Also, many more films have been made from the outpourings of Edgar Wallace and Frank Gruber than from Simenon's. Action is much less important in them than description and cerebration, and to date no film from a Simenon novel or story has made cinematic history. Simenon also says his novels are not cinematic, and fundamentally this is true. I would not be surprised if he is remembered less for Maigret than for the picture of twentieth century man which emerges from the totality of his enormous output. Simenon himself thinks he will be remembered, if at all, because of Maigret. He is an honest, plodding cop who had wanted to be a doctor, who doesn't always get his man, and who sometimes doesn't even establish the fact that a crime has been committed.
Inspector Maigret is no cybernetic whizzbang pulling mach-5 solutions out of a Sherlock Holmes hunting cap. Simenon's saving grace is his understanding of human beings and his freedom from cant in depicting them. Simenon has written 186 books under his own name, and 200 more under pseudonyms, but even the most snobbish literary critics do not dismiss him as a hack.
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What is meant is that Simenon's vision of people, and society, is free of partisanship of that commitment to party or creed which imprisons writers and so often turns them into hacks. Simenon is sometimes compared to Balzac, even though he has written nothing approaching the stature of, say, Père Goriot. Indeed, there are those who say his Inspector Maigret novels are not detective stories, i.e., puzzles about who did it, so much as literary excursions into why twentieth century human beings do unthinking, bizarre and violent things. In the opinion of a surprisingly large number of thoughtful people Georges Simenon is not only one of this century's most prolific writers but one of its authors who best understands the comédie humaine. Either they rework the same plot, or character, over and over, or they exploit whatever nonsense is fashionable at the moment (in our day, Freudianism, Marxism, existentialism, etc). ULTRA-PROLIFIC writers are rarely of lasting interest or cultural importance. SIMENON ON THE SCREEN Has Not Been So Successful As He Has Been In Print By JACK EDMUND NOLAN Jack Edmund Nolan: Simenon on the Screen Home Bibliography Reference Forum Plots Texts Simenon Gallery Shopping Film Links