Simenon: Maigret and More

The biggest news in European ebooks last month, as I see it, was the release in France of the first 41 ebooks by Georges Simenon (1903 - 1989), the best-selling French-language author of the 20th century, and by some ways of reckoning the most prolific novelist of any era. Now and through 25 July 2012 the price of these French-language ebooks has been cut in half: individual ebooks now sell for less than four euros, three-packs for less than eight.

I've read, and mostly admired, several dozens of Simenon's books. There are so many of them, and the experience of them is so inseparable from French or European life, that his readers (and especially those of us with a few decades of reading under our belts) find they can't keep track of the numbers. (Simenon himself couldn't say how many he'd written.)

If you read French, you're likely to know a great deal about Simenon already. To you I'll just mention two of my favorite Simenons, one featuring Inspector Maigret and one non-series novel. L'affaire Saint-Fiacre brings the seasoned, adult Maigret back to his childhood home to investigate a crime involving a noblewoman whom he once idealized. Le chat (which was memorably filmed with Simone Signoret and Jean Gabin) is a powerful study of a claustrophobic marriage. (The links provided are to Amazon.fr. Kindle users may want to check their usual Amazon store, and users of other e-readers can get more information at the 'Simenon en numérique' website.)

And if you don't read French? There's an excellent selection of Simenon ebooks in translation--except that the US ebook prices for all the Maigrets available in English exceed the ceiling I've set for most linking from this blog. (See here for an earlier discussion of ebook prices, especially of the 'gouge zone'.) But consider, among the non-series Simenons available in e-format, the very early Tropic Moon (which will remind you of Heart of Darkness, in a good way), Act of Passion (which takes the form of a letter from a man convicted of murder to the examining magistrate who handled his case) or The President (Simenon's most overtly political novel).

And, since we're stressing the non-series novels (now referred to more and more as romans durs), let me mention the best recent piece I've found on them, by John McIntyre.

I'll close with a link to Simenon's 1955 Paris Review interview, which includes among its extensive riches a documentation of Simenon's work schedule and output that is if anything more amazing almost 60 years later. Among other things, Simenon wrote faster than many of us read. But in the process he created a world of indelible atmosphere and unforgettable relationships. As readers and as writers, we're still struggling to catch up.

From 'Hello, UK!' to 'I'm Here All Week, Folks!': Bearing the Burden of Bestsellerdom

I happened to notice a few mornings back that my novel A Kiss Before You Leave Me had cropped up on the AmazonUK bestseller list for psychological fiction, between a World's Classics paperback of a Virginia Woolf novel and an ebook by Philip Roth.

I'm not sure how either of those authors would have felt about our juxtaposition; not much worse, perhaps, than about the tête-à-tête (if that's the word for it) that I seem to have interrupted. (All I know is that, on the basis of my knowledge of the works in question, two of the three authors would have insisted on reporting that Woolf was on top. [You see how difficult it is to talk about bestsellers without getting into sexual content.])

I know, however, that I'm delighted to be on this UK list. And not just as an indication that the book is 'selling internationally'. For some very important part of me, the UK is at least one of the centers of my cultural universe, and has been ever since I first arrived in London at the age of 20. (If I told you what role I saw Judi Dench in the West End on that visit, it would be needlessly hurtful for one or both of us.)

Bestseller lists, we all know, don't mean very much.

Except when it's your book that gets noticed that way.

Well.

Because I, rightly or wrongly, attribute this 'movement' in the UK 'market' to the current (very international and very broadly 'cross-vendor') 'sunshine deal' on A Kiss Before You Leave Me, I'm extending the 'deal' for one additional week, in all markets and through all participating vendors. (I admit that this feels like an overly American response, but I don't want to be too hard on myself.)

Thank you to every reader in every country who's found room for my work on their digital 'shelves', on their virtual 'bedside table'.

(If you're still having trouble getting hold of Kiss, consult the links in the column to the right, or follow this link to the bitly 'bundle' and link on from there. Or 'comment' below, and let me know what you need. Finally, if you just arrived and want to know what this is all about, here are all my blogposts labelled 'A Kiss Before You Leave Me'--although, by this time, it might be easier for you just to break down and read the book...)

Twitter Woes

First of all, this is addressed almost exclusively to people who have followed me on Twitter or who have an extreme interest in Twitter in general. Everybody else, please read a different post on Jascha Writes (click here for what is currently the most-read recent post; the top 10 of all time are listed at the foot of every page of the blog) or a good book (click here for a not-so-randomly-chosen title from a recent AmazonUK bestseller list of psychological fiction).

I hope I made it clear before that I love Twitter--or, to be more precise, that I love it much more than I ever expected to. I used it hassle-free for the better part of a year and hope for a speedy return of those halcyon days.

It's just that we've hit a snag. I can't quite get in an it's-not-you-it's-me here; all I know is that between (a) Twitter, (b) the third-party software I need to manage my account and (c) me--something isn't quite working. Twitter and my software disagree in their tallies of my followers and people followed, to such an extent that both the software and I are (temporarily, I hope) unable to follow back additional people. (Believe me, you don't want to hear about it in any more detail.)

I'm posting this here as an apology to any readers who may have been given the impression that I-- May I say, 'that I trifled with their readerly affections'?

Out there in the Twitterverse there are Tweeps who don't 'follow back'. There may even be a few who, after being followed, unfollow their followers so as to be able to attract additional followers more quickly.

Quite simply, I wouldn't do that. Not any of that. Along with everything else doglike about me, I definitely follow back.

I'm working to fix the problem. And, frankly, I'm also hoping for a fix from the people who brought us Tweet Adder 3.

For now, once more, my apologies.

Tweet on.

(That's what works for me. Even now.)

'Discovering' Boris Akunin

Imagine a young aspirant on the lowest rung of the Czarist police bureaucracy, 20-year-old Erast Fandorin, recently orphaned, indisputably wet behind the ears, stumbling (embarrassing 'foundation garment' and all) into his first case, which seems to involve a peripatetic game of what later centuries will call 'Russian roulette' (but which Russians in 1876 still call 'American roulette')... and a femme fatale for whom he's no match. At the outset, there's little to suggest that Fandorin has a big future (a distinguished career extending 35 years and counting, in which he will never solve the same kind of puzzle twice) or that his first case, The Winter Queen, will launch one of the most successful 'franchises' in international crime fiction. But in the Erast Fandorin novels, and in the other works of Boris Akunin (born 1956), appearances are often deceiving. Fandorin, it turns out, is not only brilliant (we suspected that) but also an astonishing polyglot, a master of disguise, a lover and, on occasion and in the line of duty, a killer....

I've been away from blogging for much longer than I intended, but at least I don't believe I've been wasting time. Among other things, I managed, in the course of my holiday hiatus, to 'discover' Akunin. I put 'discover' in quotation marks because, although I was reading him for the first time, he's been publishing novels for well over 20 years and is the best-known Russian author of genre fiction. He combines qualities of Dostoevsky and Nabokov, not to mention the great series novelists of other countries, whose success he rivals.

He's also amazingly prolific. His historical series about Erast Fandorin runs to a dozen volumes, many of them already published by Random House in the US and Hachette subsidiary Orion in the UK--and this does not count other series under the Akunin name or other works published under other names. ('Boris Akunin' is itself a pseudonym, and it would take an entire blogpost just to explore its multiple meanings.)

Different Akunin series have different organizational principles, slowly disclosed by Akunin through little clues, then made explicit in interviews and essays. The novels in one series, for example, illustrate what Akunin sees as the various possible sub-genres for a crime novel, at the rate of one novel for each type; another series parallels cinematic genres. In addition, different novels and series explore different eras: for example, the first Erast Fandorin novel, The Winter Queen, is set in 1876 and the latest in 1911; another series features Fandorin's British grandson in (mostly) the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Three of Akunin's novels have been filmed (lavishly, by all accounts) in Russia; The Winter Queen is currently getting the Hollywood treatment, for better or worse.

If you'd like to experience for yourself what all the excitement is about, I'd recommend to US readers this trade-paperback edition, and to UK readers this ebook edition, of The Winter Queen. (US customers of iBooks may find this link useful because of a database peculiarity that makes Akunin more difficult to search for otherwise; check prices carefully.)