Doug,
Small is beautiful… very big is, most of the time, so heavy
and so short-sighted…
Concerning Simenon, the book you're publishing (Les 13
Coupables) must be one of the 3 short-stories volumes all
with 13 in the title. The "13 Coupables"(published in French
in 1932), was written around 1928-1930, and, as far as I
know, is considered as pre-Maigret mystery stuff. Finally,
except for his huge production for pulps and novelettes
during his first years as a writer, there is rather few
Simenon collections of crime/mysteries short stories. Well, I
estimate these to be around 15 (anyway less than 20) books …
which for this author can be qualified as a low output.
Amongst these collections, there was a rather successful
assembly of non-Maigret short stories - quite forgotten now-
called : Le Petit Docteur (The Little Doctor)-1943- that
gained a second fame by a series of radio shows (plays)
during the early fifties ( in French by the Belgian adio}
based on it … It's whodunit Simenon style and a little bit
unconventional; I do not know if it was ever translated in
English, but, if it was, I do not think it was not
re-published recently.
I can understand your feeling of noir in some ambiance of
Simenon's mysteries; I personally think it's more
"grayish", with a meaning like the word "grisaille" in French
(word applied to climatic conditions for gray skies, as well
as in a symbolic way to places or moods, or even way of
living- grayness maybe in English).
When, recently in France, Ellroy was asked which French
authors he knew, he answered: Simenon and Manchette….
(Simenon was Belgian, but his works belong to French language
literature)
E.Borgers Polar Noir http://www.geocites.com/polarnoir
---
dgreene@odu.edu wrote:
> Etienne
>
> Thanks for the note on Simenon-noir. My
microscopic
> company, Crippen &
> Landru, will publish the first translation
in
> English of Simenon's early
> collection, LES 13 COUPABLES. A very
traditional
> detective collection, but
> Simenon--with the rain in Paris, and the
> waiting--always seems to me to
> have a noir sensibility.
>
> Doug G
__________________________________________________ Do You
Yahoo!? Get email at your own domain with Yahoo! Mail. http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 06 Apr 2001 EDT