Are you a fan of unflappable pipe-smoking French detective Jules Maigret? Georges Simenon, the Belgian mind and man behind the sleuth was born today in 1903 (d. 1989) -- and perhaps having a birthdate on the cusp of Valentine's Day gave him special powers involving the opposite sex, as he claimed to have had some 10,000 female lovers throughout his lifetime. (Reportedly many of these were prostitutes but maybe he just considered it like going to Starbucks every morning.) With such a busy extracurricular schedule, it's a wonder that he found enough time to peck away at the typewriter as well and write his literal hundreds of novels, but it seems that from sheer determination, focus, organization and a realistic scope of what he wanted to put into a literary work, he managed to get it all done.
The idea condition for the reader is to have time to read a whole book in one evening. ** Georges Simenon,
"Chez Simenon" -- NY Times, Oct. 24, 1971
