Three Crimes (Simenon novel)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Simenon's first novel, Au Pont des Arches, was written in June 1919 and published in 1921 under his "G. Sim" pseudonym. Writing as "Monsieur Le Coq", he also published more than 800 humorous pieces between November 1919 and December 1922. He stopped writing for the Gazette in December 1922. During this period, Simenon's familiarity with nightlife, prostitutes, drunkenness and carousing increased. The people he rubbed elbows with included anarchists, bohemian artists and even two future murderers, the latter appearing in his novel Les Trois crimes de mes amis. He also frequented a group of artists known as "La Caque". While not really involved in the group, he did meet his future wife Régine Renchon through it."--Sholem Stein |
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Les Trois Crimes de mes amis (1938) is a novel by Georges Simenon, usually regarded as a 'roman dur' but actually more of a biographical novel.
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Background
This novel was written by Georges Simenon in January 1937 while he was living on boulevard Richard-Wallace in Neuilly-sur-Seine. It is a fictionalized story, largely autobiographical, describing three real events that took place in Liege between 1918 and 1922, of which the author knew and had frequented the authors. It was first published in ten episodes in the weekly Confessions between February 25 and April 29, 1937, before being published in full by Gallimard in April 1938.
The original manuscript was sold in 1943 for the benefit of prisoners of the Second World War. There is no habitual "yellow envelope" associated with the novels of Simenon.
Summary
Three characters, whose fates cross in Liege, are about to become murderers.
Marked by the traumas of the First World War, a group of young people meets regularly at the bottom of a sinister courtyard of the Outremeuse district, in " la Caque ". There, in a sordid room, these artists, intellectuals and others share the same taste for eccentric exaltation, drinking and filth. Among the eccentricities of these evenings are the sessions of the "Fakir". He chose for his experiments little K..., a young, sickly, poor painter whom he drugs and whose suicide he provokes: one winter morning he is found hanged on the porch of the Saint-Pholien Church in Liège, about a hundred meters from the Caque.
The author, who was one of the victim's companions, has in the meantime made the acquaintance of a fellow journalist, Deblauwe, an elegant and smooth talker. Commissioned by a Romanian adventurer who soon disappears, Deblauwe launches a satirical gazette in which he involves the young Simenon. The gazette, Nanesse, soon becomes a blackmail sheet bought by the bookseller Hyacinthe Danse, while Deblauwe finds it more lucrative to go to Barcelona where his friend Renée works for him in a brothel. The pimping gradually leads him to total decadence which will push him to kill a Spanish rival in a hotel in the rue de Maubeuge in Paris.
The third criminal is Hyacinthe Danse who during the German occupation, was interested in occult sciences and who did dishonourable things to young girls in his bookshop. When the armistice came, this fat character became a man of letters and, playing the patriotic game, succeeds in obtaining recommendation letters. Owner of Nanesse, he starts scandals that earn him a two-year prison sentence for blackmail. But, before that, Danse flees and settles in Boullay-les-Troux in the Paris region with his mistress, Armande Comtat. In order to subsist, as his new journal does not bring him much money, he places Armande in a brothel in the rue du Caire. When she decides to leave him, he takes advantage of a last appointment to murder her with a hammer blow to the head followed by a stab wound in the throat, in the same way that, as a child, he had seen a sow slaughtered in a farmyard. He repeats the act on his old mother, who lived under the same roof, then, having made the funeral toilet of the two dead women, he returns to Belgium with the intention of turning himself in. But for fear of an extradition that would cost him the death penalty in France, he commits a last crime in Liège by discharging his revolver on Father Haut, an old Jesuit father whom he had once had as a confessor at the Saint-Servais college.
Analysis
A first-person narrative that recounts memories of Georges Simenon's youth. As the author notes, it is not a novel in the strict sense of the term, that is to say, a story with a beginning and an end, in which the events find an explanation. The story, which has the value of a period piece, brings together real facts crystallized around the same idea: these three youthful acquaintances were potential murderers. How did they get there and why? The narrator asks himself this question, without being able to answer it.
Characters
- The main character is the narrator himself, a teenager and then a young journalist.
- Ferdinand Deblauwe, son of a merchant from Liège, journalist in Paris, then in Liège, bachelor, about 35 years old
- Le Fakir, illusionist, originally from the Near East.
