Simenon in Paris, in 1962. He found success with his novels about police superintendent Jules Maigret, but sought the respect of the literary élite with darker “hard novels.” Photograph by Robert Doisneau / Rapho

Those who know anything about Georges Simenon usually know at least three things. The first is that he divided his energies between detective novels and “straight” novels. The former made him one of the highest-earning writers in the world in the mid-twentieth century, and barred him from achieving the top-rung literary status that he longed for. The second thing is that he generally devoted only about a week and a half to writing a novel, a practice that, again, was good for his bank account and bad for his reputation. Finally—and this is a matter that Simenon discussed enthusiastically with journalists—he spent a great deal of his life having sex. Once, in an interview with his friend Federico Fellini, he claimed that he had been to bed with ten thousand women.

Simenon was born in 1903 in Liège, the main economic and cultural center of French-speaking Belgium. In his highly autobiographical coming-of-age novel “Pedigree” (1948), he described his home town as a place where there was almost nothing to do except go to school and to church. After Sunday dinner, Uncle Charles would show the photographs that he had recently taken of clouds over the general post office. Eventually, Simenon discovered books: Balzac, Dumas, Dickens, the usual list for boys of his period. He also found another interest: girls. His description of his deflowering takes your breath away. He and Renée—he was twelve, she fifteen—were in the woods. He climbed a holly tree, to pick berries for her, and descended bleeding, from the thorns. She told him to lie down, and she licked the blood off. Then she pulled down his shorts and climbed onto him. “It hurt like mad,” he recalled. “She practically circumcised me.” Soon, however, he tried again and became a fan for life.

Simenon adored his father, Désiré. In “Pedigree,” too, the father is called Désiré, and, like the real one, is a minor agent in an insurance company. A sweet-natured, unambitious, and dignified man, he stands in his church pew “as calm as a saint in a stained-glass window.” He loves his lunch, his newspaper, his chair in the kitchen, and, undemonstratively, his son, Roger (the Simenon character). By contrast, the mother, Élise, has screaming quarrels with the boy. Élise is as unhappy as Désiré is happy. She weeps and throws fits daily. Her greatest concern is money. The family is petit-bourgeois, but only barely. Against Désiré’s wishes, Élise takes lodgers into their small apartment. Soon, when Désiré comes home from work, someone is sitting in his chair, reading his newspaper.

Simenon was a disobliging child, and once he reached adolescence all he wanted was to get out of Liège. He quit school at fifteen, and he went to work writing for a local newspaper. Soon, he began writing novels as well. The first was published when he was eighteen. That year, Désiré died, of angina pectoris, at forty-four. A year later, Simenon left town. He came back home for two days to marry his fiancée—Tigy (Régine) Renchon, a painter, and apparently more a friend than a lover. The two of them settled in Paris, and Simenon didn’t cross his mother’s doorstep again for almost thirty years.

This productive man now became more so. In the next seven years, he brought out more than a hundred and fifty novels and novellas. All were unabashed pulp—Westerns (e.g., “The Eye of Utah”), adventure tales (“The White Monster of Tierra del Fuego”), and what he called “spicy” stories (“A Girl Who Learned a Thing or Two”)—published under pseudonyms. Tigy quit painting in order to help him. They hired a housekeeper, Henriette Liberge, nineteen years old, whom Simenon nicknamed Boule, or “ball” (she was plump), and he made her his mistress in short order. Other lovers came later, and he visited brothels frequently. Every morning, he sat down and completed his self-assigned daily quota of eighty typewritten pages. Then he would vomit, from the tension, and spend the rest of the afternoon relaxing. Thus, by the age of twenty-seven, he had established the pattern of his life: lots of books, lots of women. In the words of his excellent biographer, Pierre Assouline, “the train was on its way.”

But Simenon was discontented with being a writer of potboilers. In 1931, he produced the first novels that he was willing to sign his name to. They were detective stories, about a police superintendent named Jules Maigret.

At the opening of a Maigret novel, as of any detective novel, a body drops, and at the end of the book we find out who did it. But the point of the Maigret stories is by no means the plot. The dénouement, which, in classic detective stories, is usually the crucial matter, often makes only a slight impression in the Maigret novels. In many cases, the culprit turns out to be the person we suspected all along, or the opposite— someone out of left field, a person we’ve never met before. Julian Symons, an expert on the detective novel, claimed that the Maigret novels were not really part of that genre, because, he said, Simenon was not interested in detection.

What interested him was his characters and the world they moved through. The central matter in the Maigret novels is Maigret. We see him more clearly than we do any other character in Simenon’s fiction. In most of the books he is middle-aged, and a famous man. Because he is the head of the homicide police, his picture is frequently in the papers. When he gets into a taxi, the driver often says, “Where to, Inspector?” He is tall (five feet eleven) and broad-shouldered. He smokes a pipe almost continuously, as did Simenon. He likes to drink. Not rarely, he will stop in a bar by 10 A.M. He also loves to eat, and he is no longer thin.

Which brings us to his wife. As one critic said, Mme. Maigret looks after her husband as if he were a toddler. She makes splendid meals for him, not just at dinnertime but also for lunch. Often, he does not arrive to eat them, because he is out solving crimes, but if Maigret misses the foie de veau en papillote at lunch he still gets the chicken with tarragon for dinner.

Appropriately, Maigret’s first encounter with this woman has to do with food. In what is probably Simenon’s most poignant book, “Maigret’s Memoirs” (1951), our hero remembers a time when he was an apprentice policeman, on a bike. A friend invites him to a party given by some government people. He goes, but he feels awkward and ill-dressed. At one point, he is standing next to a full plate of petits fours. He reaches out for one, then, without thinking, another and another. Eventually, he looks down and sees, to his mortification, that he has eaten every last one of the little cakes. Furthermore, other guests have noticed and are staring at him in disbelief. At that moment, a girl in a blue dress comes up to him with another plate of petits fours. Would he like one? she asks, and advises him that the ones with the candied fruit on top are the best. This is the niece of the hosts, and what she is saying is that Maigret should have all the cake he wants. Her name is Louise, but she is almost never called that again, because she is soon Mme. Maigret.