Les fiancailles de M. Hire

by Georges Simenon

La concierge toussota avant de frapper, articula en regardant le catalogue de la Belle-Jardinière qu'elle tenait à la main : « C'est une lettre pour vous, monsieur Hire. »
Et elle serra son châle sur sa poitrine. On bougea derrière la porte brune. C'était tantôt à gauche, tantôt à droite, tantôt des pas, tantôt un froissement mou de tissu ou un heurt de faïences, et les yeux gris de la concierge semblaient, à travers le panneau, suivre à la piste le bruit invisible. Celui-ci se rapprocha enfin. La cIef tourna. Un rectangIe de lumière apparut, une tapisserie à fleurs jaunes, le marbre d'un lavabo. Un homme tendit la main, mais la concierge ne le vit pas, ou le vit mal, en tout cas n'y prit garde parce que son regard fureteur s'était accroché à un autre objet : une serviette imbibée de sang dont le rouge sombre tranchait sur le froid du marbre...

Genres: Fiction, France, Mystery, Crime, Noir, French Literature, Belgian

180 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1933

About the author

Georges Joseph Christian Simenon (1903 – 1989) was a Belgian writer. A prolific author who published nearly 500 novels and numerous short works, Simenon is best known as the creator of the fictional detective Jules Maigret.
Although he never resided in Belgium after 1922, he remained a Belgian citizen throughout his life.

Simenon was one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century, capable of writing 60 to 80 pages per day. His oeuvre includes nearly 200 novels, over 150 novellas, several autobiographical works, numerous articles, and scores of pulp novels written under more than two dozen pseudonyms. Altogether, about 550 million copies of his works have been printed.

He is best known, however, for his 75 novels and 28 short stories featuring Commissaire Maigret. The first novel in the series, Pietr-le-Letton, appeared in 1931; the last one, Maigret et M. Charles, was published in 1972. The Maigret novels were translated into all major languages and several of them were turned into films and radio plays. Two television series (1960-63 and 1992-93) have been made in Great Britain.

During his "American" period, Simenon reached the height of his creative powers, and several novels of those years were inspired by the context in which they were written (Trois chambres à Manhattan (1946), Maigret à New York (1947), Maigret se fâche (1947)).

Simenon also wrote a large number of "psychological novels", such as La neige était sale (1948) or Le fils (1957), as well as several autobiographical works, in particular Je me souviens (1945), Pedigree (1948), Mémoires intimes (1981).

In 1966, Simenon was given the MWA's highest honor, the Grand Master Award.

In 2005 he was nominated for the title of De Grootste Belg (The Greatest Belgian). In the Flemish version he ended 77th place. In the Walloon version he ended 10th place.

Reviews

[Glenn Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Now I'm afraid to run into him on the stairs!" cried the concierge. "I've always been scared of him. Everyone's scared!"

No question about it, Mr. Hire gives everyone the creeps, especially the men and women in his seedy apartment building, and most especially after a prostitute is brutally murdered just two blocks away.

And Mr. Hire doesn’t have to metamorphose into a giant Gregor Samsa-like bug; being a loner, an outsider who looks the way he does - short flabby body, round staring eyes, puffy waxen face, curled moustache as if it drawn on with India ink - is all he needs to mark him as a loathsome pervert, almost subhuman, the perfect murder suspect. And since he also served a prison term for trafficking in pornography and currently ekes out a living by his scam mail order business, police and state officials judge Mr. Hire guilty on all counts until (fat chance, haha) proven innocent.

Engagement was published in 1933 when Georges Simenon was thirty-years-old, the same age range as when Albert Camus wrote The Stranger, Franz Kafka wrote Metamorphosis and Jean-Paul Sartre wrote Nausea. What is it about existential themes and that time in a sensitive author's life? And Simenon’s Engagement is all about existential themes, mainly fear and alienation. The prominence of fear prompted me to include the above film still from Czeck director Zbyněk Brynych’s 1964 The Fifth Horseman is Fear. The film's title could have been this novel's title.

Georges Simenon is best known for all his many novels featuring Detective Maigret, sometimes referred to as the French Sherlock Holmes. Well, unlike Maigret or Homes, there’s nothing appealing about the detectives in Engagement; quite the contrary, they are portrayed as cartoonish dolts, a gaggle of self-centered brutes who slug down booze or seek out quick sex, seeking not justice but simply closing the case so they can move on. And the police commissioner is hardly any better – the way Simenon sketches Mr. Hire under interrogation (and dehumanization) is both chilling and deeply disturbing.

On the subject of drinking booze, the detectives hardly have the exclusives. At every turn the men and woman in the novel sit down with a bottle or glass morning, noon or night, downing drink after drink. It’s as if liquor goes hand in hand and is the sordid complement with hearts constricted, cold and calculating.

Many were the times when reading this novel I was reminded of poor Parisians drinking themselves into a stupor in Émile Zola's 1877 novel, L'Assommoir (The Drinking Den). My goodness, some things never change. Let me take that back - some things do change: when Zola's novel was first published, critics complained the book was too fierce, too brutal, too sordid. No such complaint from critics with The Engagement - another fifty years removed from European Romanticism and fierce, brutal and sordid are all accepted as the norm.

Georges Simenon had a lifelong dread of crowds, having once witnessed a crowd whipped into a frenzy and then mauling an innocent victim. A crowd transformed into an impassioned mob in the last chapter of The Engagement is foreshadowed when Mr. Hire furtively trails his neighbor Alice and her boyfriend to a soccer match; Mr. Hire sits directly behind Alice and stares at the nape of her bare neck during the entire match (Mr. Hire is also a Peeping Tom; Alice lives in the apartment directly across the narrow courtyard from Mr. Hire and Mr. Hire has been staring into her bedroom night after night).

Anyway, at one point in the match, “The stands resonated like a drum, shuddered, then positively shook as thousands of people rose at once to cheer.” Such mass excitation reminds me of a quote from French philosopher Gilles Deleuze: “If you're trapped in the dream of the Other, you're fucked.”

The story is riveting, written in lean, crystal-clear language – from the first to last sentence, not a word is wasted; every turn of phrase, metaphor and image hones character and drives action, for example, Mr. Hire isolated in his apartment: “Sitting at the table, Mr. Hire ate buttered bread and drank coffee, impassively, staring straight ahead. When he had finished, he remained there for a moment, without moving, as if frozen in time and space. He began to hear noises, at first weak and anonymous – creaks, footsteps, collisions – and soon he could feel his entire universe, with this room at its center, dissolving into the furtive sounds.”

This New York Review Books publication also includes an Afterward written by John Gray. Gray does an excellent job highlighting various Simenon themes. At one point Grey notes: “Nearly all of Simenon’s romans durs - the books he termed “hard” novels to distinguish them from the hundreds of popular thrillers he also wrote – deal with people whose lives are disrupted by seemingly random happenings or impulses. Anything – from the catastrophe of war to the most trivial daily incident – can break up the routines that give them a sense of themselves.” Another word for “routine” could be “habit” and Simenon spotlights how much habit plays in everyday life. Unfortunately in our modern urbanized world, fear can count as one such habit. Read all about it in this short existential novel.


"A dirty bit of legal swindling. The old trick of a hundred francs a day without quitting your job, and a box of paints. You seduce poor people with your ads, and since after all you do send them something for their money, you can't be prosecuted. Tell me, Mr. Hire or Hirovitch, what was that about coming here to give me your word of honor?"

[Manny · Rating 4 out of 5]

A few weeks ago, I witnessed one of those little internet dramas that one often sees on Goodreads. A person calling himself "Edward" starting leaving comments on my reviews, particularly my long Charlie Hebdo thread. Most of Edward's comments didn't make sense, coming across either as extracts from an obscure postmodernist novel (the charitable interpretation) or the deranged ravings of somebody who'd forgotten to take his medication (the uncharitable one). Every now and then, however, Edward would say something that seemed directly unpleasant, usually to a woman.

I never much minded Edward; he seemed to me to be playing a complicated game whose rules were known only to himself, and I was rarely the target of impolite remarks. But other people, particularly the ones who had been singled out for direct abuse, were understandably less happy. After a while, they began to respond in kind. Edward sharpened his rhetoric, and soon a full-scale flame war had arisen. People began to dig around for other places where he had been active. Accusations surfaced that he had been posting dubious content in groups intended for children; soon he was openly being being called a pedophile. A few days later, he deleted all his comments, closed down his account and disappeared.

I still don't know what the truth was concerning Edward, but I thought of him while reading this rather fine little novel. M. Hire is an eccentric, unappealing but basically harmless person who exists on the margins of society. He scrapes a living doing something which lies in the gray area between immoral and illegal. He has no family or friends. Only one thing brightens his miserable existence: every evening, he switches off the light in good time and watches from his darkened window as the attractive redhead in the apartment opposite takes off her clothes and gets ready for bed.

Unfortunately for M. Hire, a prostitute is found murdered not far from his home. The police need to make an arrest, the redhead knows more about it than she should, and he's the ideal suspect. With amazing rapidity, everyone agrees that the evidence points in his direction. As the Kafka-like plot unfolded, I began to feel vaguely that perhaps we hadn't been fair to Edward; but I comforted myself with the thought that the accusations were probably justified, and anyway it had only been the web, not real life.

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 5 out of 5]

8/3/25 Update: Just to say that for the first time since it came out in 1989, I last night saw the Patrice LeConte film based on this novel, featuring Michel LeBlanc and Sandrine Bonnaire, and loved it I mean, it is skillfully noir, and also creepy and twisty in terms of expectations. Alfred Hitchcock once said that all film is voyeurism (recall the opening scene of Psycho, where we zoom into a hotel room where two people are dressing after having had sex; we are voyeurs, we're interested. In this story, the guy is a loner, a "window voyeur" who watches a woman in the apartment across their courtyard. I also happen to have just reread a kind of voyeur novella, Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, where an older man watches but never really physically engages with a young boy he finds beautiful ( recall seeing the film version of that book, with Dirk Bogarde, in the seventies). I am completely coincidentally reading Patricia Highsmith's The Cry of An Owl ,which also features a window voyeur! What is going on here??!!

Hitchcock's point about all this is that because we agree to also watch the watcher, we are in some sense implicated in the voyeurism. We "like to watch," as the Peter Sellers character says in Being There. At one point the Sandra Bonnaire character in the film says to the guy, "I like it that you watch me," thus supposedly making it "okay," in some sense that we also like to watch her. The film is advertised as an "erotic thriller" though it is rated PG-13, in this country. Hitch's Rear Window has a scenario similar to Hire's, a man watching his neighbors across a courtyard. Doubtless Hitchcock and Simenon knew each other's stories.

My original review: Glenn, my friend here on Goodreads, sent me a list of his five favorite Simenon books that are not Maigret stories (and most seasoned Simenon fans agree--and he'd probably agree himself--that his non-Maigret books are usually his best) and this is on that list. Roman durs, or hard novels, Simenon called them. Also called Monsieur Hire's Engagement (1933), I saw the movie 1n 1989 by Patrice Laconte, starring Sandra Bonnaire and Michel Blanc, and loved it and was glad to have finally read it. It's a shadowy book, lurking in the corners of our minds, dealing with secret lusts and desires but also about public assumptions and condemnations about these things. It's one of my fave books of the year. Maybe not quite up to the standard of Simenon's The Blue Room, but it's close. We are manipulated into judging all the characters. We are not morally "above" anyone in this story.

A woman--a prostitute--has been murdered, so loner Hire begins to get some attention; he once was jailed for his work for a book publisher on erotic novels, he lives alone and occasionally sees prostitutes. We all will have different views on this behavior, placing him on some continuum of reprehensible behavior, but does this make him a likely murderer? Some of the police and neighbors seem to think he should be a suspect. He's short, "overweight," and is seen by some of his neighbors as creepy, and many of us will see him as creepy, tooo, I suspect.

There's another thing that Hire does that occurs in societal shadows; in his apartment he can see into the apartments near him, and one woman in an apartment across from him undresses without hiding herself, and he watches this. Creepy? Rising to the level of assault? But what about her? Where on the continuum of sinfulness do we place her behavior? At one point she acknowledges she sees him looking at her and in time, they get together, at her invitation, but not to have sex. The woman, Alice, reports she has a troubling, possibly abusive, relationship with a man; maybe she is looking for a friend?

At the same time, Hire notes that he is being followed by a detective. It is clear he is a suspect in the murder, and he wants to leave the city; he suggests to Alice that she might leave town with him so they can both escape (she from her boyfriend, but because he says he loves her). So much of what happens here is about mood, tone, shadowy behavior, unclear relationships, with little said. Noir territory. The detective, too, gets involved with Hire's neighbor, the detective watching a possibly creepy Hire and at the same time maybe seeming a little creepy himself as he watches the suspect, though the woman he begins to see seems like she doesn't love the relationship. The man grabs her and grinds into her when he meets her; she doesn't want this, though on some level she likes the attention; she is lonely, all these folks are lonely, and these ways of handling desire are complicated, unsatisfying, but human, whatever that designatin may be worth. These two relationships are set up as a way of examining desire in (mostly) isolation.

As with The Blue Room, but also quite differently, Monsieur Hire's Engagement concludes with the relation of dramatic events, and in both books, it is not absolutely clear what has happened, who is "at fault," though in Hire's story, he is a victim of derision and hate from his neighbors, who decide he is the murderer. But things are not all that clear. Maybe that's the point of these shadowy noir stories, that nothing is ever completely clear, except that no one is completely innocent. Great book that is meant to make you uncomfortable as you join the neighbors--or not--in making judgements about these characters.

[Tony]

This does not open with a killing. It opens instead with kind of an introduction to Mr. Hire. He has a sad, solitary life, and a bit of a sordid past. Some detectives are trailing him. So, yes, there must have been a killing. And Mr. Hire is creepy enough to have done it.

If we never come to like Mr. Hire, we nevertheless hope it isn't him that did it. Perhaps he didn't. The back cover of the book announces his innocence (really), but I'm not so sure.

Anyhow, the surrounding characters are all flawed in their own way. The concierge leaps to conclusions and seems unconcerned for her very ill daughter. The police detective roughly paws the red-haired woman from the dairy store. The red-haired girl does not pull the blinds when Mr. Hire spies on her; instead she pulls the dead bolt to her apartment and beckons him. Her boyfriend is abusive and, oh, maybe he's the killer. The police commissioner is bored.

And there's the anti-Semitism.

There is, in fact, a lot going on, but under the skein of the plot.

Fun stuff.

[Algernon · Rating 5 out of 5]

[9/10]

He was sad again, no longer impatient, but sad – a hot, private sadness, like tears.

Monsieur Hire has just got engaged with the girl of his dreams, but his hopes of escaping the dreariness and the loneliness of his existence are built on a lie.
A lie that will make Mr. Hire the most wanted criminal in Paris, for a short but intense manhunt.

>>><<<>>><<<

My respect for Georges Simenon grows exponentially with each of his ‘roman durs’ that I pick up. Very few authors can match him for psychological insights and for the stark elegance of his presentation, for the economy of words that somehow pack such a heavy punch.
Like other novels included in this ‘roman durs’ category, the story of Mr. Hire is less concerned with detective work or with ‘whodunit’ plots. It’s a subtle character study of a man sitting on a ledge, ready to jump or to be pushed over and into the abyss by Fate this is literally what happens at the end of the novel, as the pathetic, innocent Hire is chased to a rooftop by a violent mob and proceeds to die of fright, suspended by his fingernails. The author states in the introduction that the subject has haunted him for decades, after witnessing such an incident as a young man. The novel is his way to exorcise the memory.

A vicious murder does take place in the impoverished suburb of Villejuif, outside Paris, just before the start of the novel. A prostitute is killed and robbed, then her body is abandoned on a construction site near the lodging house where Mr. Hire lives. The police has no clues to investigate, so they go door to door to interview the neighbours.
The concierge of the apartment building doesn’t like Mr. Hire, because he is a recluse who keeps his door locked and who doesn’t socialize with anybody, so she fingers him to the police, claiming he was out late on the night of the crime.
Based solely on this deposition, the agents start a round the clock surveillance of Hire, from his dingy and cold room to his basement office in the city, where he is engaged in a small business of mail fraud, selling overpriced gadgets to naive clients.

Soon we move the perspective from the agent’s view to that of Mr. Hire, and frankly, he does act sort of suspicious. Not only is he engaged in some shady business, but he is also a peeping Tom, obsessively watching a beautiful young girl undress and read in bed in the building across from him. Hire even stalks this Alice through the streets as she goes out to meet her boyfriend and then to a football match on a Sunday.
The reader starts to wonder: is he really a killer? This pathetic, flabby and self-effacing little man?

At noon, he was still there, where it was warm, watching the people go by, more and more of them, the thousands who worked, ran, stopped, caught up with each other, passed each other by, yelled and whispered, while in the small bar, the waiters seemed to be rattling the saucers on purpose.

Mr. Hire spots his police tail and panics. His isolation, his sense of being an outsider while life passes him by, grows. He is followed even into his private sanctum: a bowling hall where Mr. Hire is the local club hero for his talent at pitching a heavy ball down a wooden runway. Later in the novel we discover that this isolation is partly explained by his past interactions with the police, when we was condemned and jailed for peddling pornography, an added reason to be considered a convenient suspect by the police.

A couple of chapters presented from the stalked girl’s perspective will make things clear to the reader as far as the original murder is concerned, but I am not going to comment on these in order to avoid spoilers.
The one thing that made the novel memorable for me is the alienation, the pervasive sadness of Mr. Hire’s life, the modesty of his dreams and the ruthlessness of the world in dealing with this sensitive and shy person. The undercurrent of racism directed at his Jewish origins is revealed late, but it cannot be taken out of consideration for the glee his neighbours felt when they learned he is a suspect.
Nobody is willing to extend the benefit of a doubt towards this lonely, this hunted man, which makes the end of the novel even more poignant.

Everyone was waiting for the same thing. Despite the rain, a group of curious onlookers had assembled on the pavement. People went closer to get a good look at the undercover detectives, who furiously turned their backs. Even the traffic policeman came up, tipping his hat and winking: Have we got him? It’s the short fat man with the curly moustache?

Highly recommended!

[None Ofyourbusiness Loves Israel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simenon's "Les Fiançailles de M. Hire" examines societal prejudice through the character of Mr. Hire—a Jewish tailor whose physical appearance and solitary habits make him an easy scapegoat when a young woman's body is found near his apartment building.

Simenon writes with characteristic restraint: "His skin gleamed like wax, with the pallor of someone who rarely sees daylight," establishing Hire as an outsider before any accusation surfaces. The psychological tension escalates as Hire secretly watches his neighbor Alice each evening, forming an attachment that becomes his undoing when he discovers her connection to the murder.

Many exceptional moments in the book reveal character and social dynamics: Hire's nightly observation ritual; the corpse discovery that attracts police attention; Detective Lagrume's questioning where Hire maintains unusual composure; the café encounter where Hire first speaks directly to Alice; his revelation that he knows she and her boyfriend committed the murder; Alice's calculated seduction to manipulate him; Hire's desperate marriage proposal despite knowing her guilt; neighbors forming a suspicious mob; Hire's explanatory letter to authorities; and his escape attempt across Parisian rooftops. Each scene exposes another layer of social hypocrisy as Hire admits, "I've watched you for so long that sometimes I wonder if you're real or if I've invented you from fragments of passing women."

Simenon, a prolific author of hundreds of novels with approximately 550 million copies sold worldwide, cannot meet a page and leave it blank. Every sentence, scene, and chapter is crafted with exceptional economy. His stripped-down style creates uncomfortable intimacy with social outcasts and their accusers. This approach reaches its height when Hire, facing capture, maintains dignity: "Even in my loneliness, I have tried to be a gentleman, though no one has noticed."

The novel shares themes with Kafka's "The Trial" and Camus' "The Stranger," examining how quickly society condemns those who appear different. Its critique of mob psychology and casual antisemitism, is uncomfortably produced via sympathy for an unsympathetic character, anger at justice perverted, and sadness at recognizing how little societal attitudes have changed since publication.

My rating is 5 full stars—Simenon creates a work of suspense that fits uncomfortably well, compelling us to question whether we too might shape truth to accommodate our prejudices.

[RJ - Slayer of Trolls · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of Simenon's earliest "roman durs" (hard novels) as he called them, based on an actual scene witnessed by the author in his youth. The story moves slowly but deliberately, centered on the societal misfit character of Mr. Hire, carefully constructed piece by piece in Simenon's sparse style. After the bleak and inevitable conclusion we are left to examine the callousness shown by fellow humans, the rush to judgment against the outsider.

[Alan (on December semi-hiatus) Teder · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hounded to Death
Review of the Penguin Classics paperback edition (2020) of a translation by Anna Moschovakis* of the French language original Les Fiançailles de M.Hire (1933)

Mr Hire's Engagement is a parable for the dangers of mob mentality and the persecution of "the other," but it is disguised as a thriller about obsession and betrayal. The protagonist Mr. Hire is portrayed as not likeable. He runs a small-time mail-order scam business of the 'get rich quick' category. He is a voyeur, particularly of a neighbour woman named Alice. He is a frequenter of prostitutes, although he seems to be of the 'I only want to talk' variety, in the one scene which we observe. Another aspect of his 'otherness' is in his Jewish origins. This is not emphasized very much in the book, but became a key element in the post-WWII film adaptation "Panique" (1946) (see Trivia and Link below).

Regardless of those factors, Hire still becomes our object of sympathy as he is framed for the murder of a woman whose body has been found in the neighbourhood. His appearance, his solitary habits, his awkwardness, his 'otherness,' make him the target for suspicion by his neighbours and the police. His obsession with his neighbour Alice (whose boyfriend is the real murderer) leads to his targeting and final destruction. There is a slight indication that justice might be served in the end if a message he has sent to the police gets through and is acted on, but given the overall atmosphere that is portrayed it seems very unlikely.


Cover of the first French language edition published by Fayard in 1933. Image sourced from Wikipedia

I've now read over a dozen of the early Simenon novellas/novels in the past five weeks and they continue to impress with how different they are not only from each other, but also from other "Golden Age of Crime" novels of that interwar era. I'm going to read a dozen of the Chief Inspector Maigret books and a half-dozen of the non-Maigret in this deep dive of the early Simenon. Many of the non-Maigret books are being translated into English for the first time and with 500 books in total there are probably quite a few yet to go.

Mr Hire's Engagement is the second of my readings of Georges Simenon's romans durs** (French: hard novels) which was his personal category for his non-Chief Inspector Maigret fiction. This is like Graham Greene, who divided his work into his "entertainments" and his actual "novels." Similar to Greene, the borders between the two areas are quite flexible as we are often still dealing with crime and the issues of morals and ethics. Simenon's romans durs are definitely in the noir category though, as compared to the sometimes lighter Maigrets where the often cantankerous Chief Inspector provides a solution and the guilty are brought to justice.

Trivia and Links
* This is the same translation by Anna Moschovakis as was previously issued as The Engagement (2007) by NYRB (New York Review of Books). That earlier edition includes an Afterword by John N. Gray which is not provided in the Penguin edition. Bonus Trivia: Anna Moschovakis was the translator for the 2021 International Booker Prize winner At Night All Blood Is Black (2020), translated from the French language original Frère d'âme (2018) by David Diop.

** There is a limited selection of 100 books in the Goodreads' Listopia of Simenon's romans durs which you can see here. Other sources say there are at least 117 of them, such as listed at Art and Popular Culture.

Mr. Hire's Engagement has been adapted 3 (some sources say 4) times as a feature film. The 1st film adaptation was the French language "Panique" (1946) dir. Julien Duvivier. This has been described as one of the finest adaptations of Simenon on film ever made. In a restored and expanded edition for Criterion it is described as a "noirish critique of the dangers of mob mentality during wartime." A trailer of the restored version with English subtitles can be viewed on YouTube here.

The 2nd and 3rd adaptation was as the Portuguese language Viela, Rua Sem Sol (The Alley, A Street Without Sun) (1947) and the Spanish language Barrio (Neighbourhood) (1947) by director Ladislao Vajda. For some reason these are listed as 2 separate films on sources such as IMDb, so perhaps it is a case of different editing rather than simply different language versions. A non-English subtitled trailer can be viewed on YouTube here.

The 4th film adaptation was the French language "Monsieur Hire" (1989) dir. Patrice Leconte. Popular film critic Roger Ebert (1942-2013) included it in his list of Great Movies and you can read his review here. A trailer with English subtitles can be viewed on YouTube here.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 1989, director Patrice Leconte brought us a stunning remake of this novella (as 'Monsieur Hire') - which told the story in an impressively compact 80 minutes, playing like a bat out of hell (that ending!). At the time, I only knew the source's author by name - it wasn't until last year that I read anything by Simenon (this is now the third work I've read, after 'The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By' and the very impressive 'Dirty Snow').

Even though I knew the story, I wasn't prepared for what a heart-crusher it is - as Simenon tells it. For the sake of adding to its urgency, Leconte's film leaves out crucial character-strokes.

I've been anxious to see Julien Duvivier's 1946 take on the story ('Panique') and will now do so tonight.* (I've been wanting to introduce more of Duvivier's work in a film group on facebook; after all, his remarkable 1948 film of 'Anna Karenina' puts *both* Garbo versions to immediate shame.)

In filmic terms, 'Mr. Hire's Engagement' is a sort-of combo of Hitchcock's 'Rear Window' and Polanski's 'The Tenant' (it pre-dates them; it was published in 1933). Yet its power runs deeper than both films put together. It is a story synthesizing voyeurism, ostracism, xenophobia, anthropophobia, identity crisis, culture clash and (perhaps most importantly) the horror that can occur when a good-looking person uses looks for personal gain. Ultimately, Mr. Hire is someone thrown by beauty - and eaten by the beast.

As a protagonist, Mr. Hire splits our sympathy. We feel for him because we sense how his social skills were compromised long ago. On the other hand - in spite of ourselves, we want to jeer at him because of certain delusions he needlessly engages in.

Simenon's book is in two parts. The first half is a slow-burn, simmering tension in a manner as elusive as Hire himself. The second half is propulsive and laced with the dread of inevitability.

*Update: Duvivier's version of the story isn't bad. Leconte's is better.

[Geoff · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this in its entirety in one stretch this morning sitting in a depressing, fluorescent-lit room of Beckettian absurdity. I mean I was performing my civic duty by serving in a jury pool. Anyway, the day before I was at Vertigo and picked it up for 4 bucks from their sale rack, thinking those long hours of purgatory would be all the more easily passed with some fine, gritty Paris noir, no doubt some lithe sex and murder too and maybe a few bons mots.

I didn't expect Simenon to be such a gripping writer. This translation is spare, dark, vivid. There is some fine scene painting, too, small details that are placed carefully in the usually brief paragraphs that save them from too much sparseness and make scenes come alive. There is only minimal dialogue, the story is told by character's behaviors, the changes in their faces, the position and gait of their bodies, their interaction with their surroundings. I love how Paris in this book is made up almost entirely of sounds, there are whole passages where a character does nothing but listen to the ambient sounds of the city coming through the thin walls of the apartment complex. I also love the parallel of the detectives persistently trailing Hire and Hire doubling them in his pursuit of the dairy girl. The watcher being watched by watchers, the prey also in pursuit.

Nothing profound here, just a really pleasing, well-executed crime story that is and isn't a crime story, and it got me through the morning hours of jury duty, which is all I really asked of it.

[Νίκος Καραμπάτσος · Rating 4 out of 5]

Χιτσκοκικη ατμόσφαιρα, καφκικος ο πρωταγωνιστής του Σιμενον, κατηγορείται για έγκλημα που φαίνεται να μην έχει διαπράξει.
Πώς η κοινωνία κατασκευάζει εξιλαστήρια θύματα και πόσο αιμοδιψής στέκεται απέναντι σε οποιονδήποτε ανήμπορο να υπερασπιστεί τον εαυτό του. Αυτό διαπραγματευονται οι "αρραβώνες" του κυρίου Ιρ.
(και τί τραγικος ο τιτλος του βιβλιου)
Κι ένα σχόλιο για την ελληνική πραγματικότητα : η λογοτεχνία εδώ, προλαβαίνει και ξεπερνά τη ζωή.
Οι κλοτσιές των νοικοκυραίων της Ομονοιας περιγράφονται γλαφυρά στο τελευταίo κεφάλαιο αυτού του έργου του Σιμενον.

[Rosanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Il signor Hire muore d'infarto appeso a una grondaia ed io sono un po' str...ana a dirvelo, sperando che andrete a leggervi il libro.
Simenon è conosciutissimo per il suo Maigret, ma confesso di amarlo molto di più nei suoi romanzi 'altri'.
In questo racconta la vita di un uomo semplice, persino banale, un ometto taciturno dal quotidiano metodico, che mette distanza tra sé e gli altri e per questo appare strano, come uno che potrebbe assassinare una donna a sangue freddo. E' difficile leggergli i pensieri, al signor Hire. E' un sempliciotto in fondo, lo leggiamo, lo vediamo mentre guarda dalla sua finestra. Appare come il colpevole ideale di ogni reato.
La cosa bella di questo romanzo è che sembra egli stesso si racconti, cosa pensa, cosa desidera, cosa sogna, fino a quando non lo ritrovi lì appeso a quella grondaia. Lì non ho ho più sentito i suoi pensieri ma solo istinto di conservazione, il cuore a mille di un animale braccato. Da lì in poi è piccola cronaca e anche un po' della vostra immaginazione.
R@

[Aprile · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cronologicamente uno dei primi, in assoluto uno dei migliori

Pingue, sudaticcio, guance rosee, sguardo basso o sfuggente, passi brevi e veloci, andatura saltellante e ondeggiante a causa dell’adipe, stretta di mano senza nerbo e senza nessuna trasmissione di comunicazione significante, silenzioso, pronto a porgere le proprie scuse per un nonnulla, metodico, solitario, puntuale e preciso
e anche
frequentatore di postriboli – molto puliti a dir la verità –, con un passato di galeotto – per colpa di altri in verità -, truffatore – di quelli in piccole dosi distribuite in ugual misura su un elevato numero di vittime -, e soprattutto con un gusto radicato per il voyerismo…
potrebbe mai trasmettere empatia?
Eppure, alla fine, quando il noir si dipana e si svela, mentre il signor Hire si regge alla vita con la sola forza delle sue molli mani, qualcosa cambia e si prova compassione per quella misera esistenza in affitto e provvisoria.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you are not already a Simenon fan this one will not likely nudge you in that direction. He’s usually better than this Rear Window meets Kafka vibe with almost more breasts than characters. Or maybe this will be just your thing. Maybe you, like Simenon, think that women generally hang out in their rooms reading a book while fondling their nipples. Maybe they do. I have not thought to ask around. Incidentally, I didn’t go near mine while reading this. Was that to blame for my lackluster reaction? We’ll never know.

[Eternauta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Αριστουργηματικό νουάρ. Το σκωπτικό και πικρόχολο σχόλιο του Simenon για τους μνησίκακους μικροαστούς αποτελεί και το μόνο πέπλο προστασίας γύρω από τον ανυποψίαστο, μοναχικό κύριο Ιρ.

[Nancy Oakes · Rating 4 out of 5]

for the longer version (which I mistakenly just left long here earlier - my apologies), you can go here; otherwise, read on.


The murder of a call girl in the Villejuif area of Paris has more than a few people on edge. The murder itself is not an event in this novel, but what happens to the protagonist of this novel, M. Hire, is based on fallout from the fear surrounding the killing. It all begins when the concierge of M. Hire's apartment building spies a bloody towel on his washstand while delivering mail, and she makes the leap that M. Hire must be the murderer, setting this story in motion. From that point on, M. Hire's daily life is scrutinized unceasingly, except at night in the privacy of his apartment, when he watches the beautiful red-haired woman in the apartment across the way. However, everything changes for M. Hire when one night he realizes she is watching him as well.

What will strike anyone who's familiar with Simenon's Maigret series and then reads this novel is the huge difference between the two. The series novels tend to work toward a solution, have a policeman as a main character who cares about some sort of justice and has definite clues to follow. Here, Simenon sort of turns the roman policier on its head, and the result is one of the best books I've read in a very, very long time. It is a fine example of his "roman durs" ("tough" novels), much more serious "in tone and intent" than his series novels; it is the term Simenon used "to refer to all those novels that he regarded as his real literary works."

The Engagement is short, but don't let that fool you -- it is a beautiful book that should be (imo) on everyone's reading list. Most especially recommended for people who prefer reading about people over plot.

[Κατερίνα Μάγνη · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ένα ερώτημα που προκύπτει από την ανάγνωση του βιβλίου είναι: "Μήπως μια κοινωνία που κατασκευάζει ενόχους είναι εξίσου δολοφονική με έναν δολοφόνο;"

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

3* Mr Hire's Engagement
4* Act of Passion
4* Pietr the Latvian (Maigret, #1)
3* The Carter of 'La Providence' (Maigret, #2)
3* The Late Monsieur Gallet (Maigret, #3)
4* The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien (Maigret, #4)
3* A Man's Head (Maigret #5)
4* The Yellow Dog (Maigret #6)
4* The Night at the Crossroads (Maigret #7)
2* A Crime in Holland (Maigret #8)
3* The Grand Banks Café (Maigret, #9)
3* The Dancer at the Gai-Moulin (Maigret #10)
3* The Two-Penny Bar (Maigret, #11)
3* The Shadow Puppet (Inspector Maigret #12)
4* Lock No. 1 (Maigret, #18)
4* The Cellars of the Majestic (Maigret, #20)
3* Inspector Cadaver (Maigret, #25)
3* Maigret Se Fache (Maigret, #26)
4* Maigret's Holiday (Maigret, #28)
4* La première enquête de Maigret (Maigret, #30)
4* My Friend Maigret (Maigret #31)
4* Maigret at the Coroner's (Maigret #32)
3* The Friend of Madame Maigret (Maigret #34)
3* Maigret and the Burglar's Wife (Maigret, #38)
3* Maigret's Mistake (Maigret, #43)
3* Maigret and the Calame Report (Maigret, #46)
3* Maigret si diverte (Maigret, #50)
3* Maigret in Court (Maigret, #55)
3* Maigret and the Idle Burglar (Maigret, #57)
3* Maigret and the Bum (Maigret, #60)
4* Maigret Loses His Temper (Maigret, #61)
3* Maigret on the Defensive (Maigret, #63)
3* Maigret Bides His Time (Maigret #64)
3* Maigret Hesitates (Maigret, #68)
3* Maigret's Boyhood Friend (Maigret, #69)
3* Maigret and the Madwoman (Maigret, #72)
4* Maigret and the Loner (Maigret, #73)
TR The Saint-Fiacre Affair (Inspector Maigret #13)
TR The Flemish House (Maigret, #14)
TR The Misty Harbour (Maigret, #15)
TR The Madman of Bergerac (Inspector Maigret #16)
TR Liberty Bar (Maigret, #17)
TR Maigret (Maigret, #19)
TR The Judge's House (Maigret, #21)
TR Cécile is Dead (Maigret, #22)
TR Signed, Picpus (Maigret, #23)
TR Félicie (Maigret, #24)
TR Maigret à New York (Maigret, #27)
TR Il morto di Maigret (Maigret, #29)
TR Maigret et la Vieille Dame (Maigret, #33)
TR Le memorie di Maigret (Maigret #35)
TR Maigret in Montmartre (Maigret #36)
TR Maigret Rents a Room (Maigret #37)
TR Maigret and the Gangsters (Maigret #39)
TR Maigret's Revolver (Maigret #40)
TR Maigret and the Man on the Bench (Maigret #41)
TR Maigret Afraid (Maigret #42)
TR Maigret Goes to School (Maigret #44)
TR Maigret et la jeune morte (Maigret #45)
TR Maigret and the Headless Corpse (Maigret #47)
TR Maigret Sets a Trap (Maigret, #48)
TR Maigret's Failure (Maigret #49)

[Amaranta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Il signor Hire fa la sua comparsa già dalle prime righe, da uno spiraglio aperto di una porta.
Dà il senso che la lettura entri subito nel vivo, in barba a quei romanzi di Simenon che creano prima una specie di piccola introduzione scenografica alla storia.
Siamo a Parigi. Piove come sempre, sempre. Il racconto si liquefà sotto quell’acqua, il sangue si diluisce, i profumi si mescolano all’odore della pioggia e del terriccio bagnato. E su tutte la città si immerge in un alone liquido che la avvolge. Ma fuori rimane Hire. Un piccolo ometto, mediocre che vive in una stanza e si nutre di piccoli furti quotidiani nella vita degli altri: spiare la lattaia che vive di fronte e respirare così la vita nella sua squallida esistenza. Finchè questo non fa corto circuito con un’indagine della polizia sull’uccisione di una donna.
Un crescendo di tensione che non si avverte nella lettura, ma solo nell’animo del lettore, che vuole sapere come è implicato Hire in tutto questo, che cosa succederà, se potrà davvero realizzare il suo piccolo sogno e sfuggire alla sua quotidiana e abitudinaria mediocrità fino alla soluzione finale.
Un personaggio perfetto, un racconto molto ben calibrato. Una Parigi matrigna questa volta.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

A gem of a book. This is a great psychological drama where the main character is an unlikeable human being, Mr Hire. A woman is murdered near his apartment and because of his appearance, demeanor and furtive behavior he is suspected of the murder. We are slowly drawn into his world of a job where he scams people out of money, a visit to a brothel, bowling, peeping Tom and an inability to interact with people as seen with Alice and the concierge.

The ending, chased by a mob is very poignant.

[Evi * · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ennesimo noir di Georges Simenon che leggo. Questa volta il suggerimento di lettura mi viene da una fonte d.o.c.g. un tale Alberto Savinio che lo cita in un suo testo "Ascolto il tuo cuore, città". E chi è direte voi questo Alberto Savinio? Provate a cercarlo e, se potete, leggetelo anche, vi farete del bene.
"Il fidanzamento del signor Hire" è uno dei primi romanzi scritti da Simenon, forse ancora un po' acerbo nello svolgimento della vicenda ma il ritratto del protagonista, come sempre, prende al cuore. Un acme di pena dilaga nel lettore per questo uomo piccolo, pingue, flaccido, dalle pulsioni alquanto morbose e forse discutibili, quando il suo cappello vola via e dalla folla si alza un coro di risa sguaiate e lui d'istinto, impacciato e senza riflettere, cerca di raccoglierlo scatenando una specie di linciaggio: un sasso lo colpisce alla mano, un calcio alla tibia, ma, nonostante la sua magnifica opulenza di dimensioni, comincia a scappare ritrovando un'agilità mai conosciuta prima.
Un noir che ricorda "Il piccolo libraio di Arkangelsk" (che ho decisamente preferito). Due personaggi accomunati dal diventare facile bersaglio del sospetto di una intera comunità e da un risibile manipolo di ispettori di polizia che devono trovare a tutta forza un colpevole, per acquietarsi la coscienza.

[Ourania Topa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Πρέπει να διαβάσει κανείς μέχρι τέλους αυτό το κινηματογραφικής γραφής μυθιστόρημα που εκτυλίσσεται στα φτωχά προάστια του μεσοπολεμικού Παρισιού, για να αντιληφθεί πόσο τραγικά ειρωνικός είναι ο τίτλος που επέλεξε πολύ σοφά ο Simenon για να περιγράψει την ανάγκη του ήρωά του για ανθρώπινη επαφή και συντροφικότητα.

[Daniel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Neighborhood weirdo (aka socially awkward disabled minority man) just trying to live his best life blamed for murder of a prostitute and hounded by neighbors and the most incompetent police force in recorded history (they don't so much leak as gush).

I am forming a negative impression of French crime fiction.

I wanna rant, so

This starts out with a very bizarre and distant style of narration, not quite fly on the wall, but close. It's never 100% unambiguous what's going on, but by around halfway I'd formed the clear impression Mr Hire was the least sketchy guy in his building and was being unfairly persecuted.

There is the creepy issue of his stalking / peeping on the woman across the courtyard when she gets ready for bed, but she is aware of it and seems to encourage it, and we don't know how far back it goes, except that around the time of the murder he witnessed something happen in her apt that has convinced him she is in danger from her boyfriend, and it's implied it's related to the murder, so hell, maybe he saw that by chance and has been watching purely to protect her. We don't know. The amount of sketchy shit going down between this woman and her boyfriend convinces me her boyfriend was the murderer, unlike at least one review I've noticed where the reader finished still thinking maybe it was Mr Hire. The woman and her boyfriend's interactions with each other and hers with Mr Hire make no sense otherwise.

Also, this woman (who works at some kind of dairy shop nearby) will be referred to by her first name, and then as "the woman from the milk shop" or whatever within the space of a few lines. It's very bizarre and almost confusing. And there are weird apparent time jumps and actions out of chronological order in a sentence. The writing just is not great in my opinion.

People sometimes react to Mr Hire in ways that just aren't explained, and it seems like everyone in the entire city knows details of the police investigation in a way that's really WTF in any case and absolutely mindboggling in a large city.



And the ending sucked too.

I really dunno WTF Simenon was going for here, but this does not make me to want to read anything else of his.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short -- very short! -- novel that, by its end, had my eyes moistening as its inevitable tragedy mercilessly panned out. The tale's finale, we realize, will come a few pages after the novel's end, when hopefully a great wrong will be righted and the bad guys get their comeuppance; in the mean time, what we're left with is a sad injustice.

M. Hire is a solitary oddball, a sort of flabbily packed sausage on legs, who lives in a seemingly rather seedy apartment building somewhere in one of the less salubrious regions of Paris. By day he has a business that's only just this side of fraudulent. Occasionally he relaxes by going to a bordello, but it's not clear he ever manages to function; perhaps he's just there to ease his loneliness for a little while. His other outlets are his weekly sessions at the bowling club, where he defies his tubby lack of conditioning to be the regular champion, and his nightly voyeuristic sessions as Alice, the pretty redhead in the apartment across the courtyard from his, undresses for bed.

A couple of weeks ago a prostitute was murdered on a nearby piece of wasteland, and the cops are getting nowhere in finding a suspect. The poisonous concierge of M. Hire's building chooses to report his "suspicious behavior" to them -- suspicious behavior that, we suspect, exists nowhere outside her bored little mind. Soon the cops are all over M. Hire, following him wherever he goes and making no secret to the locals of their suspicions. For his part, M. Hire knows that the killer is really Alice's boyfriend Emile, whom he saw arrive in Alice's room with the dead woman's belongings one night. He vows to himself to do his best to guard Alice from Emile, and she appears grateful for his attentiveness . . . to the point that she seems to offer herself to him, possibly even in marriage. Obviously to us but quite unknown to M. Hire, Alice and Emile are playing him for a sucker, planning to frame him for Emile's crime . . .

I was absolutely entranced by this tale. To be sure, M. Hire isn't the most admirable of people -- I don't mean his physical repellence or his sad voyeurism, more his fleecing of other unfortunates through his unethical (but perfectly legal!) mail-order business -- yet still I found myself rooting for him. By the time the combined efforts of the evil-minded concierge, the insouciant, mentally lazy cops and Alice and Emile have stirred up the locals to lynch-mob passions, M. Hire has become a near-Kafkaesque victim, someone whose humanity has been forgotten or discounted by everyone else involved: he's been dehumanized, reduced to the status of an object that the crowd can condemn and thereby, all feel-good, reassure itself of its own moralistic rectitude. M. Hire's voyeurism is essentially harmless; the mob's is vindictive, predatory.

As I say, this book (which was called Mr. Hire's Engagement in the edition I read, nicely translated by Daphne Woodward) is very short, but that doesn't mean it's a slight work. Simenon's spare, carefully distancing prose ensures that we can escape neither M. Hire's calamity nor the sense of guilt we acquire through in effect becoming one of those spectators whose callous thrill-seeking helped bring it about.

======

This is a contribution to Rich Westlake's 1933 roundup at his Past Offences blog.

[Elizabeth (Alaska) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had the creepiest feelings at the beginning of this one. Two weeks before the novel opens, a woman was found murdered in a vacant lot just two blocks from the apartment building where Mr. Hire lives. Mr. Hire does not live a seemingly normal life. He is very much alone, does not talk with people - not even his concierge. At night he turns out his lights and watches the woman in the apartment across the courtyard. But is he a murderer?

Simenon is the master of this kind of story. Something happens in the lives of his characters that disconcerts them, and thereby the reader. There is a quite good Afterword by John N. Gray in this NYRB edition. He writes that one cannot expect justice in Simenon's roman durs and that rather than a presence of good versus evil, he simply ignores the issue. Both are certainly true in this novel.

I continue to be drawn to reading Simenon. This was a bit slow to start, but became a more compelling read before too long. I think, however, if I were not already a Simenon fan, this would not make me one. It is a very strong 3-stars, perhaps at the very tip top of that group.

[Eva · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ζωρζ Σιμενόν: είναι η πιο παραγνωρισμένη μεγαλοφυΐα του προηγούμενου αιώνα; πόσιμπλι!

[Sharon Barrow Wilfong · Rating 4 out of 5]

I will say upfront that I am not a huge fan of Simenon's stories that do not include Inspector Maigret.

This is really a sad story. It contains a whole ensemble of heartless characters. A man, Mr. Hire, is suspected of murder and for a while, we don't know whether he is the guilty party or not. What we do see is how fear and jumping to conclusions without proof reduce normal citizens into a merciless mob.

Simenon does not spare anyone. The police, the residents who live in the same apartment as Mr. Hire, plus a character who manipulates someone to pin Hire into a corner. Everyone disgusts the reader. At least this reader.

Even Mr. Hire is creepy, which keeps the reader wondering if he is capable of murder. He enjoys watching a girl undress and read a book in bed in her nightgown who lives across from his apartment. This turns out to be Hire's undoing as, with the encouragement of the girl, he creates an unrealistic fantasy about his future and plays into the hands of everyone who is out to get him arrested.

[Chrystal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mr Hire is creepy and gross; a peeping Tom with an unscrupulous past. However, he doesn't deserve to be persecuted by the police for a crime he didn't commit. Ah, but in Simenon's "hard" novels, justice and fairness do not have a place. The world is uncaring and unseeing. Human beings have little or no value and there is nothing to be done about it. Even the streets and buildings in these novels are dark, cold, sordid. The characters try to run or hide but it's no use. It is a bleak view of life but as a reader it is hard to turn away, even if one doesn't agree with this view.

[Sophy H · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poor Mr Hire!!

An almost sordid little story of victimisation, persecution and hounding of an individual based on their unfortunate appearance and insularity.

The story is short yet builds tension beautifully and creates atmospheric restlessness.

I suppose the type of story would be best placed in the noir style.

I enjoyed it as a wee afternoon read.

[Shaghayegh.l3 · Rating 3 out of 5]

نه شوقى واسه ادامه دادن ، نه هيجانى .. به اندازه كافى خوب نبود .