Safe Return Doubtful

translated from the French (Belgium) by Lynne Muir – published 1969

The Prison begins like a conventional murder mystery. After the opening we might expect Maigret to come through the door, but this is one of Simenon’s short and often brilliant, psychological novels.

Alain is a successful publisher of a popular Paris magazine called Toi. He returns home one autumnal evening after a busy day of harassing his young female employees and downing double whiskies to be met at the elevator door by a detective. He’s an unpleasant piece of work.

Alain’s wife Kitten, a freelance writer, has shot and killed her sister Adrienne, but refuses to say why. After a grim police interrogation, typical of the great writer in the sense of personal despair he associates with crime, Alain’s story turns into the complex deconstruction of a man who seemed to have everything, but without a thought about the other people around him.

This is the bitter destruction of one of the wealthy and powerful elite of Paris. The prison of the title isn’t the one that holds Kitten, it is of Alain’s life of using and then discarding those who come in contact him, and, in Simenon’s mind, he must be punished.

In the haste of telling the tale Simenon misses much that other writers would dwell on, nuance, character detail. But at the same time this is the appeal of his work, common values, conventional wisdom.

This is a great example of his psychological novels, not his best, but solid entertainment. It made me think of how it would read though, if those things he leaves out were to be included..

My GoodReads score 4 / 5