Georges Simenon

Staggeringly prolific and stylistically revolutionary, Belgian author Georges Simenon is the creator of Inspector Maigret and one of the most significant crime writers in literary history. The author of over 400 novels, Simenon began his literary career at the age of nineteen, committing to a punishing schedule of composing 80 pages of narrative per day. By the time he introduced the Parisian Inspector Jules Maigret in 1929’s Pietr the Latvian, Simenon had already published a formidable number of books under a wide variety of pseudonyms. The spare yet humane style of the Maigret novels proved phenomenally popular and Simenon turned out another 83 books featuring the iconic detective, as well as over a hundred stand-alone romans durs – or ‘hard novels’ – which examined criminal psychology in more depth than could be achieved in a police procedural series. A legendary figure in Gallic crime, Simenon continues to cast a long shadow over modern detective fiction.