It’s the birthday of the insanely prolific Belgian-French novelist Georges Simenon, best known for creating Inspector Maigret, featured in no fewer than 84 detective novels. Simenon wrote roughly 200 pulp novels pseudonymously and more than 200 more serious novels, making him probably the most widely published author of the last century, and could write a novel in 10 days. (Seriously, I’m not even sure I could retype someone else’s novel in 10 days, and I’m a fast typist.)

Simenon was born in 1903 in Liege, Belgium, where he attended a Jesuit school. His father died too young; his mother, a harsh and unloving woman, not young enough. Simenon wrote his first novel at 16 and moved to Paris at 19, where he began cranking out novellas. By then he was already married to his first wife, Regine Renchon; they had a son but divorced in 1949, possibly because Simenon had been romantically involved with a family servant for many years, in addition to tons of liaisons with other women (many/most of them prostitutes). That thing Simenon did, producing loads of books? He did the same thing with affairs, only more so, claiming later in life to have slept with 10,000 women, though his second wife, Denyse Ouimet, said it was probably only about 1,200. (Doesn’t this make his literary output all the more impressive? How did he find the *time*?) He married Denyse in 1950, had three children with her, and they separated in 1964.

Simenon began his first Maigret novel,  Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett (or Pietr-le-Letton) in his late twenties while traveling in The Netherlands. Maigret was unique among literary detectives for not being an eccentric genius; a staid, confirmed family man, Maigret focuses his energies on studying people and faces rather than more traditional clues, and the books are known for their psychological insights. My Friend Maigret is sometimes called the best of the Maigret novels. But Simenon regretted that his reputation came to rest so heavily on his detective novels; he wanted to be known for his more serious efforts, such as The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By (1938), Pedigree (1948), and Dirty Snow (1948), a dark portrait of a young killer in German-occupied France. At least one critic has called these “among the best novels of the twentieth century” (Joan Acocella, “Crime Pays,” The New Yorker, Oct. 10, 2011).

Simenon changed residences more than 30 times in his life; he lived in the U.S. for 10 years starting in 1945, later returning to France and Switzerland. He retired near Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1973. His only daughter committed suicide in 1978 at the age of twenty-five after years of suffering from mental illness. Simenon died in his sleep on September 4, 1989. According to his obituary in the New York Times, he had said, “I don’t fear death, but I fear causing trouble by my death to those who survive me. I would like to die as discreetly as possible.”

Have a very pleasant Tuesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.