Death of a butcher

A couple of days ago we failed to find anything to watch in the foothills of Freeview, that is to say up to about channel 50, and decided to push on. On this occasion we were lucky, turning up a Rupert Davies Maigret story somewhere around channel 82. Which we thought would do fine, having watched a couple of them before, back in August 2020.

Oddly, I can find no documentary trace of those watchings, beyond a something in an email about how the Gambon version seemed to have been built on the Davies version. Plus just the one mention of Rupert Davies in an annex to something not presently relevant. I would have thought that I would have made more of them. Perhaps I meant to and never got around to it.

Also oddly, although I have read the whole of the Maigret oeuvre at least twice, this watching failed to revive any memory of the story. Working through the titles on the spines on the shelf didn’t help either and I was reduced to asking Bing who turned up the IMDB page at reference 2, from where I got to reference 3. And then to reference 4 which demonstrated that in October 2017 I still remembered the original story.

Which, in sum, is about a very important and very unpleasant wholesale butcher based in Paris – say Dewhurst and the rest – who fears for his life, goes to the police but gets killed anyway, shot down in his own house. A chap Maigret had known as an unpleasant child from an unpleasant family, back in his native village, near Moulins. Maigret and his team run around for a bit, eventually he has the ‘aha’ moment and tracks the killer down to his hideout in the woods, that is to say, Maigret’s natal woods.

There is counterpoint in the form of a minor story line about an older lady from Kilburn Lane disappearing from a package holiday to Paris, a disappearance which attracts plenty of coverage in the French press. And comment from the UK press about the useless French police.

I puzzled about the original running time of 50 min, which seems a rather odd number for the BBC, which did not need to make space for advertisements. With the channel 82 version running, I think, to 65 minutes with advertisements. Perhaps, even all those years ago, BBC had the commercial market in mind?

Notwithstanding all of which, we rather liked it and I stick with my line that the Gambon version was built on the Davies version. Next stop, the original text, something under 140 pages of it, roughly three pages to the minute. I forget the sort of rates that one gets with Agatha adaptations. In any event, now read again.

The television version had certainly simplified things a bit. We got much less, for example, of all the tittle tattle from the half dozen servants – who sleep above what used to be the stables of the big butcher’s fancy house opposite the Parc Monceau. How the big butcher treats both his staff and employees very badly. He enjoys humiliating them. His private secretary, for instance, is brigaded with the domestic servants. While they, in return, are mostly stealing from him, in one way or another. How he treats his competitors even more badly. How he is a rapacious, self-made man of business, stealing, more or less, on a far grander scale. Morally responsible for at least two deaths, probably more.

In the written version also, we have a thinly veiled bit of anti-Semitism in the form of the butcher’s shady man of business, one Joseph Goldman, who lives at the top of house and who is able, inter alia, to draw a veil of legality over his less wholesome dealings. Being a post-war story, slightly more veiled than similar characters in pre-war stories.

But the television version has changed the shape of the thing. In the television version, we have just another crime that Maigret solves in his usual inimitable way. In the written version, the point is that Maigret doesn’t stop the killing and doesn’t even solve the murder in time to stop the killer fleeing the country. Maigret worries that he has let his dislike of the man get in the way of doing the job. And the killer only turns up by chance, years later, dying of some tropical disease in the prison hospital before he can be brought to trial. While the lady also turns up, again quite by chance, alive and well in Australia. Two of Maigret’s few recorded failures.

Some odds and ends

On more or less the first page, we have a dreary mid morning in March being described as being like that of an execution at first light: ‘une aube d’execution capitale’. Not sure about this, but none of my usual sources are helping on this one.

Simenon has done some of his homework. Kilburn Lane is entirely plausible in the context, a stretch of the B413 running just south of the railway line running between Queen's Park and Kensal Green. West Kilburn in North London. 

While the butcher’s address given near the Parc Monceau, that is to 58bis, Boulevard de Courcelles, is plausible enough, the details given do not compute in Street View, not for me anyway. There has been a bit of artistic license or a bit of redevelopment. Or both. But at least I am a bit clearer about this use of ‘bis’ in house numbers.

The butcher’s safe is an important element of the end of the story. A safe which appears to have both a key and a combination. No reason why it shouldn’t, but it just niggles that the few safes that I have known had either key or combination, but not both.

Another important element is Maigret’s dream, in which he dreams that he has found the key to the mystery. Except that when he wakes up, the key in missing, he is just left with the certainty that he had had it. But he does edge forward, and all of sudden, minutes too late, the key comes back to him. I believe that Simenon read widely in medicine and psychology and was quite possibly familiar with Freud on dreams. Perhaps these few pages were his take on the subject?

There seem to be quite a lot of very forceful, more or less unpleasant, self made men scattered across the Maigret oeuvre. Is Simeon, in this way, in Freudian fashion, unloading unpleasant parts of himself?

Conclusions

Both versions of the story worked and my appetite for Davies has been whetted again. 

I find also that the complete set has now been released on DVD, with ebay asking between £50 and £100 for it. A bit too much – but we shall see. Maybe prices will fall or I will weaken.

References

Reference 1: Death of a butcher – Rupert Davies, BBC – 1961. Season 2, Episode 3.

Reference 2 : https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0853878/. 

Reference 3: Un Échec de Maigret – Simenon – 1956. Volume XIX of the collected works.

Reference 4: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/10/more-irritation.html. 

La jeune morte

Once again, I have been looking at the business of turning a written story into a filmed story, in this case the Maigret story from 1954 at reference 1, turned into the 2022 film at references 2 and 3, a film starring Gérard Depardieu. A story about tracking down the killer of a young girl found late one night in a street in Paris: rue de Vintimille, just below Monmartre. Simenon, as usual, is careful about his Parisian street names. Sometimes confused by the post-war renaming of streets after war heroes of one sort or another.

In all of which, it took me a while to cotton onto the change of the name of the film to ‘Maigret’, which should have warned me that the adaptation was going to be a very loose one.

The story follows the usual Maigret lines, steadily building up her picture of the victim and her life, a process (left in the figure above) which, more or less randomly, provides the clues which unlock the murder (right). Told very much from Maigret’s point of view and while I have not checked, I don’t suppose there are many pages among the 150 or so from which he is missing.

This against the familiar background of Maigret’s home and Maigret’s office. A twist which provides a bit of novelty is the Lognon chase in parallel to the Maigret chase, Lognon being a rather odd chap – nicknamed by all ‘Malgracieux’ – a very good detective but not HQ material and who appears in a number of the Maigret stories. However, right at the end, after a good run, Lognon makes the wrong call and heads off to Brussels. Maigret is the better reader of people!

While the film, while using some of the story, leaves most of it out, filling in with material drawn from other stories – or just invented. Quite a lot of shots of Maigret/Depardieu just pondering.

Mainly filmed in low light using a very muted colour palette, only livened up by the clothes, the food and the table dressing at the two parties, the two pivots on which the film hangs, perhaps from a narrative theory point of view replacing the nine chapters of the story. Two dollops of more or less unnecessary sex: first some improbable nudity around dressing in the dress hire shop; and, second the dodgy sex parties organised by the fiancé of girl 2. Parties which, to be fair, we are told about rather than shown. Sex parties which eventually lead to an accidental death on the stairs – rather than the more old-fashioned robbery gone wrong in the story.

The victim’s father, a career conman with a taste for the good life, the unthinking trigger, as it were, for the chain of events that leads to her death, is missing.

The Lognon angle, important in the story, is missing.

While girl 3 is more or less invented, inter alia a peg on which to hang Maigret’s nostalgia and regret for his long-lost daughter, present in the oeuvre as a whole, but absent from this story. Ditto Maigret’s medical affairs. And he never gives up the pipe; puffer to the end.

There are lots of cuts in the film, lots of short takes, this reflecting the fact that one can make a point visually far faster than one can make the same point in words. Which is all very well, but if there is too much of it one overloads and glazes over. The words run at a more sustainable speed.

But while the narrative of the investigation is rather lost, we do have some continuity with Maigret’s pipe, his home and his office. Continuity which includes various bits and pieces which Maigret buffs will notice but which others may well miss.

Not bad, but all a bit mannered. All too much of a vehicle for Depardieu, who is a bit too old and fat for the role. I prefer the late Gambon.

Oddments

Abebooks might be owned by Amazon but it is clearly not part of the free delivery deal that comes with Prime. See the opening snap.

The film runs to around 90 minutes. Compared with both Davies (1960-63) and Gambon (1992-93) episodes on TV at around 50 minutes. And Atkinson (2016-7) at around 90 minutes. While the story is around 150 small pages.

I was irritated that the police surgeon was conflated with Maigret’s GP in the film. Can’t see such a thing happening, even in the bad old days.

I though that the same shed was used as a taxi drivers garage near the beginning of the film and as a bus garage at the very end, although I have not checked back. A bit cheapskate if true!

I was pleased to see the thedrinksbusiness, missing from RPPL for some months now, was on case back in 2016. See references 4 and 5.

According to something turned up by Bing: ‘Montmartre district in Paris, from Latin Mons Martyrum "Martyrs' Mount," in reference to St. Denis, first bishop of Paris, who was beheaded here with two companions in 258. The older name was Mons Mercurii’. Clear enough from the modern name, but I had never thought of it before.

Checking, I find that Maigret is indeed smoking his pipe in the last story, Maigret et Monsieur Charles (reference 6). I don’t think Simenon ever gave up either, although I dare say he cut down.

I resisted the temptation to turn the takes of the film into an Excel worksheet for statistical analysis. A couple of hours work?

Conclusions

All grist to the mill of how we consume stories and how that consumption reaches consciousness.

A reminder that the business of a film is more to entertain, rather than, in this case, to please Maigret buffs with a careful visualisation of the original story. Also that the world of Paris in the 1940s and 1950s is a lot more alien, a lot more foreign, to today’s young people than it is to people of my own generation. Furthermore, as with Agatha Christie, the stories would have been set more or less in the present as far as the original readership was concerned. Not costume dramas at all.

From where I associate to the misleading saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. Misleading because only true when the viewer has been trained, in one way or another, to read the sort of picture in question – and for that one needs words. Maybe a more accurate, if less catchy, version would be: 'a picture cashes in a thousand words'.

PS: to my surprise ‘cheapskate’ was not in OED, but it did make it to Websters, giving as authority one Frances Williams Browin, a US writer who lived 1898—1986. So it must be a bit of US slang which crept into both the Eustace and the Toller vocabulary somehow.

References

Reference 1: Maigret et la Jeune Morte – Georges Simenon – 1954. The second story in Volume XVIII of the Rencontre edition of 1968.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maigret_(2022_film). 

Reference 3: https://www.jpbox-office.com/fichfilm.php?id=21703.

Reference 4: https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2016/05/gerard-depardieu-resolves-to-give-up-booze/. 

Reference 5: https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/. 

Reference 6: Maigret et Monsieur Charles – Georges Simenon – 1972. The last story in Volume XXVIII of the Rencontre edition of 1973.

Crusher

This day more or less started with a short visit to B&M, a well-stocked place, as already obliquely noticed at reference 4. Lots more stuff than Wilko managed as it was running down.

For the avoidance of doubt, I was probably returning one of their trolleys, rather than shopping.

By the end of September, the demolition of the small block tacked onto the small parade of shops at Waterloo Road had more or less finished. I had been surprised that for this small job, they had thought it worth bringing in a crusher for the rubble - some of which may have gone to fill up a cellar. I guess that is what you get for getting a proper demolition contractor in, rather than some local builder who does demolition on the side. But perhaps that was in the days when you demolished small building like this by hand, stripping out all the wood and then doing the walls by standing on them and swinging the mattock.

The view from the other side. McCarthy & Stone visible behind. Full up, if reference 1 is to be believed.

A stray bicycle at the entrance to Court Recreation Ground.

Last time I looked at them, they had a designated area, which I remember as being central London plus the borough of Kingston. But that seems to have changed, and I have not found anything about area at reference 2, having to resort to Bing to get the snap above. These bikes do seem to be creeping nearer to Epsom. There is also a mechanism for fining you if you park badly, but I have not found out how exactly that works.

The first time I came across one of their bikes out of area was noticed three years ago at reference 3 - when they were called humanforest.

Along the way, I came across this sturdy bag, clean and decent but abandoned. Just the thing for taking into the Wigmore Hall and suchlike places. It has, as it happens, already seen one trip into town.

Home to the second showing for the 16oz brew of lentils noticed recently.

Washed down with apples from a little way up north, served with cloves. Unusually entire, which is hard to achieve with the cooking apples you get from Sainsbury's, probably some kind of (bright green) Bramley, if achievable at all.

PS: as it happens, a crusher has quite a big place in the Maigret story I am rereading at the moment, reference 5, in an effort to try and puzzle out what was going on. Having read the story two or three times over the years and having watched the Rupert Davies version ('The Golden Fleece') twice, I was still having trouble with it.

The crusher - concasseur - is by the side of the canal - or perhaps the Seine - where the barge tycoon has his house, on top of the job, as it were, one of several crushers that he owns. For crushing rock - perhaps chalk - that he has had brought down from his quarries up-river. According to Littré a machine for grinding up animal feed, but for Larousse and Simenon, a noisy machine for grinding up rock.

And talking of animals, there is some talk of the some of the barges being horse drawn, with such horses featuring in at least one of the earlier Maigret stories. The days when tow paths were just that.

Incidentally, the last of the first cycle of Maigret stories, with him taking early retirement a few days after the end of this one. But he comes back to life after a bit of a pause of getting on for ten years, but Simenon does not really get into gear with Maigret again until the late 1940s. It may have irritated him to have to keep pumping out these pot-boilers when he had his sights on higher things, like the Nobel Prize. Still, needs must.

Could horses have pulled the barge in the snap? Along the level, granted, but it still looks pretty big to me. On the other hand, you stabled the horses in the middle of the barge, so it must have been fairly big; not one of our narrow boats at all. To think that we used to have a canal boat buff at TB and he could probably have told me all about such things.

References

Reference 1: https://www.mccarthyandstone.co.uk/.

Reference 2: https://www.forest.me/. I think I liked it better when one knew what the suffices meant, rather than being a vehicle for a bit of marketing.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/11/sundays-snaps.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/10/kingston.html.

Reference 5: L'Écluse No.1 - Georges Simenon - 1933. Story 2, Volume V of the collected Maigret. Rencontre.

Signé Picpus

Yesterday evening we happened to watch Rupert Davies in the ancient BBC version of Signé Picpus, a Maigret story which references 2 and 3 suggest that I have read at least twice before. I may have nodded off a bit, but we got to the end and I had not got much of a clue about what I had just seen. I was able to reconstruct the beginning and the end, but there seemed to be a large hole in the middle. So I turned up the hard copy to try and fill some of the gaps.

In the meantime, the story remains that I rather like these old adaptations, made at a time when Simenon was still around - and while the producers like to slap on the Parisian colour, the stories had not yet become the costume dramas they have become since. Just an hour long, which suits quite well these days, two hours being quite a chunk out of an evening. Someone has got around to issuing the whole lot on DVD, but at £60 or so, I have not yet fallen - although a £1 an episode, £1 for an hour's entertainment is not that bad. Less than I often pay. However, with a new smart telly on the horizon, we shall wait and see whether Britbox can do the business.

Puzzle 1. One bit they seemed to have got wrong was translating 'tanche' as roach, which I understood to be a small fish which you might catch in a  net and fry like whitebait. Whereas Collins is quite clear that a tanche is a tench, a fish which can grow to more than half a metre in length, which likes still, turbid water and which can be eaten - although is not much eaten these days. People not hungry enough. Which does not seem quite right, so checking further, I find that I was wrong about roach, which turn out to be a common river fish, ranging in size up to around half a metre, smaller than the tench but presumably quite eatable. Perhaps the BBC translator thought that tench was a mistake, that for once Simenon had been a bit careless about his river facts, and settled for roach instead.

The French for this sort of roach being a 'gardon', with Littré describing it as a small freshwater fish.

And maybe I will get to the pike of references 2 and 3 in due course.

Puzzle 2. Simeon makes quite a lot of the recreational scene on the rivers to the east of Paris, particularly the Seine and the Marne. Lots of riverside bars, al fresco dancings, restaurants, villas and hotels. The weekend scene for lots of Parisians through the middle part of the year. Lots of bridge and goings on. And this BBC adaptation evokes the sort of thing that comes to my mind rather well.

However, when I ask Bing about 'riverside hotels marne isle de france', all he seems to be able to manage is a whole load of hotel booking sites. No real attempt to parse the query, to do what I asked for at all - something that irritates me when I am looking for a hotel in this country. Google does slightly better and turns up references 4 and 5, a bit grander than the sort of thing that I had in mind, but at least the hotel is on the river, even if the river is a tributary of the Marne rather than the Marne proper. While the snap above is the right river and there are what might be weekend homes on the other side, but not much in the way of hotels and restaurants. Maybe Parisians don't do that any more.

But the puzzle is, why don't we do the river scene much at all? I suppose there is a bit out Henley way, but that is for toffs and bankers. All a bit fancy, rather than ordinary Londoners out on a beano. Maybe Hampton Court was a bit nearer the mark fifty years ago.

Is the answer all to do with the fact that we are much cooler and that we are a small island? So we tend to do seaside, with Londoners of old flocking to places like Southend, Margate and Brighton. Seaside hotels, gin palaces and piers. Met the same need, but met it in a proper English way. None of this French nonsense.

PS: while I was posting this, an email turned up from the ancient tree people at reference 6. People in whom I might take a serious interest if I lived a bit nearer. Today, inter alia, they advertise the work of a photographer called Beth Moon, also into ancient trees. But she seems to have protected her copyright very carefully, with very little in the way of good quality reproductions of her photographs having leaked out to the free part of the Internet. Not like people of her sort in this country at all, who mostly let out a good number of tasters. I think the snap above was taken from the foot of a very old Wellingtonia, or giant redwood as they have it in the US.

References

Reference 1: Signé Picpus - Simenon - 1941. Volume XI of the collected works.

Reference 2: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/11/pike.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/02/picpus.html.

Reference 4: https://www.le-moulin-de-pommeuse.com/.

Reference 5: https://www.le-moulin-de-pommeuse.com/le-parc/. The pictures.

Reference 6: https://www.ancienttreearchive.org/.