The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books

The blog of The Top Ten author J. Peder Zane.

Banville discovers Simenon
Monday, March 26, 2007

Benjamin Black. The name sounds familiar, famous even. Where have I heard it before, you puzzle, while scanning the cover of his debut crime novel, “Christine Falls”?

Don't wrack the old bean too hard. There is a famous name somewhere but it's not Black but Banville — John Banville, the Man Booker Prize-winning author who has adopted Black as his nom de plum.

I mention this because of two connections to "The Top Ten." First, the Irish writer contributed a list to the book:

John Banville
1. Ill Seen Ill Said by Samuel Beckett
2. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
3. Ulysses by James Joyce
4. Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann
5. Moby-Dick by Hermann Melville
6. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
7. Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
8. Dirty Snow by Georges Simenon
9. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
10. Vanity Fair by William Thackeray

Second, in his Philadelphia Inquirer review of "Christine Falls" Frank Wilson notes: " Banville has been quoted as saying how impressed he was to discover recently Georges Simenon’s psychological thrillers, and this novel compares quite favorably to Simenon’s best."

Although the Belgian writer published more than 500 books during his singular career — the most famous being his detective novels featuring Inspector Maigret of Paris — he was news to me until the brilliant British mystery writer Iain Pears listed Simenon on his Top Ten list. It just so happened that the great New York Review Classic Series was in the midst republishing several of Simenon's novels. I read 'em and wrote about 'em. Wow. Thank you Iain.

To help spread the good news news about Simenon, Iain wrote a short piece for "The Top Ten." Enjoy!

Appreciation of Georges Simenon’s Maigret Detective Novels
by Iain Pears
The Maigret series of detective stories, written by the Belgian Georges Simenon, are part of that rare breed of books — the massmarket entertainment that also works as great literature. Simenon is the master of atmosphere; with the lightest of touches he is able to conjure up Paris in the 1940s and 1950s, a seedy, largely poor city of shabby concierges and downtrodden traveling salesmen, of cheap hotels and squalid nightclubs, of hissing steam radiators and grubby shirt collars.

Much of the narrative is liquor soaked — Maigret begins drinking after breakfast, interviews witnesses over brandy, and suspects over beer. Only rarely is a case concluded by unraveling clues; these are not whodunits. Rather, they are studies in character, of place, and of people. Simenon would have been a brilliant analyst. As often as not, the books end when Maigret (and through him, the reader) so understands the criminal that the suspect confesses all. Indeed, the
reader is usually left sympathizing with the criminal, whose crime is reacting to limited choices and desperate circumstances.

The books are so compressed they could almost be short stories, but Simenon populates them with an extraordinary range of characters — the overweight, perpetually sweating Maigret, his eternally patient wife (more acute, in many ways, than her husband), his juniors, and the gallery of pimps and prostitutes, petty criminals, shopkeepers, bartenders, small tradesmen, and canal barge pilots who make up his world. There is no reveling in the grime of the underworld; most of the characters dream of better things and live a life of disappointment. Out of their lives, Simenon created some of the most enduring and compelling works of the twentieth century.

Posted by J. Peder Zane at 10:30 AM
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