man of mystery

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

the lady killer

Masako Togawa, author, actress and chanteuse, was born in Tokyo in 1933 and it appears she will be rounding age eighty in March of this year.  (Imdb.com cites a birth year of 1931, but Wikipedia counters with 1933 -- whichever may be true, continued health and happiness to her.)  Among Togawa's novels is the mystery The Lady Killer, nominated for Japan's Naoki Prize when it first came out in 1963.  This is a twisted tale, and one that I found especially enjoyable since I'm a fan of things Japanese -- I kept visualizing it as a Japanese new wave film like Pale Flower or Crazed Fruit.  And an old 1989 item from the L.A. Times notes how The Lady Killer was once slated for filmdom, but it doesn't seem that this ever came to be:

Lewis B. Chesler, executive producer and creator of pay-TV's "The Hitchhiker," has purchased film rights to 1963 Japanese novel, "The Lady Killer" by Masako Togawa, a highly controversial and erotic thriller that dealt with role of women in that society. Screenwriter Robert J. Avrech ("Body Double") will adapt the book, and Carl Schenkel ("The Mighty Quinn") will direct. "Crimson Cabaret," the title of the film version, will film in Japan and possibly Hong Kong this spring. . . .

Well, that's a shame.  The 1985 Dodd Mead American edition was translated from the original Japanese by Simon Grove, who seems to have done an excellent job in keeping the cultural backdrop and tone of early 1960s Tokyo while also maintaining the intrigue of the plot.