literature


On the Maigret trail


Conrad Landin walks in the footsteps of reporter turned author Georges Simenon


T


here are four daily newspapers in Liège,” Georges Simenon writes in Maigret and the 100 Gibbets.


When I arrived in the city earlier this


year, I tried to find the Gazette de Liège, the paper Simenon – best known as the creator of detective Jules Maigret but the author of hundreds of novels besides – started reporting for aged 15. It has now been incorporated into national tabloid La Libre Belgique. I had more luck finding La Meuse, the other Liège regional that features prominently in the novels Simenon set in his home town. Its strapline, “Le Quotidien de Liège”, suggests it is the last survivor of the four. Its front page is dominated by the funeral of Cyril Vangriecken, a 22-year-old man killed the week before in a terror attack. Had this tragic episode occurred


during the crime writer’s youth, it could well have ended up immortalised in fiction. Simenon, after all, would often say he was “incapable of making anything up”. In his preface to Pedigree, his autobiographical bildungsroman set in Liège, he observes that “everything is true while nothing is accurate”. Naming 10 famous Belgiums is a


legendary parlour game. Like Jacques Brel, Hergé and the fictional Hercule Poirot, Simenon is often assumed to be French.


Liège is full of the tiny bars and


seedy alleys one associates with its most famous son. But it marks him in a rather half-hearted fashion. Perhaps this can be explained by the


controversy over Simenon’s activities during the Second World War. Having moved to France in 1922, he remained there under the German occupation


and signed a declaration that he was Aryan to collect film royalties. I found a walking tour of Simenon’s Liège on an antiquated fan site (www. trussel.com/maig/liege.htm). When I set out with a Belgium-based journalist friend, we found glass plaques and subtle arrows pointing the way. But it did not appear a well- trodden path. My hopes for a selfie with the bench-dwelling statue of Simenon at the Place du Commissaire Maigret were dashed when I saw he had company. Not a fellow reader, alas, but a incurious tourist munching on frites.


In the island neighbourhood of


Outre-Meuse we found several further childhood homes, but the most evocative place was the Church of St Pholien.


On March 2 1922, Simenon’s friend Joseph Kleine was found dead, hanging from the door handle of the church. It’s a scene – a haunting memory, sketched over and over again by unsuccessful artist turned newspaper photo-engraver Jef Lombard – that Simenon recreates in Maigret and the 100 Gibbets. Lombard’s occupation is not just spare detail. Simenon pitches the workaday nature of the newspaper trade in opposition to the extravagant artistry of the Companions of the Apocalypse, whose secret past Maigret eventually uncovers in this novel. “Just imagine if you’d told me then I


was to be a photo-engraver!” the character, once a member of this sordid fraternity, remarks. But Lombard’s transition – successful on paper, but never quite complete – suggests the worlds of hack and hedonist are closer than meets the eye.


“ ”


He could never leave quite escape the world of rushed reporting, sensational narratives and an uneasy relationship with the truth


This novel is full of crushed preconceptions. Maigret visits the four newspapers of Liège to discover the truth of what happened 10 years before. As well as accurate historical record, their archives come to symbolise the ease with which history can be amended. Another member of the Companions, Joseph Van Damme, is one step ahead of Maigret, removing 15 February’s paper from each archive. In another novel, At The Gai-Moulin, Maigret works with the Liège police to dupe a crime reporter who “always prints what we tell him”. The journalist is led to believe that Maigret, having been arrested in an earlier part of his ploy, has shot himself. The fake news spreads across the local media, is accepted as fact, and then helps Maigret solve the case. Simenon’s genius is often attributed


to his youthful temptation to the criminal underworld. But, after leaving his home city and journalism behind, he could never leave quite escape the world of rushed reporting, sensational narratives and an uneasy relationship with the truth. Perhaps it’s just as well.


theJournalist | 25


GRANGER HISTORICAL PICTURE ARCHIVE / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO / ARTERRA PICTURE LIBRARY / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO


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