WHILE IT IS CERTAINLY TRUE that the Belgian author Georges Joseph Christian Simenon (1903–1989) was prolific, estimates of the number of works he produced have been exaggerated, some alleged scholars of crime fiction putting the figure at five hundred or more. In fact, his output was less than half that—still a remarkable achievement. His series about the Paris policeman Jules Maigret totals about eighty novels and a modest number of short stories, beginning with The Death of Monsieur Gallet (1932). The work he considered more serious than the Maigret series may be categorized as psychological crime and has been counted as one hundred twenty-six books. He also produced lesser work under various pseudonyms, including Christian Brulls, Jean du Perry, and Georges Sim. Although the Maigret series has been more successful in England and the United States, in France Simenon’s reputation soared with his crime novels. Andre Gide proclaimed him “perhaps the greatest and most truly ‘novelistic’ novelist in France today.” Many of Simenon’s books have been filmed, mainly in France but also in England and the United States, including the highly regarded RKO motion picture The Man on the Eiffel Tower (1949), which starred Charles Laughton as Maigret, Franchot Tone, and Burgess Meredith, who also directed. Among the non-Maigret works adapted for the screen in English are Temptation Harbor (1947), based on Affairs of Destiny (1942); Midnight Episode (1950), based on Monsieur La Souris (1938); The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By (1952; American title: Paris Express), based on The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By (1938); and The Bottom of the Bottle (1956), based on the 1954 novel of the same title. Mystery Writers of America presented Simenon with the Grand Master award in 1966.
“The Little House at Croix-Rousse” was translated by Anthony Boucher and first published in English in the November 1947 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine; an earlier translation was published in Esquire in 1935 under the title “The Case of Dr. Ceccioni.”