Published by Presses de la Cité, Paris in 1953. Condition: Good. Original Edition.
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Maigret et L'Homme du Banc was originally published as a serial in Le Figaro before it was published as a book. It tells of Simenon's fictional creation detective Jule Mairgret. Simenon accounts that the inspiration of the character came to him one morning as he was drinking coffee by the Dutch canal, “a large powerfully built gentleman … a pipe, a bowler hat, a thick overcoat”.
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Simenon was a Belgian author who wrote and lived abundantly. At the time of his death his oeuvre included nearly two hundred novels, over one hundred and fifty novellas, several autobiographical works, numerous articles, and scores of pulp novels written under more than two dozen pseudonyms. His personal life was rife with secret affairs and failed marriages, two of the women he married being half his age and already living with him as housekeepers and family friends. By 1977 he said he had had sex with ten thousand women in the sixty one years since his thirteenth birthday. His second wife has said the number is closer to one thousand two hundred. He was caught up in relative controversy during the war as he was suspected of being a collaborator with the Germans after negotiating film deals with them for his work. He was eager to separate his work from his main competitor Albert Camus, whose writing often featured similar characters and who received much greater attention and intellectual accolade. This book, Maigret and the Man on the Boulevard, is one of his most famous detective stories and features his most successful character.