(By the way: sorry to be so late today.)
Here's Paul Theroux on Georges Simenon (and Albert Camus, with whom Simenon carried on a one-sided rivalry).
During the six years I studied French, I had to read both Camus, the famous existentialist author, and Simenon--a wildly popular and prolific writer best known for his Maigret detective series. (If you look on that Wikipedia entry, you will see that there is an ungodly number of Maigret books. Simenon wrote around 400 novels in his lifetime. Yes, scholars believe that is actually the number.)
Simenon has not received the same love from academic circles that Camus has. Simenon was too accessible, too enjoyable, too successful for that.
But Theroux points out that Simenon was just as existentialistic, even absurdist, as Camus. (Existentialism teaches that, if your life is going to have any meaning, you have to create it yourself; absurdism raises its eyebrows and smirks, "Good luck with that!")
So why didn't Simenon get the honors that Camus did?
There isn't really an answer, but Theroux, as the actor William Hurt is alleged to have once put it, "plays the question."
(I wish I could remember where I read that. It was a very long time ago. A co-star of Hurt's talked about running up against a question he couldn't answer about his character's motives. Hurt told him, iirc, "You don't need to know the answer. You need to play the question."
The actor reported, again iirc, "I don't know what that means. But I believe it does mean something."
