‘What are you reading, Benny?’ His fingers around the glass were yellow with nicotine and the fingernails ridged and thick. ‘Did you look up that Simenon book I was telling you about? He’s the deep one. And everybody thinks he’s just a detective story writer. Did you know that Gide was writing about him at the time of his death? That’s a fact. Have you read any Gide at all?’
‘I’m still working my way through the Russians. Slowly.’
‘Gogol,’ he said, rolling his eyes with meaning that didn’t need elucidation, except to me.
From Howard Engel, The Suicide Murders
On arriving in New York after his wedding Simenon’s first idea was to take the boat to Europe. His new wife had never been there and he kept a mild nostalgia for his old haunts. He had made sure that Johnny’s birth had been registered at the Belgian consulate and recorded on the family’s page at the town hall in Liege. In the heat of Arizona he had sometimes missed the comfort of warm clothing in cold weather. But the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 had caused a flood of visa applications from Europeans wanting to come to the United States and fearful of another war in Europe. Simenon learnt of this from the Belgian consul in New York and credited the rumours without question because he well understood the feelings of the would-be refugees. Accordingly he did what he had done in 1938, when the last rumours of war had
Simenon with Professor Lucien Pautrier, obstetrician and godfather, and Vlaminck at his son Marc’s christening party in the Vendee in May 1939.
Convinced that he was about to die of heart disease Simenon wrote a family memoir, Je me Souviens, in the Chateau de Terre-Neuve at Fontenay-le-Comte in 1941. Marc was normally the only person allowed to enter the room when he was writing.
In 1944, after the liberation of France, Simenon decided to emigrate to the United States with his family. Tigy (right) insisted that Boule (left) should stay behind.
In Manhattan, in November 1945, Simenon met and fell in love with Denyse Ouimet, a young French-Canadian who he hired as his secretary. Rechristened ‘Denise’, she would later become his second wife.
In 1950 Simenon and Denise settled in New England purchasing Shadow Rock Farm, Lakeville, Connecticut. ‘At last I have settled down ... I am taking root,’ he told the New Yorker.
Simenon with Fernandel during his triumphant European tour of 1952. Huge crowds chanting ‘Sime-non, Si-me-non’ greeted his arrival at the Gare St Lazare.
Seated on the floor of his study at Shadow Rock Farm in 1953. His new titles were selling over half a million copies each in France alone. His world sales were running at 3 million a year.
The return to Europe in May 1955. Simenon’s happiness was from now on to be overshadowed by marital problems.
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An opportunity to try the new spectacles. Simenon encounters Brigitte Bardot at the Venice Film Festival in 1958. Bardot had just played the lead in the film of En cas de malheur opposite Jean Cabin.
By 1961 Simenon and Denise with their three children, Johnny, Pierre and Marie-Jo, had been living for four years in the Chateau d’Echandens, near Lausanne in the Swiss canton of Vaud.
Marie Jo aged 7, coquette and adoring. At the age of 8 she asked her father to buy her a wedding ring and she wore it for the rest of her life.
Denise Simenon signing the visitors’ book in October 1961 at the newly opened Bibliotheque Georges Sirnenon in Liege. Between husband and wife stands mother, awaiting her turn.
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In 1967, outside Epalinges, the mansion overlooking Lake Geneva which Simenon and Denise designed together but which only he lived in.
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