By any standard, the Belgian Georges Simenon is the most successful novelist in history—author of nearly four hundred titles which have sold five hundred million copies in fifty-five languages worldwide. Yet probably few Americans under forty have ever heard of him. In the days when French was studied by more American high-school and college students than it is today, Simenon’s novels—which never employed a vocabulary larger than two thousand words~dashwere a wonderful discovery for the student, blessed relief from exercises about la plume de ma tante.
But they were not just easy to read; they were fun, and they cast light on certain details of French life that language textbooks preferred to avoid. As Marnham points out, the appeal of Simenon’s novels comes largely from their atmosphere: “Cheap . . . and luxury hotels, the power of political influence over justice, the power of social snobbery, the casual introduction of sex and the strongly cinematic nature of the descriptions of town life in general and port scenes in particular.” Thus drawn in by the mise en scène, one was encouraged to soldier on with grammar, sentence structure, even to face those infernal partitives “y” and “en.”
Simenon’s special skill was honed from early experiences as a police reporter in his native Liège.
Simenon’s special skill was honed from early experiences as a police reporter in his native Liège. “He knew,” Marnham writes, “to what extent the fait divers, the brief