The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 1 May 2001
by Georges Simenon
Did Simenon inspire American hard-boiled crime writers, or was it was the other way around (he did live in America for several years)? He certainly created a hardboiled character with his Inspector Maigret. This book, a British translation of La Tête d'un Homme, is another, if earlier, of the many gritty stories Simenon wrote of the mean streets of Paris. Maigret, confronted with his own doubts of the guilt of a man on death row, arranges his escape in an audacious attempt to prove his theory. The presumed murderer goes on the run across Paris and its suburbs, dropping misleading clues along the way. The first two thirds of this short book are taut and tense, inventively told. Maigret is in for more than he ever bargained, as he encounters rich American expatriates, dangerous foreigners, and their hidden motives. The last third of the tale, in which all is told and unraveled, is a little less structurally interesting, as Simenon seems to rush his solution. This is pretty masculine fiction, as well. All the main characters are male, and Maigret himself is quite the tough guy (though here he shows some sincerity). His wife is a shadowy woman making coffee for him, and other female players are more two-dimensional than the males. Of course, we are speaking of Paris in the 1930s, so context is an issue. Nevertheless, this is an engaging mystery.
(In her own memoir, The Passionate Years, Caresse Crosby accused Simenon of stealing the idea for this book when he overheard her and her friends bandying it about in a bar he frequented. She also remained bitter about characters (Mr. and Mrs. Kirby) that resemble her and her husband. The novel, published in 1931, is fairly hard to find, and was also made into a 1949 movie entitled The Man on the Eiffel Tower.)
Also by Simenon: [At the `Gai-Moulin'] [Maigret in Montmartre] [The Blue Room]