The author of about 500 books, most of them written in less than a fortnight, including nearly 80 Inspector Maigret volumes and over 100 romans durs or “hard novels”, Georges Simenon began keeping notebooks in 1960, when he was nearing 60 and beginning to feel old. The three volumes that are published here run from June of that year up to February 1963. By December 1969, when he wrote the preface to the book, he was able to declare: “I have not felt old for a long time. I no longer feel the need to write in notebooks, and those that I did not use I’ve given to my children.”
Why Simenon wrote the notebooks when he did is not entirely clear. At first, they may have been intended principally as family reading. He writes that he wanted to show his children their father as he really was – an ordinary human being with normal human foibles. He also mentions that he was finding it increasingly difficult to achieve the concentration required to produce his novels: whereas he used to write them (the popular novels, at least) in three or four days, then 12 a year (at the time of the Maigrets), then six a year, “Now it is down to four.” Incredibly, Simenon may have been suffering from a form of writer’s block. Producing the notebooks may have served to distract him from this condition.
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