He also wrote for various scandal sheets, some of which made money by quashing negative stories for a fee. He worked for a local newspaper after World War I, which gave him entry into the city’s nightlife and criminal milieu. Simenon was born in the Belgian city of Liège in 1903 into a French speaking lower middle-class family. I will not give too many more details about the plot, except to say that murder is just the start of Frank’s exploration into the depravity he is capable of. Obsessing over whether Holst will report him to the authorities, Frank becomes infatuated with the tram driver’s shy 16-year-old daughter.
Frank kills the man without remorse but is seen by a passing tram driver, Holst, who dwells in the apartment opposite his mother’s. One night, in a kind of existential wager with himself, he borrows a knife from a brutal big talking gangster who frequents the same dive bar as Frank, and picks a target, a low-ranking policeman who may also be a collaborator. Having already come of age sexually, Frank is intent on embracing another milestone, knowing what it is like to kill a man.
It is not clear who works for ‘the occupiers’, as the Germans are only ever referred to, who is resistance, and who is simply trying to survive. The world outside their apartment is a bleak urban landscape in the grip of a seemingly never-ending winter, imbued with constant paranoia and suspicion. He is never short of food, most of which his mother procures on the black market, nor sex, which he gets from the girls in his mother’s employ, nearly all of whom have been forced by the war from rural areas into the city and left with no alternative but to sell their bodies to survive. Frank lives with his mother, who runs a brothel out of their apartment. My introduction to Simenon’s romans durs was what some claim is his best book, The Snow was Dirty or Dirty Snow as it is known in the United States, an uncompromisingly bleak noir tale of a 19-year-old amoral pimp, Frank, in an unspecified European city under Nazi occupation.
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