Maigret's Memoirs
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 | |
| Author | Georges Simenon |
|---|---|
| Original title | Les Mémoires de Maigret |
| Translator | Jean Stewart |
| Language | French |
| Series | Inspector Jules Maigret |
| Published | 1951 (France) 1963 (GB) |
| Media type | |
Maigret's Memoirs is a novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon. Unlike other Maigret novels, there is no plot; Jules Maigret himself writes about his life and work, and about his relation with the novelist Georges Simenon.
It was written from 19 to 26 September 1950 in Lakeville, Connecticut USA. Simenon had recently remarried and had invited his new mother-in-law to stay for a while. In his autobiography Intimate Memoirs (published in the UK and USA in 1984) he wrote that in the circumstances he could not write a demanding novel: "I was looking for an easy subject... and that was when I got the idea of writing Maigret’s Memoirs. To me, it was something like writing a letter to a friend, and therefore entertaining".[1]
The original French version, Les Mémoires de Maigret, appeared in 1951, and it was first published in Great Britain in 1963.[2] It was included, with Maigret and the Headless Corpse and Maigret and the Saturday Caller, in Maigret Victorious (1975).
It has been described as "a book about writing, about distinctions between art and reality: a fictional character talks about himself as though he were real, and the real author is introduced as a character in this fiction".[2]