At 08:49 17-08-03 -0500, you wrote:
>About the only Simenon I had around the house was a
story in THE MAMMOTH
>BOOK OF GREAT DETECTIVE STORIES. The story is "The
Evidence of the Altar
>Boy," and it's about 30 pages long, translated by
Jean Stewart. It's an OK
>story, in which Maigret deals with an old man, a boy,
and various versions
>of the truth. The boy reminds Maigret of his own
childhood, so we get a
>little (certainly not much) about Maigret's past.
Maigret has a bad cold in
>the story, and there's an amusing little sub-plot
about how he manages to
>sneak in a few smokes without his wife finding out. I
didn't find anything
>noir or hardboiled in the story.
>
>Bill Crider
>-
Bil,
The Maigrets (approx. 80 novels and 30 shorts) are not Noir
or HB, and Simenon himself admitted that a lot of them were
not really well written. At the most, some of the Maigret
series are "greyish", mainly due to some ambiances Simenon
recreated by a few lines referring to the weather, the
surroundings (old buildings, chenals...etc) or by some somber
traits attributed to some of the characters. We discussed
these points on RA in a recent past.
Noir is to be found in *some* of his non-Maigret novels
(total:approx 120 of them) and Simenon declared many times
that hte non-Maigres were the novels he tried to give a
better litterary treatment.
E.Borgers
-- # Plain ASCII text only, please. Anything else won't show up. # 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 : 18 Aug 2003 EDT