The Murder of Maria Marten. In 1827, young Maria Marten slipped into a red barn to meet her secret lover. It was the last time she would be seen alive. David Hare: the genius of Georges Simenon . Even then I had noticed that stories supposedly driven by narrative depended for their real vitality on establishing ambience. Crime writing came to life when it had density, when you felt that the paint was being laid on thick. A strong sense of time and place was far more exciting than a clever puzzle.
Anyone could create a mystery, but only the best could summon up a world in which the mystery could take root. My taste in literary fiction . When, at university, I came across WH Auden. It had never occurred to me that thrillers were anything less. By then I had already graduated from Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers to Dashiell Hammett and the chill ambiguity of Patricia Highsmith. But when I discovered that the author of the Maigret series . These books belonged more alongside Camus and Sartre than Arthur Conan Doyle. The popular joke in Le Canard encha. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock. It. In fact, he was Belgian, born in Li. In Belgium, few people fostered illusions about national greatness. As he later observed: . It would give you a feeling of superiority. What Frenchman or woman would speak of their loathing of gastronomy ? What French writer or politician would agree that . The untruth offended him. Simenon believed the events of the 1. French as thoroughly as they had the Germans. Yet nobody locks them up. Those who invent morals, who define them and impose them, end up believing in them. Over and again, he describes someone quietly living their life, until some random fait divers . Striking out towards freedom, they fall instead into captivity. He had the idea that a book, like a Greek tragedy, should be experienced in a single session. Typically, in one of Simenon. The man who, when adolescent, says he suffered physical pain at the idea that there could be so many women who would escape him, has the intense focus of a voyeur. An ex- journalist, he often describes towns from their canals or railway lines, because from there you could look into the back of residents. They simply possess an inadvertent power to drive men mad. It was this fallen universe of compromise that I found so convincing when I was growing up. It matched what I had already seen of life. I knew at first hand that Simenon was right when he said that . But it was only when I was older that I became addicted to the hard stuff . If, as is generally thought, Simenon wrote around 4. If you want to read three of his greatest books, try the deceptively light Sunday, written in 1. Riviera hotel- keeper who spends a year preparing to kill his wife; try The Widow, published, like The Outsider, in 1. Camus. The charge of misogyny at least is unfair. In his books, casual sex is fine . In these circumstances, sex comes closer to despair than to joy. The women he portrays are not usually manipulative or cruel or deceitful. They simply possess an inadvertent power to disturb men and to drive them mad. They exercise this power more often in spite of themselves than deliberately. All of his books are, in one way or another, about power of different kinds, and he specialises in depicting the lives of those near the bottom of society, the concierges and the salespeople, the waiters and the clerks, who possess very little. No wonder, when he went to America, that he remarked how everyone was expected to have a hobby, so that in one small field at least they might exercise at least a measure of domination. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images. Maria Marten (original title) Short, Drama . Follow IMDb on Home; Top Rated Movies; Box Office; TV; Coming Soon; Site Index; Search; In Theaters; Contact Us.The inspiration for finally deciding to write a play from Simenon came from my friend Bill Nighy, who knew that I was a fan. He gave me a present of a rare first edition of a novel that had been almost entirely forgotten. Even now, I have yet to meet anyone in Britain who claims to have read La Main. It was written in 1. Simenon. In the book, the town he then lived in, Lakeville, is renamed Brentwood. His house, Shadow Rock Farm, becomes fictionally Yellow Rock Farm. But the topography and feel of the place are pretty much identical, with beavers playing in a nearby stream, and the local Connecticut community expecting strong but already threatened standards of private morality. The only detail omitted was Simenon. We hear rather less about its opposite. In my view, there is something rare and interesting artistically when a European sensibility engages with American morals. La Main describes America at a point of change, when the suburban world patrolled so brilliantly by writers such as Richard Yates, Sloan Wilson and Patricia Highsmith is about to yield to a newer way of life, theoretically freer but equally treacherous. It was characteristic of Simenon to suspect that sexual liberation might not deliver everything it promised. After all, he doubted most things, except his own writing. But it was even more characteristic of Simenon to be in the right place, as he had been in France and Africa before the war, and at the right time, equipped with a reporter.
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