It would give you a feeling of superiority. As he later observed: “It must be great to belong to a group, a nation, a class. “Under occupation,” he wrote, “your overwhelming concern is with what you will eat.” Simenon’s background, and his lifelong feeling that he was disliked by his mother, left him with the aim of developing, equally as a writer and as a man, a wholly undeluded view of life. In Belgium, few people fostered illusions about national greatness. In fact, he was Belgian, born in Liège in 1903 and brought up in a poorly defined country that had often suffered under occupation.

It’s symptomatic of our misunderstanding of the unique Georges Simenon that so many people believe he was French. Rupert Davies as Maigret in the BBC TV series, 1964. The popular joke in Le Canard enchaîné that “M Simenon makes his living by killing someone every month and then discovering the murderer” seemed nothing more than that. These books belonged more alongside Camus and Sartre than Arthur Conan Doyle. But when I discovered that the author of the Maigret series – which I knew chiefly through the BBC television series with Rupert Davies – was also the author of stand-alone novels, my expectations of the genre changed and expanded. By then I had already graduated from Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers to Dashiell Hammett and the chill ambiguity of Patricia Highsmith. It had never occurred to me that thrillers were anything less. When, at university, I came across WH Auden’s suggestion that Raymond Chandler’s books “should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art”, I was bewildered. My taste in literary fiction – I read every word of Patrick Hamilton and Graham Greene – was towards those authors whose techniques most closely resembled those of thriller writers.

Anyone could create a mystery, but only the best could summon up a world in which the mystery could take root. A strong sense of time and place was far more exciting than a clever puzzle. Crime writing came to life when it had density, when you felt that the paint was being laid on thick. Even then I had noticed that stories supposedly driven by narrative depended for their real vitality on establishing ambience. L ike many bookish children, I grew up consuming detective fiction more than any other kind.

The widow simenon