The Cat by Georges Simenon review – Maigret author’s tale of a toxic marriage

The Belgian author’s genius comes to the fore in a dark domestic drama

The more one reads of Georges Simenon, the stranger the writer and his writings become. His novels, most of them composed in& a week or two, are simple, straightforward, shallow-seeming even, but below the surface lie dark and fathomless depths.

Many readers will know him as the& creator of Commissioner Jules Maigret& of the Paris Police Judiciaire, the most unpretentious, humane and convincing of the great fictional detectives. However, his finest work is& to be found in what he called his romans durs, or hard novels, including such masterpieces as Dirty Snow, Monsieur Monde Vanishes and the jauntily horrifying The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By. Now, Penguin Classics has launched a series& of 20 of the romans durs in new translations, starting with The Cat, originally published in French in 1967.