All in all, my favourite 20th-century novelist. “So noir he makes Raymond Chandler look beige”, as one reviewer said 
All his books are set in Purgatory. Hardcore French existentialism without ever being boring (Camus) or pompous (Sartre). Though they’re also never funny - the achievement of a funny existentialism belongs only to Beckett
Things that make Simenon’s novels so good: a spare, impassive prose style; a minimal cast of characters; a brooding and vivid atmosphere; murder; human motives that remain ambiguous; a seemingly random act of freedom tied to a powerful sense of fate & inevitability
His novels would be tragedies if you cared about any of his characters. But you never do. He has not a single lovable character. You view them more with the fascination of something in a laboratory. Yet that fascination is utterly absorbing and even thrilling
The page-turning quality comes from this psychological fascination. From nearly the first page, Simenon has pinned his character to the board and you can’t wait to see what will happen to him next: his inner life as well as his external fate
I acknowledge that these novels might not be good for the soul: how could they be? Yet for sheer enjoyment, for the peculiar thrill of turning the pages and watching a human character slowly implode, I would choose Simenon over all other modern novelists
