Author
Georges Simenon
Publisher
Penguin Classics
Date
July 3, 2014
Final Verdict
3/5

About the Author

Georges Joseph Christian Simenon (1903 – 1989) was a Belgian writer. A prolific author who published nearly 500 novels and numerous short works, Simenon is best known as the creator of the fictional detective Jules Maigret.
Although he never resided in Belgium after 1922, he remained a Belgian citizen throughout his life.

Simenon was one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century, capable of writing 60 to 80 pages per day. His oeuvre includes nearly 200 novels, over 150 novellas, several autobiographical works, numerous articles, and scores of pulp novels written under more than two dozen pseudonyms. Altogether, about 550 million copies of his works have been printed.
Other Works By Georges Simenon
Maigret
Maigret and the Yellow Dog
The blue room
The Cat
The Strange Case of Peter the Lett
Maigret Goes Home
A Battle of Nerves
The Strangers in the House
Act of Passion
Maigret Sets a Trap
The Crime of Inspector Maigret
The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By
Tropic Moon
Maigret and the Dead Girl
The Bottom of the Bottle
Maigret and the Headless Corpse
Red Lights
The Little Man from Archangel
Maigret at the Gai-Moulin
The Shadow Puppet
Maigret and Monsieur Charles

A Man’s Head by Georges Simenon

Here’s something about me: I love philosophy, and believe firmly that it needs to be made more mainstream. Philosophy helps root your beliefs into a concrete base. Professor Michael Sandel in his Justice series asked a very interesting question which went something like this: “You are in a mine, in one of those trucks and speeding down a track and you realise that the brakes have failed. You see in front of you five people working on the track and you have no way of notifying them that your brakes have failed. Then, you see a diversion of the track and on that track, only one person is there. The choice is now yours, kill the five men who sort of may have been destined to die, or kill this one man whose life depends on you. What do you do?”

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There is no right answer to this. Going ahead may be a great way to initiate conversation and keep a person engaged.

But, in a world so full of crimes with more numbers and fewer stories, how do you evaluate the worth of a man’s head, especially if the power lies in your hands?

Georges Simenon mostly did not write A Man’s Head (Maigret #9) with any of the above views in mind. But it raises these questions, and it will make you wonder. About that, later.

When you think of detective fiction, most of us Indian readers would know little beyond Holmes and Poirot. Yet, Jules Maigret has over 70 books to his name. And where did we find this little book? At a Books By Weight sale. Shows, that if we look, there is good fiction to be found everywhere.

A Man’s Head begins with a convict escaping from prison, facilitated by the police because Maigret feels that he is not the killer. And so begins a chase along the banks of the river Seine, into multitudes of French cafes to look for the mastermind behind it all. It is interesting, although detective fiction has become so much of a ‘the least suspicious man is the killer’ that the moment this character is introduced, you doubt the person. Motives and methods included, this would make for a gripping episode and it made for an easy read. The drama includes Radek, Heurtin, Kirby, Edna, Maigret, Janvier and Lucas is a wild cat-and-mouse chase, that goes from one telephone line to another over lots of coffee and smokes.

We may lack many things as an Age, but in media and entertainment, we flourish. So why read when you can watch TV? Why spend a day in what may be a forty-minute episode? The genre was at its height in the pre-tv show era but post that, a writer must give his readers something more. Simenon’s book scores decent on that count. The style, like what I have heard of the French, is leisurely and at no point does anyone seem to be in any hurry, except when getting through telephones. But, there is nothing I read that could not be captured equally well on screen. Point is, if the audio-visual exists, you can skip the book.

In the book itself, the character of Maigret, possibly because he is recurring in so many books, feels incomplete. I would have liked to know some references to his past cases, and some quips that highlight his presence. But he roams about almost always clueless until the last two chapters. Now, I am all for a big reveal, but throw some hints that the guy knows what he is doing.

Undoubtedly, Simenon masters in his closing and the last two pages take the book several notches higher, bringing us to question what is a man’s worth. I won’t give names and I won’t tell you more. But here’s a warning, look out for the last victim. In a 137-page book, I was unimpressed by 135 pages. And then the last two have made me a fan of Simenon. Definitely an author I’d re-read and definitely a detective I want to know more about.

Favourite Quote:

Genius, you know, is like everything else. You’ve got to start young. It’s no use starting at forty-five.”

Recommended Age Group: 15, thanks to irrational sociopaths.

You can buy the book here.

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Prakruti Maniar

Prakruti Maniar is founder and editor of Purple Pencil Project. She likes to call herself, an ist-er-preneur, as there are many roles and titles she's held through the years. Many ists: Journalist. Cultural Theorist. Humanist. Digital Humanist, Communication and Content Strategist. Hobbyist. Many ers: Writer, Editor, Researcher, Observer, Maker, Creator, Doer, Learner Some preneur: Entrepreneur / Mediapreneur / Culturepreneur She is deeply invested in cultural heritage, especially stories, and is committed to saving the literary heritage of India. She has a Master of Arts in Digital Humanities from Loyola University Chicago.

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