der Beste. Nr 30 Non-Maigret, KEES POPINGA, unvergesslich, 1938erstmals veröffentlicht ( )

I've read one or two of the Maigret stories, but never expected Simenon to have produced something like this. A very modern psychological story, with a narrator you can never quite trust or quite believe, who is clearly deceiving himself - and maybe us? I would say more, but I don't want to spoil the discovery of how a book written in the 1930s could be so ahead of its time. ( )

Kees Popinga, a Dutch family man, loses his job at a ships chandler in Groningen through no fault of his own. Like a dog faced with an unexpectedly open door he bolts to freedom and goes off the rails, quickly. He kills a woman, flees to Paris, and taunts the police, even as they search for him. He spends his nights in seedy hotels with prostitutes because he can’t sleep well by himself. He frets about the quality of the press he’s getting.

Kees is convinced he’s smarter than the police, and everyone else actually. Getting swindled out of the only money he has is the start of a run of bad luck that is the beginning of the end of his freedom.

Georges Simenon has the ability to get to the bleak heart of his characters through their flaws and desires. Kees Popinga is such a character. ( )

in which julius de coster the younger gets drunk at the little saint-george and the impossible suddenly breaches the dikes of everyday life. ( )

The Man Who Had a Psychotic Break
Review of the Penguin Books paperback edition (November 2016) of a new translation* by Siân Reynolds of the French language original "L'Homme qui regardait passer les trains" (1938)

The Man Who Watched Trains Go By has very little to do with actual trains, which instead become more of a symbol for what the protagonist, Dutchman Kees Popinga, begins to believe is a life that has passed him by. The bookkeeper discovers that his boss has swindled his company and is going on the run. Seeing the end of his comfortable life and expecting to also be blamed for the swindle, he abandons his wife and 2 kids and begins a deranged run from Holland to Paris, France.

Along the way, he strangles his boss's mistress and becomes labelled as the Dutch sex maniac in the Paris newspapers. He falls in with a prostitute and her pimp's gang of car thieves until his paranoia causes him to escape them as well. He then goes back to attack the prostitute, all the while taunting the Paris newspapers and police with letters instructing them on where their perceptions of him are incorrect. He begins to believe himself a master criminal as he evades capture for a period of a few weeks over a Christmas and New Year period. Finally his funds are dwindled and he himself falls victim to a crime. The police are closing in.

See image at https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1550580948...
Cover of the first French language edition published by Gallimard in 1938. Image sourced from Goodreads

After reading the first dozen Simenon Maigret novels this year, I'm now reading a half-dozen or so of the non-Maigrets. Many of the non-Maigret books are being translated into English for the first time and there are still probably quite a few yet to be done.

The Man Who Watched Trains Go By is the 5th of my readings of Georges Simenon's romans durs** (French: hard novels) which was his personal category for his non-Chief Inspector Maigret fiction. This is like Graham Greene, who divided his work into his "entertainments" and his actual "novels." Similar to Greene, the borders between the two areas are quite flexible as we are often still dealing with crime and the issues of morals and ethics. Simenon's romans durs are definitely in the noir category though, as compared to the sometimes lighter Maigrets where the often cantankerous Chief Inspector provides a solution and the guilty are brought to justice.

Trivia and Links
* L'Homme qui regardait passer les trains was previously translated into English several times. The earliest appears to be published by Routledge in 1943 translated by Stuart Gilbert (not found on Goodreads) and as recently as The Man Who Watched Trains Go By (NYRB 2005) translated by Marc Romano.

** There is a limited selection of 100 books in the Goodreads' Listopia of Simenon's romans durs which you can see here. Other sources say there are at least 117 of them, such as listed at Art and Popular Culture.

The Man Who Watched Trains Go By has been adapted once for film.
The adaptation was in English in 1952 directed by Harold French and starring Claude Rains as Kees Popinga. There doesn't appear to be a trailer, but a clip from the film can be viewed on YouTube here. The film was released in America as The Paris Express. ( )