A rather odd story, from the recently acquired Volume XV of the standard edition. The start of which acquisition was noticed on Christmas Day (at least according to PST), with the idea being to give Atkinson version of 'Maigret au Picratt's' marks out of ten. I subsequently got into a muddle with the French version of ebay and wound up with two copies, one of which was graciously bestowed on a lucky family member and the other of which I am now reading. The Atkinson version is more or less forgotten, so that will have to wait for the repeat or a lucky break at reference 2, but we do have the DVD of the Gambon version, so will be able to attend to that in due course.
The Mémoires are odd in various ways. First, they are the only Maigret story which is told in the first person, at least the only one that I have come across. Second, they involve both Maigret and Simenon, this last appearing both with his original nom de plume 'Sim' and his real name.
In fact, hardly a story at all, although there is a frame of sorts in that Maigret is writing his memoirs, in his retirement, in an effort to set the record straight. Some space is given to filling in the gaps in his early life. We learn about his courtship and marriage, while still quite young. We learn about his early years in the police, before he became the commissaire in the Police Judiciaire of the regular stories. We learn of the arrival of Simenon in the office of his boss one day and of their subsequent collaboration, extending to holidays and the Maigret's borrowing Simenon's flat in the Place des Vosges while the block in which they lived, in the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, was being renovated. I note in passing that most of the street and place names in Paris in Maigret really exist, with the only one that I have found to be missing having probably been changed to that of a Hero of the Resistance.
Quite a lot about Maigret being, above all, a civil servant, with the life style of any other, middle ranking civil servant. Including the towel and bar of soap provided at his place of work, a custom which was still alive in my early days in the civil service here in the UK. A custom which BH remembers from her spell in a laundry which used to launder the things, complete with the discarded sandwiches (and worse) which they were sometimes use to wrap.
Quite a lot about why exactly he chose to be a policeman, apparently at the start of the twentieth century a common career choice for a boy from the country who wanted to get away. It seems that quite of lot of the policemen in Paris at that time came from the centre of France, from where they brought their habit of wearing long moustaches.
A story about a country doctor who was a drunk, but who was also a friend of Maigret's father. Who stuck by him to the extent of allowing him to look after his wife in childbirth, even though he had made a fatal mess of someone else some months previously. With the wife, Maigret's mother, also dying in consequence, with the eventual result that Maigret was sent off to a relative to go to school in Nantes. Such things must have been both tricky and common enough, at a time when the medical science was not what it has become since.
An anecdote about how odd Maigret found it to watch successive versions of himself in the cinema.
Some observations about how personality traits, traits such as one's ways with a pipe, move around between Simenon, Maigret in the flesh, Maigret in the story, and Maigret's colleagues. So, for example, Simeon invents a trait for Maigret, which he puts into several stories, and then winds up acquiring the trait for himself. Or perhaps, the real Maigret winds up acquiring for himself. With the catch being that I do not think that there was ever a model for Maigret, not in the sense of a single model whom Simenon knew well, at work and at play.
Some observations about the training of policemen, in the olden days before the advent of direct entry from universities of people with fancier backgrounds than those of the older policemen. A training which involved starting at the bottom and doing a stint in each of the divisions of the force. The people who looked after the railway stations, the people who looked after the big stores, the people who kept an eye on the hotels and rooming houses, the people in what we now call the vice squad. Years of tramping all over Paris, on foot, in all weathers. A tramping around which brought one into intimate contact with one's customers, the criminals, petty and otherwise. An intimate contact which the direct entrants are never going to have. They are never going to have the instinctive understanding of the ways of the underworld which their predecessors acquired in their years of tramping. They are apt to forget, for example, that criminals have lives, loves and children, just like the rest of us. A debate which goes on, to this day, in connection with our own police forces.
Some talk about foreigners, of whom it seems that there were a lot in inter-war Paris, presumably brought it to fill the hole made by the million or more deaths in the first war. Simenon claims that near two thirds of crime in Paris was the work of foreigners.
Perhaps of particular interest to me, was the talk about how real life had to be tidied up, simplified for the purposes of a story. Real life was often a muddle and often boring. The truth does not work on the pages of a novel, even less on the screen - as watchers of lower forms of reality TV know all too well. Real life superintendents do not interview the concierges of squalid apartment blocks, they sit in their offices doing management stuff, lots of paperwork, committees and meetings. Real life superintendents do not have three or four trusted colleagues with whom they work, more or less the whole time. The story is indeed made up, but the idea is to give a true sense of the flavour. Or is it just to make some money? How does this square with the famous 'realistic' novels of the second half of the nineteenth century?
Another thread was the way that a fictional detective like Maigret starts off very two dimensional, there is very little to him apart from a few clichés drawn from his predecessors. But he is successful and goes on to a long and productive life, gradually accumulating a more substantial personality as he goes. Wherein lies a large part of the success of the serials with core characters who go on, from episode to episode. Something that Trollope and his readers knew all about, back in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Lastly, it was interesting to read of the importance to police work in France of the inter-war years of all the information to be had from the concierges of apartment blocks, the staffs of hotels, nosey shopkeepers and the requirements to carry identity cards and work permits. The sheer numbers of policemen on the ground. Information which we are only now harvesting here in the UK with the advent of big data on computers and CCTV. And of the tensions between the various forces of law and order in France, echoing those that must exist between the regular police, special branch and the funnies here in the UK.
All in all, an interesting read.
PS: quite irrelevant and quite by chance, I learn in the margins of this post that the French word for a lute, 'luth' is also the French word for a turtle and it comes from the Arabic. Presumably our turtles come from somewhere else.
Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/atkinson-maigret.html.
Reference 2: https://uk.webuy.com/.
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