once had dinner with Ted Kennedy during the 1990s. This was after Kennedy's ill fated run for president. But he was still a Kennedy, still living like one. Maybe like the ultimate one. The ultimate Kennedy. The lion of the Senate, they called him. He was fighting for the people, but doing plenty of other stuff too. Limousine liberal Kennedys are not like you and me. They fly their own planes and go skiing in places that we can't afford, and they own homes up and down the coasts. And while this friend of mine, this mother of the friend of mine was eating with him, part of a group of people at a restaurant having dinner. She said that he reached over and started taking food from her plate with his hands without saying anything. What was he thinking? Oh, that looks good, and I'm hungry, and I'm Ted Kennedy, so it's mine. Here we go. I'm hungry. She saw it as a metaphor for how he lived life. Enormous appetites that overwhelmed him and also drove him an engine that couldn't Contain itself, if he even wanted it to. It's just. It's just how some people live, it seems. And Simonon, I would put in this category. He said that he had his first sexual encounter at age 13, although I've read that it was 12 elsewhere. Everyone cheated. Remember mom and dad? Everyone. Me too. And went on. He went on to sleep with 10,000 women. I was a choir boy before I had sex, he said. But I never went to church again afterwards. Well, who had time? This was his routine. He woke up at dawn, wrote 60 to 80 pages before 10:30am smoked 15 full pipes of tobacco and had sex. I'm insatiable for the contact with women, he acknowledged. He added another mistress to the household. Now he had a wife and two mistresses there. And he used the earnings from his writing to visit prostitutes. And he lived to be 83 years old. My God, was he satisfied? Hardly. I literally suffered, he once said, knowing that there were millions of women in the world, that I would never know. His infidelity, or should I say infidelities, did take their toll. He met a young French Canadian woman whom he seduced within hours. She had three children to him of his. He left his first wife for her. Later she wrote a book cataloging his infidelities. And after it was published, their daughter. Simenon's only daughter committed suicide. She had always been unstable. This may or may not have put her over the edge. Something age, maybe. Or maybe it was love for yet another housekeeper he had been having an affair with. Or maybe it was losing his only daughter in such a tragic way eventually settled him down. And he stopped his madman's pace of writing novels, too. He gave up fiction at age 70, but then he dictated 21 volumes of memoirs. Ted Kennedy was a hungry man until his dying day, too. No doubt the memoirs are not recommended. Maybe only Siminon's biographers would find them of interest. Siminone himself agreed with the assessment. At bottom, he said, I have nothing to say. Kind of incredible to commit yourself, to spread that sentiment over 21 volumes. But he believed in productivity. He believed, to some extent, in quantity over quality. Although he valued quality, he couldn't stop himself from quantity. And at one point, his French publisher said, you know his Siminon. Each book is only selling about 8,000 copies, but he's giving us six a year. That's kind of. But then when the Maguray books started to sell more and sold more around the world, there were so many of them to sell, made him a rich man. So we've skipped over a few years and milestones. But I think the issue is we've given you the heart of it, the writing and having sex. We probably haven't given you enough of the color of his life. I'm going to draw from a New Yorker piece that came out in 2011. It has some of the more astonishing details I've read about Simonon or any writer for that matter. This is going to sound. Hopefully it doesn't sound too gossipy. And I'm not covering this just because he's. He had a strange life. And I'm not going to just cover the strangeness. We're going to. As I said, we'll explore Maghre in Part 2 and Siminon's own writing process in his own words in part three. I take. I take that stuff more seriously. I take Simenon seriously because I take Maghre and his other novels. He called them. He called them hard novels or doers take them seriously. There's a lot of them. I haven't read anywhere close to all of them. But I like the style, I like the length. It's like watching a 90 minute movie. You think that's a good length. That was a good length. His novels are like that, maybe 140 pages. I like spending time with the characters. I like the projects that he embarks upon. Ultimately, they're not always satisfying, but they're not fluff or formulaic either. They're kind of fascinating in their way. To see his choices and the execution can be bracing, can be clean, rinsing can feel good to read his prose. It moves so his output, his writing output. His works are fascinating, but maybe not as fascinating as Siminon himself. Let me give you the top five fascinating things about Simenon as provided to us in the New Yorker article from 2011. Simenon made a ton of money, mostly from the Maghre books. They were translated, as I said, into more than 50 languages, made into more than 50 fold films in his lifetime, and then adapted for television multiple times. He was both uneasy and unapologetic about his commercial success. He believed that he was someone who should win a Nobel Prize. And when another writer won it, another French writer, Camus, he and his wife got drunk, furious. They had to numb the pain. He also looked down on his Maghre novels as being not serious. At one point, he switched publishers to try to buff up his reputation, signing with a more literary firm to buff up this reputation that he was a serious writer. But then he would stroll down the hushed hallways of the New publisher, singing, aware that the editors in the offices were hiding in there, their heads down, working on their important works, viewing him as a literary pretender, but aware that they could say nothing about him because he was their cash cow, a beast they wanted to milk. Number four. Simenon also liked to spend a lot of money. He lived in luxury once in a 16th century chateau, and he drove fancy cars. Once when he was living out in the country, he had a white stallion that he would ride to the market. He also had two pet wolves, though he had to donate them to the zoo after one of them, or maybe both of them, ate his cat. Number three. Counting down from five. Number three. Simenon took seven to eight days to write a novel, then two or three more days to revise. For each book, he had a lucky shirt that he washed every night, then put on again the next day. Before writing, he canceled all his appointments and he went to see his doctor to make sure that he'd be able to endure the stress. The doctor gave him a thumbs up, then he would go ahead. And when writing these novels, every morning, he would sit down and type out 80 pages, then vomit, then spend the afternoon relaxing. Item number two. Siminone did not plot out any of these books. He sketched out the characters, then he entered a trance and the plot developed as he went. The result is, I think, good on the whole. We discover things along with the main character, and we're not either ahead or behind the detective, or the author, for that matter. Sometimes in a book that's well plotted by Agatha Christie, you can sense that you've figured something out and the author is still assuming that the reader hasn't yet figured it out. I think Oscar Wilde described this as turning every page with suspense, waiting for the author to catch up, or something similar. And then there's another one. Other times, the author can be ahead of you and you think, I'm not following this. With Simenon, you're almost always right there with the detective and the author. It's probably because of this writing style that he didn't develop the plot and then sort of try to tease you into it. But this method could also produce some sloppiness. Subplots get dropped and characters change in weird ways. And his day or two of revision didn't fix this. He didn't really revise for anything but style, at least according to him. The number one most fascinating fact. Let's deal with it directly. Siminon once claimed to have had 10,000 sex partners, but his second wife Denise said, this is nonsense. Where did he get that number? It was probably more like 1200. His doctors were astonished by what he told them about his sex life, how he did it. He had sex for no more than two minutes and he kept his clothes on, merely unzipping. People in the household were told that they didn't need to leave the room when he was having sex with someone. He seems to have always had this arrangement of a wife with whom he had sex and who employed a maid or a household servant with whom he also had sex. One needs to have one need one's needs met. He would say one of these maids was plump and he nicknamed her the ball. So there we go. He was an absolute whirlwind writer. The accounts vary, but all of them are probably true enough. He wrote a novel in a single day once. He typically wrote them in a week and a half, ten days. He would block out a few weeks on his calendar. I feel a novel coming on. And then he would clear his calendar. We'll talk about the toll this took on him physically and mentally and spiritually when we get to part three. And he had a lot of sex with women. He was prolific and profligate, and his most famous character, the Detective Maghre, was the opposite of both. We'll talk about the gentle, domestic detective after this. Don't you love it when you find a new podcast you really like? Well, let me recommend one. It's called Something you should know. I'm Micah Ruthers, the host, and in every episode you'll hear fascinating information that will make your life better from top experts. Recently we've done episodes on why you have the personality you do, the science of luck and the psychology of a restaurant menu you're gonna like. Something you should know. We have literally thousands of five star reviews. Look for something you should know wherever you get your podcasts. We're so done with New Year. New you this year is more you on Bumble. More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one, filled with show tunes. More of you finding Geminis because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too be more you this year and find them on Bumble. You don't wake up dreaming of McDonald's fries. You wake up dreaming of McDonald's hash browns. McDonald's breakfast comes first. Magre is the unusual detective who doesn't really detect in our sense. We're used to a reader of most mysteries enters into a kind of contract with the author. We will get a dead body early. The detective's job is to figure out who did it. Clues will be dropped along the way, along with red herrings, and we will be sorting things out alongside the detective, who, if the author is good, is probably a little better than we are at figuring all this out. There may be some kind of locked room scenario. How could this possibly have happened? Situation that defies immediate intuitive grasp. There might be a killer on the loose, and we're racing against time to figure, figure out the murder and stop the next one, or stop as many as we can. Maghre books are different. One Maghre expert, Julian Simons, says these aren't even detective books at all. They don't belong in that genre. In Maghre books, the perpetrator might be someone we suspect from the very beginning, or it might be someone who shows up at the very end out of the blue. That's not the readerly experience that an Agatha Christie delivers. On the other hand, there's something liberating about getting out of that paradigm as well. When books follow that pattern, the authors can try desperately to break free or to do something different, to do something novel. And so you get every variation under the sun. The narrator is the killer, the detective is the killer. You, the reader, are the killer. Or they amp up the splatter. Here's a headless corpse. Here's a young girl that's been stabbed a thousand times and then burned. Or they give the killer some kind of twisted, grisly habits. Corpses are found with pages from the Bible stuffed in their mouths, for example, or their eyes and six toes are removed, or some other kind of twist, something to make things different and to keep you guessing. You, who have read a million of these before, well, you multiply one writer's desire to be new or interesting, and then the next writer has to top that, and then they have to top that. And every writer is trying to make their own books more interesting than the one before. You get the sense of just how sweaty authors need to get mystery writers in order to feel like they're giving us something new that we haven't seen before. Maghre kind of steps aside from all that. Maghre, the character lives a quiet domestic life. He and his wife have an admirable marriage based on mutual affection. Madame Maghre is often doing something like simple, like washing fresh berries or shelling peas or getting some food ready, making a nice salad. She's the kind of cook who wants to make sure that you're full. Maghre likes being comfortable, even though he's a little big, carries a little too much weight, and he likes smoking his pipe. He's famous. He's recognized all over. And if he has one skill, it's his curiosity. He might do. He might see a man do something interesting, mail an envelope full of cash, and he'll follow him to figure things out. Mysteries have whodunits and howdunits. The Maghre books are usually more what's and whys. Here's a community. Siminon is excellent at sketching a place, a neighborhood, a street, a village. The regulars at a store or restaurant or a hotel. We feel like we're right there. Maghre sizes it up as we do and appreciates it for what it is. And then something disrupts it, some crime or curiosity. And Maghre tracks down the origin of the disruption. Other mysteries have to go into the psychology of a killer to give us the justification for why someone might kill five people and do those horrible things to the human body. Other mysteries might give us the motivation or background in skills and education of the detective. Why is she so good at figuring this out? What makes this police inspector? Tickets and that kind of thing? Maghre books are more about average people. Why did this average person do this unusual thing? Not why did this extreme. How do we explain this extreme person? But why did this. Why did this average person end up doing this unusual thing? We don't learn about the outliers, who are often invented to make the plot more engaging. We learn about humanity as we might recognize it in our friends and neighbors and ourselves. I love reading Simenon. William Faulkner once said. He makes me think of Chekhov. Chekhov, the master at giving us insight into average human beings. But of course we have the difference that Chekhov wasn't also writing crime stories. And sometimes that leads Simenon down unusual paths. Characters dive from trains and. And so forth. But that might actually be a bonus for you. Maybe you find Chekhov a little too quiet, a little too drawing room. Maybe you like having a little bit of suspense put into your books. Maghre. There's one book where Maghre is intensely curious about a man's suitcase. And so he buys an identical case, stuffs it with newspaper and swaps it out at the railway station. It turns out that the case that he's taken from the man is full of money. And he goes to this hotel and the man in the room next to him opens his suitcase, sees the newspaper and realizes that he's lost his money and shoots himself. Even when Maghre books have plots that are fanciful, that, when summarized, seem kind of wild, they don't read that way. The art of Simenon, says Julian Simons, lies in making the implausible acceptable. Maybe the crimes don't need to be so in your face because the settings change so often. Magray visits new places in the country or at the beach. One suspects that Simenon used this to keep himself fresh, not just out of literary ambition, that he didn't want to write and rewrite the same book over and over so that he didn't have to keep amping things up with the plot or the murders. One of the great pleasures of Maghre is how comfortable they are, how comfortable the characters are when he's doing something simple. Muriel Sparks cited this in her description of Simenon. She said he was a wonderful writer, marvelously readable. And she said, lucid, simple, absolutely in tune with the world he creates. That's such a hard to define quality that it can make it hard to see just how great it is. The greatness is almost invisible. It's like the acting of Spencer Tracy. So subtle, but so strong. But we'd get bored with the simplicity if there wasn't also something new, like Maghre is visited by someone from his past, or he's following someone new around, or he's serving as someone's mentor, or he's taken up some mild new hobby. My favorite scenes, though, are Maghre with his wife, Madame Maghre. The beauty of their domestic setting. It's almost as if he took his father and said, what if my father had a wife who was not like my mother, who Siminon's mother used to scream at his and her husband. And then she invited another man into the home. He came home and a German soldier was sitting in his chair. What if everyone cheated? But the what if? What if it was the opposite of that? What if it was his perfect counterpart? Siminon gives us a great origin story about how Maghre met his wife. Maghre was at a party when he was still a young policeman. He felt. He felt awkward and under. He arrives on his bicycle. He feels awkward. He's not dressed properly. He looks down where he's standing next to a full plate of petit fours. He reaches down, he has one, and then, without thinking, he has another one and another. Until suddenly he looks down and realizes that he's eaten the whole plate. And people are staring at him in disbelief. And just then, at that moment, a girl in a blue dress arrives with a fresh plate of cakes and says, would you like one? She says, the. The ones with the candied fruit on top are the best. And that girl ends up becoming Madame Magray. And that incident, as Joan Accochella says in the New Yorker story that I mentioned earlier, the one from 2011, that incident shows what Madame Magra gives to Maghre. Maghre should have all the cake he wants. Or as Maghre himself said later, at that moment, in the darkness, I saw a face. The face of a young girl in blue. And on her face a soft expression, reassuring, almost familiar. You would have said that she'd understood, that she was encouraging me. End quote. Look at that description. I'm going to read a bunch of quotes here coming up, but I just want to highlight how economical Siminon is. The face of a young girl in blue. How many writers would trust themselves to only give you that much detail? And on her face, a soft expression, reassuring, almost familiar. That's enough, isn't it? A young girl in blue. We don't need to hear nine different things about how wide her nose is, or some overly written, overly literary, as Colette would say, point about how, you know, she had soft down on her earlobes or something. It's just. That's enough. The face of a young girl in blue. Then we hear what was on her face, which is what mattered to Maghre at that point. Listen to these descriptions of Maghre and his wife for their relationship. This one starts with a line of dialogue. Is that you? It must have been hundreds, if not thousands of times that she'd asked that question in a sluggish voice when he'd returned in the middle of the night, that she'd fumbled to light the lamp on the night table, then gotten up in her nightgown, darting a glance at her husband to see what kind of mood he was in. You're not hungry? Should I make you something? Or this one? She was asleep. As he started to undress in the semi darkness, a voice from the bed asked, is it late? I don't know. Maybe 1:30. You haven't caught cold? No. You don't want me to make you some herb tea? She's always offering him things. And here's one. There were rituals that had taken years to establish and to which he held more than he would have liked to admit. His wife had a special gesture of taking his wet umbrella from his hands and at the same time tilting her head to kiss him on the cheek. And here too, the Magres would exchange glances. They never talked much when it was just the Two of them. And in the looks which they exchanged today, for example, there was nostalgia and acknowledgement, and that was part of the tradition. Madame Magray automatically took her husband's arm, and on the empty sidewalk they walked slowly into the quiet of the night. Now, some of these I've read make it seem like Madame Magre just serves Maghre, but Maghre appreciates her too. Here's some examples. And he kissed her hand with a tenderness hidden by playfulness. Next one, at intermission, he bought some candy for his wife for for almost as long as Madame Maghre's gesture for him to take her arm. It was a tradition. And in fact, in a normal time. What would he talk about with his wife when he was with her? Nothing, really. Then why all day long did he miss her so much? These are sprinkled in. Also enjoyable in the Maghre books are the descriptions of food and restaurants and places generally, and the weather, which Simenon conveys with genuine passion and joy. I've been reading some F. Scott Fitzgerald stories, and you get the sense that he loves a sunset for its own sake. Partly. But he also loves it for the words that he might be able to find to describe it. It's prose written by someone who likes sunsets and loves prose. Simenon comes across as someone who loves sunsets, period. Or maybe as someone who loves sunsets and who has characters who love sunsets and who hopes or expects that. You, the reader, love sunsets too. Simonon was, said Peter Ackroyd, a novelist who entered his fictional world as if he were part of it, end quote. And he lets us into it with him. We admire a Sherlock Holmes, we're dazzled by him, but we don't truly identify with Sherlock Holmes in Maghre books. We only see the world through Maghre and through his eyes. What happens to him? We end up knowing him, or feeling like we know him and his perceiving sensibility as well as we know ourselves, and maybe even better. Let's hear a little from a Maghre book to give you a taste of what he's like when he's on the case and the movement with which he enters into an investigation. This is from the beginning, almost the beginning, of the Sellers of the Majestic. Standing by the revolving door, Maghre was on the point of knocking his pipe against his heel to empty it. Then he shrugged and put it back between his teeth. It was his first pipe of the morning, the best one. The manager is expecting you, sir. The lobby was not very busy yet. There was only an Englishman, arguing with the mail clerk and a young girl walking on her long grasshopper legs, carrying a hatbox, which she was presumably delivering. Maghre walked into the manager's office. The manager shook his hand without a word and indicated an armchair. A green curtain concealed the glass door, but you just had to pull it slightly to see everything that was happening in the lobby. Cigar? No, thanks. They had known each other for a long time. They didn't need many words. The manager was wearing striped trousers, a dark jacket with edging and a tie that seemed to have been cut out of some stiff material. Here. He pushed a registration form across the table. Oswald J. Clark, industrialist of Detroit, Michigan, USA, coming from Detroit, arrived 12 February, accompanied by Mrs. Clark, his wife, Teddy Clark, 7, his son, Ellen Darrowman, 24, governess Gertrude Borms, 42, maid, suite 203. Phone calls, the manager answered impatiently. Maghre folded the form in four and slipped it into his wallet. Which one is it, Mrs. Clark? Ah, the hotel doctor, whom I telephoned immediately after alerting the police, judiciary and who lives nearby in Rue de Berry, is downstairs. He says Mrs. Clark was strangled between 6 and 6:30 in the morning. The manager was glum, pointless, telling a man like Maghre that it was a disaster for the hotel and that if there was any way of hushing the whole thing up. So the Clark family have been here for a week, Magre said. What kind of people are they? Oh, perfectly respectable. He's a tall, strong looking American. A cool character, about 40, perhaps 45. His wife, poor thing, must have been French. Originally 28 or 29. I didn't see much of her. The governess is pretty, the maid who works as the child's nurse. Fairly ordinary, rather forbidding. Oh, by the way, I almost forgot. Clark left for Rome yesterday morning by himself. From what I gathered, he's in Europe on business. He owns a factory that makes ball bearings. He has to visit the major capitals and in the meantime decided to leave his wife, son and staff in Paris. What train? Maghre asked. The manager picked up the telephone. Hello, porter. What train did Mr. Clark take yesterday? That's right, 2:03. Did you send any luggage onto the station? He only took a traveling bag. A taxi. Desiree's taxi. Thanks. Did you hear that, Inspector? He left at 11 yesterday morning by taxi. Desiree's taxi, which is almost always parked in front of the hotel. He only had a traveling bag with him. Do you mind if I also make a phone call? Hello? Police? Judiciary, please. Mademoiselle. Police, Judiciary. Lucas Go straight to Gare de Leon. Find out about trains to Rome. Since 11 o'clock yesterday morning. As he continued to give instructions, his pipe went out. Tell Torrance to find Desiree's taxi. Yes, usually parked outside the Majestic. Find out where he took a passenger, a tall, slim American he picked up yesterday from the hotel. Okay. He looked for an ashtray to empty his pipe. The manager handed him one. Are you sure you don't want a cigar? The nurse is beside herself. I thought it best to inform her. As for the governess, she didn't sleep at the hotel last night. What floor is the suite? Second floor, with a view of the Champs Elysees. Mr. Clark's room, separated by a sitting room from his wife's room. Then the child's room, the nurse's, and finally the governess's. They asked to be put together. Is the night porter still here? No, but I know from needing him once that he can be contacted by phone. His wife is the concierge of a new apartment block in Nuit. Hello? Get me. Within five minutes they had learned that Mrs. Clark had gone to the theater by herself the previous evening and had got back a few minutes after midnight. The nurse hadn't gone out. As for the governess, she hadn't dined at the hotel and hadn't been back all night. Shall we go downstairs and have a look? Maghre sighed. There were more people in the lobby by now, but none of them suspected the drama that had taken place while everyone was asleep. We'll go this way. Will you please follow me, Inspector? As he said this, the manager frowned. The revolving door was moving. A young woman in a gray tailored suit came in at the same time as a ray of sunlight. Passing the mail clerk, she asked in English, anything for me? That's her, Inspector. Miss Ellen Darrowman. Fine, well fitting silk stockings. The prim and proper look of someone who has taken great care over her grooming. No trace of fatigue on her face, but on the contrary, a pink glow caused by the brisk air of a fine February morning. Do you want to talk to her? Not just yet. One moment. Maghrey walked over to an inspector he had brought with him who was standing in a corner of the lobby. Don't let that young woman out of your sight. If she goes into her suite, stand outside the door. The cloakroom. A big mirror swung open on its hinges. Maghre and the manager found themselves on the narrow staircase. All at once there was no more gilt, no more pot plants, no more elegant bustle. A kitchen Smell rose from below. Does this staircase serve all the floors? There are two like this. They go from the lower basement to the attics, but you have to know the place well to use them. On each floor, for example, there's just a little door like all the others, without a number, and it would never occur to any of the guests. It was nearly 11 now. There were no longer just 50, but more like 150 people swarming about the basement, some in white chef's hats, the others in waiters uniforms or cellarmen's aprons, and the women, like Prosper Donga's three fat ladies doing the heavy work. This way, make sure you don't slip or dirty your clothes. The corridors are narrow through the glass partitions. Everybody was watching the manager and above all, the inspector. Jean Remouel continued grabbing the slips. He was being passed almost in midair and checking the contents of the trays at a glance. The jarring element was the unexpected figure of a policeman standing guard outside the locker room. The doctor, who was very young, had been informed of Maghre's arrival and was smoking a cigarette as he waited Close the door. The body was there, on the floor, surrounded by all the metal lockers. The doctor, still smoking, murmured. She must have been grabbed from behind. She didn't struggle for long, and the body wasn't dragged along the floor, Maghre added, examining the dead woman's dark clothes. There's no trace of dust. Either she was killed here or she was carried here, most likely by two people, because it'd be difficult in this maze of narrow corridors. In the locker where she had been discovered, there was a crocodile skin handbag. Maghre opened it and took out an automatic revolver, which he slipped into his pocket after checking the safety catch. Nothing else in the bag apart from a handkerchief, a compact and a few banknotes that amounted to no more than a thousand francs. Behind them the hive was buzzing. The dumb waiters kept going up and down. Bells rang endlessly, and behind the glass partition of the kitchens you could see heavy copper saucepans being handled and dozens of chickens being put on the spit. Everything has to be left where it is until the examining magistrate gets here, maghre said. Who was it who found he was pointed in the direction of Prosper Dongay, who who was cleaning out one of the percolators. He was a tall man with red hair, the kind of red hair that is called carrot colored. He might have been about 45 or 48. He had blue eyes and a pockmarked face. Have you employed him for long. Five years before that, he was at the Miramar in Cannes. Reliable. As reliable as could be. A glass partition separated Dange and Miagre. Through the glass, their eyes met and the blood rushed to Dong's cheeks. Like all redheads, he had delicate skin. Excuse me, sir. Detective Chief Inspector Maghre is wanted on the telephone. It was Jean Ramwell, the bookkeeper, who had just emerged from his cage. If you'd like to take the call, here, a message from the police. Since 11 o'clock the previous day, there had been only two express trains for Rome. Oswald J. Clark had caught neither. As for the driver, Desiree, who had been reached by phone in a bistro where he was a regular, he stated that he had driven his previous day's fare to the Hotel Aiglon on Boulevard Montparnasse. Voices on the staircase, including a young woman shrilly protesting in English to a valet who was trying to bar her way. It was the governess, Ellen Darrowman, who was charging straight at them. There we go. That's the end of the chapter. You want to know about this woman, Ellen Darrowman, because she was close to the woman who has been killed, and also because she's got something on her mind and we want to know what it is. But mostly you want to see the world as Maghre sees it, as it unfolds for him. You want to meet these people at the hotel and learn more about them. Because he's meeting them and his project is like Chekhov's the project to get to know them, to see what's underneath the surface. Let's take our last break and then hear from Siminon, the writer foreign, joined by a special co anchor. What up everybody? It's your boy. Big Snoop deal. Double G Snoop. Where can people go to find great deals? Head to T mobile.com and get four iPhone 16s with Apple Intelligence on us plus four lines for 25 bucks. That's quite a deal, Snoop. And when you switch to T Mobile, you can save versus the other big guys. Comparable plans plus streaming. Respect. When we up out of here, see how you can save on wireless and streaming versus the other big guys. @t mobile.com/apple intelligence requires iOS 18.1 or later. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. You might say all kinds of stuff when things go wrong, but these are the words you really need to remember. Like a good neighbor. State Farm is there. They've got options to fit your unique insurance needs. Maybe meaning you can talk to your agent to choose the coverage you need. Have coverage options to protect the things you value most. File a claim right on the State Farm mobile app, and even reach a real person when you need to talk to someone. Like a good neighbor. State Farm is there. Just After World War II, Simonon lived in the United States for about 10 years in Lakeville, Connecticut. He was productive when he was there, of course, but he also took time out to give an interview to the Paris Review. He started with this description of the influence of Colette we mentioned earlier when she was his editor. He says, just one piece of general advice from a writer who's been very useful to me. It was from Colette. I was writing short stories for Les Matins and Colette was literary editor at that time. I remember I gave her two short stories and she returned them. And I tried again and tried again, and finally she said, look, it is too literary. Always too literary. So I followed her advice. It's what I do when I write, the main job, when I rewrite. What do you mean by too literary? What do you cut out? Certain kinds of words, Simenon, Adjectives, adverbs, and every word which is there just to make an effect. Every sentence which is there just for the sentence, you know, you have a beautiful sentence. Cut it. Every time I find such a thing in one of my novels, it is to be cut. Interviewer. Is that the nature of most of your revision? Almost all of it. It's not revising the plot pattern? Oh, I never touch anything of that kind. Sometimes I've changed the names while writing. A woman will be Helen in the first chapter and Charlotte in the second, you know. So in revising, I straighten this out and then cut, cut, cut. I think we heard that in the excerpt I read. That's the beauty of Siminones prose. You move so fast. Paragraphs are rarely more than three sentences long. One or two sentences is far more common. You don't say. He. The hotel manager handed him the telephone. He picked up the receiver and pressed the dial that said, madam. He's just immediately into the call. Hello. That's it. You figure out that he's talking on the telephone. Here's a question. To what purpose is all that cunning? Why write these books at all? Here's his view. And think about Faulkner saying that the results remind him of Chekhov. Interviewer. Are you conscious there will be readers of the novel Siminon? I know that there are many men who have, more or less, with more or less intensity, the same problems I have and who will be happy to read the book to find the answer, if the answer can possibly be found, even when the author can't find the answer, do the readers profit because the author is meaningfully fumbling for it? That's it. Certainly. I don't remember whether I've ever spoken to you about the feeling I have had for several years. Because society today is without a very strong religion, without a firm hierarchy of social classes, and people are afraid of the big organization in which they are just a little part. For them, reading certain novels is a little like looking through the keyhole. To know what the neighbor is doing and thinking. Does he have the same inferiority complex? The same vices, the same temptations? This is what they are looking for in the work of art. I think many more people today are insecure and are in a search for themselves. There are now so few literary works of the kind Anatole France wrote, for example, you know, very quiet and elegant and reassuring. On the contrary, what people today want are the most complex books trying to go into every corner of human nature. Do you understand what I mean? I think so. You mean this is not just because today we think we know more about psychology, but because more readers need this kind of fiction. Yes. An ordinary man, 50 years ago. There are many problems today which he did not know. 50 years ago he had the answers. He doesn't have them anymore. End quote. Simenon also talks about his famous or notorious writing. Infamous, his writing process. Interviewer, you have shown me the manila envelopes you use in starting novels before you actually begin writing. How much have you been working consciously on the plan of that particular novel? Simenon, as you suggest, we have to distinguish here between consciously and unconsciously. Unconsciously, I probably always have two or three. Not novels, not ideas about novels, but themes in my mind. I never even am thinking that they will serve for a novel. More exactly, they are the things about which I worry for myself. Two days before I write a novel, I will consciously take up one of those ideas. But even before I consciously take it up, I will first find some atmosphere. Today, here there is some sun. I will remember such and such a spring. Maybe a spring in a small Italian town or some place in the French provinces, or in Arizona, I don't know. And then, little by little, a small world will come into my mind with a few characters. Those characters will be partly from people I have known and partly from pure imagination. You know, it's a complex of both. And then the idea I had before will come and stick around them. They will have the same problem I have in My mind, myself and the problem with those people will give me the novel. Interviewer. This is a couple of days before Siminon. Yes, a couple of days. Because as soon as I have the beginning, I can't bear it very long. So the next day I will take my envelope, take my telephone book for names, and take my town map, you know, to see exactly where things happen. And two days later I will begin and the beginning will all will be always the same. It is almost a geometrical question. I have such a man, such a woman, in such surroundings. What can happen to them to oblige them to go to their limit? That's the question. It will be sometimes a very simple incident. Anything which will change their lives. Then I write my novel, chapter by chapter. What has gone on the planning envelope? Not an outline of the action? No, no. I know nothing about the events when I begin the novel. On the envelope I put only the names of the characters, their ages, their family. I know nothing whatever about the events which will occur later. Otherwise it would not be interesting to me. When do the incidents begin to form? On the eve of the first day. I know what will happen in the first chapter. Then, day after day, chapter after chapter, I find what will come later. After I have started a novel, I write a chapter each day without ever missing a day. Because it is a string. I have to keep pace with the novel. If, for example, I am ill for 48 hours, I will have to throw away the previous chapters and I will never return to that novel. We will close with this excerpt. Interviewer what are some of the problems you have dealt with often and expect to deal with in future? One of them, for example, which will probably haunt me more than any other, is the problem of communication. I mean communication between two people. The fact that we are, I don't know how many millions of people. Yet communication, complete communication is completely impossible between two of those people, to me, is one of the biggest tragic themes in the world. When I was a young boy, I was afraid of it. I would almost scream because of it. It gave me such a sensation of solitude, of loneliness. That is a theme I have taken I don't know how many times, but I know it will come again. Certainly it will come again. We can see this fear of loneliness in the books of Georges Simenon, and we can see it in his life. The man who compulsively had sex thousands of times in two minute bursts. And the man who wrote 80 pages a day and then vomited from the strain, who worked himself into a lather over and over, putting all those words into the universe. But we best see his loneliness, perhaps in the caring way that he describes the opposite. The times when a man and his wife face the world together, arm in arm, walking down the sidewalk, not talking much, knowing each other and themselves. A connection that together is stronger than the lonely individual multiplied by two. That's what Simenon gave to his most beloved character. And you might say it's what he spent all those hours trying to give to the world. Okay, that's going to do it for this episode of the History of Literature. I'm glad you were here today and I hope you enjoyed it. We'll be back soon with some Coleridge. We'll have a repeat episode of Coleridge, an ad free version for you. And we've got Thomas Kidd coming up soon. He was pretty influential. He influenced a guy called Shakespeare. Perhaps you've heard of him. We'll hear what Thomas Kidd's plays were about. And we'll have one of our favorite guests, Carl Rawleson, who's coming back to tell us about the making of Sylvia Plath. And we have one of our very first guests, way back from the early days, Radha Wattsall, who will return after a multi year absence. She's written a new book set in the Chinatown of the early 20th century in New York City. We'll hear about Alan. Oh, oh. Alan Lightman will be here soon to tell us about the miraculous in the physical world. All that and more coming up on this here podcast. I'm Jack Wilson, this here host of this here podcast. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time. How are business leaders working to confront climate change? For that answer, listen to the award winning Climate Rising podcast produced by Harvard Business School and hosted by me, Mike Toffel, a professor at hbs. Each episode we share a behind the scenes view into how startups and the biggest businesses like Microsoft, Google and seventh Generation are tackling the central issue of our era. Check out Climate Rising wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Rick Rubek. And I'm Royce Yudkoff. Are you interested in becoming an entrepreneur, owning your own business and being your own boss? Our new podcast from Harvard Business School, Think Big, Buy Small, explores becoming an entrepreneur through the acquisition of an enduringly profitable small business. 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