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Newhaven-Dieppe by Georges Simenon – All Along the Watchtower.
Newhaven-Dieppe by Georges Simenon (1933) Original French title: L’homme de Londres.
L’homme de Londres by Georges Simenon was our Book Club choice for September. It is translated into English under the title Newhaven-Dieppe.
Louis Maloin works the night shift at the coastal train station in Dieppe, France. He’s a switchman, in charge of all the trains that liaise the actual Dieppe railway station and the ferry harbor. When the book opens, we’re with Maloin in his watchtower over the harbor and the ferry from Newhaven is about to disembark its passengers and goods. The arrival of passengers is organized in such a way that they cannot escape custom before going on land.
Maloin is looking out the window, observing the passengers who arrive. He has a privileged view on the ferries and trains that come in and out of the harbor.
He notices two men disembarking from the ferry. One of them, a man in a grey suit, swiftly gets around the line to customs with a suitcase in hand. Nobody had seen him but Maloin. The man goes to stand with the people who are on the quay, as if he were waiting for a passenger instead of having just stepped out of the ferry. Maloin is intrigued, wondering what kind of contraband the man carries in his suitcase. He doesn’t say anything, he too would try to avoid customs if he could.
Later that night, he sees the two men again and the one in the grey suit pushes the other into the sea while attempting to keep the suitcase. He fails. The other one falls into the water, drowns, taking the suitcase away with him.
Maloin witnesses everything and instead of going to the police, he dives into the harbor and fishes the suitcase. Back in the safety of his glass tower, he opens it and finds the equivalent of 540 000 francs in British pounds. He decides to keep the money and hide it in his closet in the tower.
The man in the grey suits stays in Dieppe. He and Maloin see each other in town. They both know about the suitcase and don’t act on it. The Englishman doesn’t confront Maloin and the latter almost wishes that he did.
Maloin doesn’t know what to do about the money but he never really thinks that he witnessed a murder, that this is ill-acquired money and that he should contact the authorities.
The hesitation of the two men will be fatal. Indeed, it leaves enough time for Inspector Molisson from Scotland Yard to arrive in Dieppe. He starts digging around. He knows the thief in the grey suit and he’s after the money. His presence will set the rest of the events into motion.
Newhaven-Dieppe can be easily read in one sitting. It’s one of the romans durs and Maloin is a strange character. Maloin’s motivations are hard to pinpoint. We never understand why he made that impulse decision to pick up the suitcase and not report the murder.
He’s married with two children and he has a stable job with the railroad company. We’re in 1933, the times are difficult and the family struggles to make ends meet. Is it because his wife comes from a wealthier family and because his brother-in-law looks down on him? Is it the shame he feels that his daughter Henriette has to work as a servant at the local butcher because her family needs the money?
Maloin doesn’t know himself why he acts that way. Simenon seems to tell us that we never know ourselves completely. The ending of the book and Maloin reminded me of Meursault, in L’Etranger by Albert Camus, although it was written decades later.
This is a very atmospheric novel. It is set in Dieppe, in winter. Simenon excels in the description of the foggy shores, the little town with its shops. The sea, the tides influence people’s lives. We see a bit of the life in the seaside town in winter, when the hotels and the casino are closed for the season. Only the locals are there, and the only strangers in town are the occasional salesmen and business men who come through Dieppe. Simenon describes the streets, the lights, the cafés and the local life with the fishermen and people picking up seafood at the shore. I didn’t know that trains rode like tramways between the main station and the ferries embankment in order to make a connection between ferries and rail. It worked for goods and passengers.
Simenon’s style is fluid and easy to read. I noticed that he used English words like banknotes, policemen and meeting instead of billet de banque, policiers or réunion when he was referring to something British. The French readership of the 1930s would have been less exposed to the English language than nowadays. How was this perceived?
I also picked a slightly misogynistic vibe. Poor Madame Maloin only gets a first name in the last minute, when Maloin finally acknowledges her as his equal. Otherwise, she’s just a wife, she has no other identity. I suppose it goes with the times.
Newhaven-Dieppe is a cleverly crafted novella about a man who acts out of character, doesn’t know why and wrecks his life. Noir is the color.
Highly recommended.
The Outlaw by Georges Simenon
The Outlaw by Georges Simenon (1941). Original French title: L’outlaw.
| C’était terrible ! Stan était trop intelligent. Il avait conscience d’être aussi intelligent, sinon plus, que n’importe qui. Il pensait à tout !
Il savait même qu’il allait faire une bêtise et pourtant il était incapable de ne pas la faire ! Comment expliquer cela ? |
It was terrible! Stan was too intelligent. He was aware of his being as intelligent as anyone else, if not more. He thought of everything.
He even knew that he was about to do something stupid and yet he was unable not to do it! How to explain this? |
When The Outlaw opens, it’s night, it’s winter and Stan and his girlfriend Nouchi are walking around in Paris. They’re broke and cannot go back to their cheap hotel because they haven’t paid for the room and they know that the owner will be on the prowl, waiting for his payment or to throw them out.
Stan is Polish and Nouchi is Hungarian. They are both illegal migrants in the Paris of the 1930s. They’ve been together for a while and have come back to Europe after a few years in New York. We soon understand that they had to leave after Stan did something stupid.
The first chapters are poignant as Stan feels trapped in his penniless life. He lives in constant fear of the police. They walk around, looking for an open café to warm themselves a bit. They are desperate. They’re not allowed to work, they’ve already gotten all the money they could from friends. We follow Stan’s train of thoughts and he doesn’t see the end of the tunnel.
| Il marchait. Il pensait. Il pensait durement, méchamment. Ses narines se pinçaient et il serrait les poings. Il n’avait pas le droit de s’asseoir sur un banc, car il aurait attiré l’attention et la première idée de n’importe quel agent serait de lui demander ses papiers ! | He walked. He was thinking. He was thinking harshly, meanly. His nose was pinched and his fists were clenched. He couldn’t sit on a bench because it would have drawn attention to him and the first idea any deputy would get was to has him for his papers. |
Nouchi and Stan need food and shelter. Exhaustion plays dirty tricks with Stan’s mind. He comes with the idea to bargain with the police: for 5000 francs, he will give them information about a gang of Polish criminals who operate from the same shabby hotel as the one they’re staying in. Instead, they want him to infiltrate the gang.
From there starts a rather confusing hide-and-seek game. The police are using Stan’s information but are still surveilling him. They are also staking out the Polish gang. I never quite understood whether the police were already aware of this gang’s activities or if Stan put them on it. Stan hopes to leave that mess scot-free and with the money. But Stan isn’t as clever as he thinks and he’s driven by fear, a bad adviser. He’s a young thug who isn’t brave enough to be as violent as his thug persona would require to and he can’t help wanting to earn easy money.
It could have been a great book if the plot had been polished a bit. It feels like it’s been written in a hurry and not edited much. I was more interested in the setting, the Paris of that time and Stan’s status than in the actual story.
It sounds strange to consider Polish and Hungarian citizens as illegal migrants as Poland and Hungary are now part of the EU and we can live wherever we want in the Union. Stan’s current nationality reminds us of the political instability in Europe.
| Je suis né à Wilno. Donc, avant la guerre, j’étais russe. Après, nous avons été lithuaniens… Les Polonais sont venus mais, au fond, nous sommes toujours lithuaniens. | I was born in Wilno. So before the war, I was Russian. Then we became Lithuanian…The Poles came but deep down, we remained Lithuanian. |
All this in a life time. I can’t imagine what it was for them. (Of course, I picked up on this since Romain Gary was born in 1914 un Wilno.)
Simenon gives a chilling idea of what it was (is?) to be an illegal migrant. Stan and Spa from Spa Sleeps by Dinev would understand each other at some level although Spa isn’t willing to do become a criminal to get money.
That part was more appealing to me than the rest and Simenon set Stan’s state-of-mind really well and prepared the reader to understand what he did later. There’s no excuse for crimes but there are explanations on how criminals got there. More about this later this month with my billet about Crime by Ferdinand von Schirach.
This was #TBR20 number 16.
Maigret as a bleu
La première enquête de Maigret by Georges Simenon (1903-1989) The title means : Maigret’s first investigation.
I’ve only read Le chien jaune by Simenon. I have a vague memory of a novel in a foggy city in Britanny and of sitting in a classroom, head resting on my hand, waiting for the bell to ring with patient resignation. After reading reviews of Simenon’s books by fellow bloggers, I decided to try another one. True, the reviews I read weren’t about the Maigret series, but still I wanted to try one again, in an attempt to wipe away the ennui I endured when I first read him.
Now the book.
We’re in 1913, in Paris, pre-WWI and the city is still full of fiacres. Jules Maigret is the secretary of the commissaire in the Saint-Georges police station. In the night from 15th to 16th April 1913, a musician, Justin Minard arrives at the police station and declares that he heard a shooting in an hotel particulier rue Chaptal. The mansion belongs to the powerful Gendreau family and Maigret’s boss, well introduced in the Parisian high society, doesn’t want an investigation. Feeling Maigret isn’t ready to give up, he sends him on an unofficial one, hoping he will fail. We follow him during his investigation.
I can’t say I was enthralled by the plot but I’m convinced I should read more of Simenon. Here is the opening paragraph of the book:
| Une balustrade noire partageait la pièce en deux. Du côté réservé au public, il n’y avait qu’un banc sans dossier, peint en noir lui aussi, contre le mur blanchi à la chaux et couvert d’affiches administratives. De l’autre côté, il y avait des pupitres, des encriers, des casiers remplis de registres énormes, noirs encore, de sorte que tout était noir et blanc. Il y avait surtout, debout sur une plaque de tôle, un poêle en fonte comme on n’en voit plus aujourd’hui que dans les gares des petites villes, avec son tuyau qui montait d’abord vers le plafond, puis se coudait, traversant tout l’espace avant d’aller se perdre dans le mur. | A black balustrade split the room in two. On the side reserved to the public, there was only one bench without a back. It was black too and set against the whitewashed wall covered with administrative posters. On the other side of the balustrade, there were desks, inkwells, lockers full of huge books, also black. Everything was black and white. There was also, standing on a metal sheet, a cast iron stove that can only be still seen in railroad stations of small towns. Its pipe climbed to the ceiling, then bent and crossed the whole room before getting lost in the wall.My translation, please be lenient, it’s not easy to translate. |
A few sentences and you’re propelled in this commissariat. You can imagine the place, smell the dust, feel the atmosphere, the people going in and out bringing into the building the ugliness of the world. It reminded me of the first paragraph of Skylark.
This volume is not the first Maigret Simenon wrote though. Contrary to contemporary crime fiction writers who develop their character in later volumes, Simenon imagined his character’s beginnings in the police after his readers have known him as an accomplished commissaire. Is it because he wrote it in Arizona in 1945 that this novel is so tainted with nostalgia? Simenon never knew Paris during La Belle Epoque, he arrived in the City of Lights in 1922. However, this first Maigret brings to life the popular Paris of that time: the cafés, the apaches, the working class, the food, the drinks (Mignard drinks fraisette) and the still new neighbourhood of the future 17th arrondissement.
In French, a bleu is a beginner. It conveys the idea of being freshly out of school, educated but lacking field experience. Maigret is a bleu. His head is full of the principles and methods he learnt in the police academy and he struggles to put them into practice or to pick the useful ones and leave behind the inapplicable ones. He discovers at his expense that not all the things he needs to know were included in the textbooks.
Simenon confronts Maigret with reality. In his head, the difference between good and evil is clear. He’s certain that the police is efficient and wouldn’t cover a crime. In his mind, things are black or white, like the commissariat he works in. This first investigation throws him in all kinds of grey shades. He won’t get out intact. Simenon also shows him as ambitious, already eying the Quai d’Orsay as his future office. And Maigret is newlywed and it is kind of funny to meet Mme Maigret before she becomes a dull wife.
La première enquête de Maigret was entertaining and I enjoyed reading Simenon reconstructing his hero’s first steps in his profession and the first months of his married life. It was funny to read about a clumsy Maigret full of illusions about justice and police as you might expect a beginner to be. Someway it broke in my head the automatic equation Maigret = Bruno Kremer, which is good.
Book Around the Corner 