Liège
“Encounter” with Simenon, a detective literary
Popular novelist Georges Simenon is best known for his books about Maigret, a police inspector in the criminal investigation division of the Paris Police Department.
I read numerous volumes of Simenon detective fiction when I was a teenager. It was similar when I was younger. One gets to “meet” him by middle age. Actually, it wasn’t until July of that year, when I was on my third visit to relatives in Liège, that I was able to see his bronze statue on a stone bench.
Wearing a coat and a felt hat, he sat there in the warm summer sun with his right hand resting on the armrest of a stone bench—the kind of long bench that is frequently seen in parks—and his left hand clutching the pipe that was so familiar from Inspector Maigret’s novels. There is a bronze plaque on the ground in front of the monument that has lines on it that explain why the statue was put up.
The statue was made to honor a notable son of this Belgian city and was sculpted by Roger Lenertz. It is a life-size bronze statue that was placed in February 2004 close to a police station and his childhood home.
The statue was vandalized in September 2013, according to one of my relatives who lives here. Someone brought a statue of a woman and positioned it in a difficult-to-see spot directly in the Simenon statue’s lap.
Following the period of social isolation brought on by the Covid-19 epidemic, my uncle said on, “Visitors to Liège are still sparse; the square of Inspector Maigret is not yet crowded.” As a result, not many people take seats close to the Simenon statue.
When I first arrived here, I saw that the statue of Simenon appeared to be a person reflecting on the events of the previous days in the open area of the square called “Maigret Square,” which is named after the protagonist of the well-known detective series he wrote.
Those who are leisurely can sit next to it, relax, or think about the stories he wrote about the elderly Maigret. I also sat like that when I visited family in Liège for the third time, requesting an uncle to snap some photos, but those photos have long since vanished.
The protagonist of Simenon’s detective novels is Maigret, who lives in glitzy, busy, crime-ridden Paris rather than the peaceful, low-crime city of Liège.
Located in the eastern region of Belgium, Liège is a tiny city near the Meuse River that is home to over 200,000 French-speaking people. Originally an industrial city that started to deteriorate in the 1960s, Liège now mainly thrives because of its river port, airport, high-speed rail line, and vast road system.
After working as a reporter for a while, Simenon left his village to begin his career in Paris, which was some 370 kilometers distant by road, in 1922, just before his 20th birthday. Then he rose to fame in one of Europe’s liveliest cities.
The archives show that Simenon, a writer of Belgian descent, wrote rapidly and with great passion. Despite not being a writer, I am unable to write rapidly; in fact, I write extremely slowly. Since I retired, I’ve had more free time, which has allowed me to write a little more quickly in recent years.
According to legend, Simenon could complete a novel in under seven days. He actually once accepted a challenge in the beginning of 1927: writing a novel rapidly while seated in a glass cage in front of the public. However, he was unsuccessful.
It’s easy to understand: how can someone create phrases like that when writing is a solitary job that is exposed to the public? Nonetheless, admirers continue to think about the glass prison story.
