I am reading “Maigret at the Coroner’s” at the moment, a postwar Maigret written by Simenon when he was living in Tucson.
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I am reading “Maigret at the Coroner’s” at the moment, a postwar Maigret written by Simenon when he was living in Tucson.
The book is also set in Tucson, with Maigret supposedly on a US study tour.
Simenon had left France for America after having been accused, then cleared, of collaborating (he had sold some film rights to a Nazi studio).
The main themes of the book so far are, Maigret fucking hates Tucson, Maigret fucking hates Americans, and Americans drink too much.
Simenon used to dash Maigret novels off very quickly, usually in a week or so. This often makes for a nice pacey, concise story, but it also means that his mood can shine through pretty clearly.
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I am reading “Maigret at the Coroner’s” at the moment, a postwar Maigret written by Simenon when he was living in Tucson.
The book is also set in Tucson, with Maigret supposedly on a US study tour.
Simenon had left France for America after having been accused, then cleared, of collaborating (he had sold some film rights to a Nazi studio).
The main themes of the book so far are, Maigret fucking hates Tucson, Maigret fucking hates Americans, and Americans drink too much.
Bizarrely, it's "Tucson."
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Bizarrely, it's "Tucson."
@stevegis_ssg Ta.
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Simenon used to dash Maigret novels off very quickly, usually in a week or so. This often makes for a nice pacey, concise story, but it also means that his mood can shine through pretty clearly.
Philip K. Dick wrote all his sci-fi on deadline and on spec. He would agonize over the early parts and then as the deadline approached he would bang out some kind of deus ex machina ending in the grip of amphetamine psychosis. Once you know this, you can pretty clearly see exactly when he stopped sleeping in each one.
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Simenon used to dash Maigret novels off very quickly, usually in a week or so. This often makes for a nice pacey, concise story, but it also means that his mood can shine through pretty clearly.
As I have mentioned before, there is SO much drinking in Maigret novels and a weirdly French and dated attitude to alcohol.
Everyone drinks all the time, including police, on duty, in the mornings. But some people are still regarded as drunks.
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As I have mentioned before, there is SO much drinking in Maigret novels and a weirdly French and dated attitude to alcohol.
Everyone drinks all the time, including police, on duty, in the mornings. But some people are still regarded as drunks.
@Nickiquote Well that just sounds like real life.
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Simenon used to dash Maigret novels off very quickly, usually in a week or so. This often makes for a nice pacey, concise story, but it also means that his mood can shine through pretty clearly.
@Nickiquote Two weeks for a novel, ha? Films based on them seem to drag just as long

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As I have mentioned before, there is SO much drinking in Maigret novels and a weirdly French and dated attitude to alcohol.
Everyone drinks all the time, including police, on duty, in the mornings. But some people are still regarded as drunks.
@Nickiquote The problem isn't the drinking, it's not being able to handle as much as you've drunk. My mother is French, this is more or less how she feels about alcohol.
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@Nickiquote The problem isn't the drinking, it's not being able to handle as much as you've drunk. My mother is French, this is more or less how she feels about alcohol.
@AnarchoNinaWrites This seems to be it, yep.
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Philip K. Dick wrote all his sci-fi on deadline and on spec. He would agonize over the early parts and then as the deadline approached he would bang out some kind of deus ex machina ending in the grip of amphetamine psychosis. Once you know this, you can pretty clearly see exactly when he stopped sleeping in each one.
@stevegis_ssg @Nickiquote One of my favourite authors (most don't know her, Margit Sandemo, she wrote supernatural historic fiction back in the 80s originally) wrote her largest series (70-something books, starting in the 1500s, ending in the 1960s, with flashbacks to something like the 1100s ...) where she had a deadline for each.
You can tell which she didn't have much of a plot for, because as the plot went down, the sexings went up >.> (also it got decidedly wilder through the books, but ...)
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Philip K. Dick wrote all his sci-fi on deadline and on spec. He would agonize over the early parts and then as the deadline approached he would bang out some kind of deus ex machina ending in the grip of amphetamine psychosis. Once you know this, you can pretty clearly see exactly when he stopped sleeping in each one.
@stevegis_ssg @Nickiquote My partner is something of a PKD scholar and says they couldn’t have put this better themself.
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@stevegis_ssg @Nickiquote One of my favourite authors (most don't know her, Margit Sandemo, she wrote supernatural historic fiction back in the 80s originally) wrote her largest series (70-something books, starting in the 1500s, ending in the 1960s, with flashbacks to something like the 1100s ...) where she had a deadline for each.
You can tell which she didn't have much of a plot for, because as the plot went down, the sexings went up >.> (also it got decidedly wilder through the books, but ...)
@melindrea @stevegis_ssg @Nickiquote I mostly know about those books because evangelicals panicked about them in the 90s, which made them immediately interesting.

(Never got around to reading them though.)
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@melindrea @stevegis_ssg @Nickiquote I mostly know about those books because evangelicals panicked about them in the 90s, which made them immediately interesting.

(Never got around to reading them though.)
@veronica @stevegis_ssg @Nickiquote parts of the story is utterly ridiculous, but there's some that I really love. and following a family through 400 years is pretty cool ... especially when they've got magic powers, a curse, and a tragic past

(at the end we have a "chosen one" who's the seventh son of a seventh son, the grandson of a demon and the great-grandson of Lucifer)
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@stevegis_ssg @Nickiquote My partner is something of a PKD scholar and says they couldn’t have put this better themself.
I love a person with a lotta Dick under their belt.
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