Georges Simenon

Born in Liège in 1903, Simenon spent his twenties in France churning out pulp under pseudonyms before creating Jules Maigret in the early thirties - a detective who made him wealthy and famous across Europe. But he refused to be only a crime writer: his romans durs, stripped-down studies of ordinary people cracking under pressure, won over Gide, Mauriac, and critics who saw something colder and truer than the whodunits. He moved restlessly - France until 1945, the United States for a decade, then Switzerland - and mined his own life relentlessly: a Liège childhood, war years, failed marriages, countless affairs. By the time he died in 1989, he'd published under his own name alone enough novels to fill a small library, each one tuned to the bleak frequency of people trapped by circumstance and themselves.