Les 13 énigmes

by Georges Simenon

Nouvelles figurant dans le recueil :

Le château des disparus
Le chien jaune
Le corps disparu
Le drame de Dunkerque
L'esprit déménageur
« G 7 »
Hans Peter
L'homme tatoué
L'incendie du parc Monceau
L'inconnue d'Étretat
Le mas Costefigues
Le naufrage du Catherine
Le secret de fort Bayard

Genres: France

155 pages, Pocket Book

Published September 21, 2005

About the author

Georges Joseph Christian Simenon (1903 – 1989) was a Belgian writer. A prolific author who published nearly 500 novels and numerous short works, Simenon is best known as the creator of the fictional detective Jules Maigret.
Although he never resided in Belgium after 1922, he remained a Belgian citizen throughout his life.

Simenon was one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century, capable of writing 60 to 80 pages per day. His oeuvre includes nearly 200 novels, over 150 novellas, several autobiographical works, numerous articles, and scores of pulp novels written under more than two dozen pseudonyms. Altogether, about 550 million copies of his works have been printed.

He is best known, however, for his 75 novels and 28 short stories featuring Commissaire Maigret. The first novel in the series, Pietr-le-Letton, appeared in 1931; the last one, Maigret et M. Charles, was published in 1972. The Maigret novels were translated into all major languages and several of them were turned into films and radio plays. Two television series (1960-63 and 1992-93) have been made in Great Britain.

During his "American" period, Simenon reached the height of his creative powers, and several novels of those years were inspired by the context in which they were written (Trois chambres à Manhattan (1946), Maigret à New York (1947), Maigret se fâche (1947)).

Simenon also wrote a large number of "psychological novels", such as La neige était sale (1948) or Le fils (1957), as well as several autobiographical works, in particular Je me souviens (1945), Pedigree (1948), Mémoires intimes (1981).

In 1966, Simenon was given the MWA's highest honor, the Grand Master Award.

In 2005 he was nominated for the title of De Grootste Belg (The Greatest Belgian). In the Flemish version he ended 77th place. In the Walloon version he ended 10th place.

Reviews

[Ann · Rating 2 out of 5]

Les 13 enigmes

This is a thin volume of 13 short stories, written by Georges Simenon in the late 1920s, early 1930s. They represent 13 small enigmas, solved by a police inspector nicknamed G.7, and the narrator, whose qualifications for detection work seem to consist only of his friendship with G.7 and his willingness to accompany him anywhere in France at the drop of a hat. The influence of Sherlock Holmes is unmistakable. Not only is the narrator the goofy foil to a brilliant detective, but the detective himself is able to make the most surprising (and correct) deductions based on a few meager clues. The difference is that where Sherlock Holmes relied heavily on physical evidence, G.7 seems to be able to sniff out the psychological characteristics of the crime, and thus figure out who is the guilty party. In this, these stories are forerunners to the Inspector Maigret novels, which are unsurpassed in their ability to evoke a milieu, an atmosphere, a dysfunctional family dynamic, in a few sentences.

In these stories, G.7 is typically sent from Paris to some village or other in France, to solve a mystery that has had the local gendarme baffled. After a cursory inspection of the crime scene and a few short interviews with witnesses, he is able to make a pronouncement as to the culprit. The stories are highly unlikely and involve a wave of violence in a mountain village, a theft in a seaside villa, a case of unclear identity, a fraudulent shipwreck and a kidnapped child, and are never more than a few pages long. Tension is absent, except in the form of the nameless narrator being baffled by the crime and impatient for G.7 to produce his oracle-like pronouncements. I think that by modern standards, this book is rather boring. But it is interesting for admirers of Simenon, to see how his style and plotting evolved from his earliest days as a fiction writer, to the characteristic tone of the Maigret novels.

[Antonio Ippolito · Rating 3 out of 5]

Raccolta pubblicata nel ’32 di brevi racconti pubblicati negli anni precedenti ancora come Georges Sim: probabilmente “Tredici qualcosa” era una formula editoriale di successo e quindi abbiamo i Tredici colpevoli, ecc..
È una lettura più che piacevole ma che consiglierei solo ai completisti di Simenon: molti racconti sono quasi bozze, soggetti che meriterebbero di essere arricchiti e rimpolpati. Il filo conduttore è il narratore, si presume un giornalista, che nella prima storia fa fortunosamente amicizia con il poliziotto detto “G17” e che da allora lo accompagna in inchieste che avvengono un po’ in tutte la Francia, per decantarne le fulminee capacità deduttive: molto Sherlock Holmes e Watson, insomma.
Un embrione di Maigret c’è già, però, nel modo in cui G17 si immedesima nei sospetti per capirne il movente, non solo sulla base di indizi esteriori come fa Holmes.
Soprattutto, i racconti più interessanti ricordano il Maupassant più allucinato (Maupassant è a mio parere uno dei modelli di Simenon): Le chien jaune con questa leggendaria bestia notturna e la descrizione della vita degradata del bracconiere, L’homme tatoué con un aristocratico che viene ipnotizzato mentre è sonnambulo (perchè l’ipnosi sia più potente!) e poi condizionato a cambiare identità; soprattutto l’allucinante Secret du fort Bayard (non a caso nel suggestivo forte è stata ambientata per anni una trasmissione televisiva francese di successo), dove una bambina viene rapita e segregata a vita da un uomo, solo per essere così abusata a lungo da un altro, peraltro ottimo padre di famiglia.. storia che come il Conte di Montecristo si basa su premesse improbabili, che però hanno l’effetto di darle la potenza del fantastico.
(il racconto Le chien jaune non ha nulla a che vedere con l’omonimo romanzo)

[Job de Kogel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mildly interesting whodunit stories. I hated the ones with anti-roma and antisemitic undertones

[Léa · Rating 3 out of 5]

J'ai beaucoup aimé l'ambiance et la simplicité de la narration !