Man in trhe Moon

Man in the Moon

TROPIC MOON--Georges Simenon--Harcourt, Brace ($2).

This book is called by its publishers the first "mature" novel by France's most famed detective-story writer, the creator of Inspector Maigret. Hot melodrama would be a better term for it. A young, naive Frenchman, Joseph Timar, goes out to work at the Equatorial African trading post of Libreville. At the town's only hotel, he stares at the grinning masks on the walls, cranks up a phonograph with a big, old-fashioned horn, drinks his first "peg" of whiskey and feels like a young rakehell. The feeling increases when Proprietress Adele comes to wake him, wearing her usual black silk dress and no underclothing. Mutual captivation follows instantly.

Within a few days Timar is happily forgetful of his job, drinking heavily, scorning Adele's obese, mouching husband. And then comes sudden death--to Adऑe's husband by fever, to a Negro waiter by an unknown hand. Adele is calm as ever, boxes up her husband without a tear and persuades the infatuated Timar to use his uncle's influence to get them a partnership trading concession in the back country.

But things crop up to disturb Timar's sodden conscience. As they travel to their new home, Adele disappears for hours to parley with a native chief. Then she suddenly goes back to Libreville, begging Timar to wait patiently till she returns. But the lonely Timar has learned that Adele herself killed the native waiter, who had seen her leaving Timar's bedroom and threatened blackmail. He has also found that her parleys with the native chief were to bribe him to fix the murder on an innocent tribesman. She has gone to Libreville to spend the night with the Governor and put him in a good mood for the trial. Deftly, coolly, Author Simenon makes the finale a freezing picture of a colonial court in action. When Timar hurries to court to denounce his mistress, a trader informs him: "Out here white folk hang together." In a farcical trial the framed Negro is left to his fate. Timar, half-crazy with his experience, is shipped blathering back to France.

At 39, Georges Simenon, last heard from in Occupied France, has to his credit the staggering total of approximately 300 novels. Most of them reflect his nonchalant ability to record in short, spare sentences the everyday life of Frenchmen of every class and type. Built up out of thousands of small incidents, Simenon's novels never fail to show a "customary air of slow-motion absent-mindedness." But they were written--usually on his canal boat Ostrogoth)--at rates varying from four days to one month per novel. Says Simenon: "I get up at half-past five; go on deck; start typing at six, with either a bottle of brandy or white wine at my side; and write a chapter an hour until noon, when I go on land and lie down in the grass, exhausted."

Simenon was born in Liege, Belgium. His real name is Georges Sim. His books, written under 16 pseudonyms, have been translated into 18 languages. To satisfy his public's passionate curiosity, Simenon started one novel in a glass cage. His friends are crooks and cops. As sleuthing reporter for Paris Soir, Simenon is credited with breaking the famous Stavisky scandal. In the same year (1934) 600,000 copies of Simenon novels were sold.

Simenon and his Inspector Maigret are interested not so much in crime as in the life and mind of the criminal. Many of Simenon's wildest admirers are intellectuals (Katherine Anne Porter, Mark Van Doren, John Peale Bishop, Deems Taylor, Count Keyserling, the late Constance Rourke). Onetime French Premier Aristide Briand traveled to meetings of the League of Nations reading Simenon.

Simenon's U.S. publishers have printed up a special Simenon letterhead, covered with names of his cultured fans, and created a Simenon cocktail--which has exactly the same ingredients as a Dry Martini. But the great American public has taught the intellectuals a lesson in critical restraint. The last seven volumes of Simenon's novels published in the U.S. have had average sales of only 5,000 copies apiece.

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