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 Georges Simenon
Belgium-France-America-Switzerland
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Simenon's life starts as a detective novel and it often looks like it : actually born on a Friday 13th, he is notified on the 12th to avoid bad luck ; later on, he attends the brothers' school in... Law street.
Disliked by his mother ("we never loved each other..."), the mystical, gifted pupil sinks into rebellion after a first sexual experience in 1915. All his life, in the likeness of his characters, he strives to make up for his solitude often in alcohol , in women (among them Josephine Baker), in patent luxury.
It's no doubt from this too that proceed his numerous travels (while wandering along the Europe rivers in 1928-29, he stays in Laifour) and removals.
Fond of Balzac, Conrad, Dickens, Dumas, Stendahl, Stevenson, he longs to put his "hard novels" forward. Yet after his numerous cheap works' success, it's Maigret (officially born in 1929) that brings him a true renown and... a plate n° 0000 as superintendent Maigret conferred by le Quai des Orfêvres.
Wrecked by his naivety his career as an investigator-reporter (1931-34), does not look much like his hero's.
Disparaged by the literary circles, his meetings with Colette and Gide are decisive stages in his writing where the impregnated with tragicalness atmosphere, both realistic and impressionistic, finds expression by mutually mixing characters and surroundings.
Tragicalness : his life doesn't lack of it above all when his daughter Marie-Jo commits suicide. He often exorcises it by autobiographic writings (Letters to my mother 74 - Inner memories 81)
In huge works, often adapted for cinema, let us select : Arches bridge 1920, The man of London 1934, Emile's boat 1954, When I was old 1960.
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