Le Gorille-Roi
The story would appear in book form the following year.
The set is preserved in a publisher’s Fayard binding specially made for the first-half-1928 gathering of L’Aventure. In addition to the complete serial, the issues contain numerous other articles, columns and short pieces signed Georges Sim, offering a record of the young Simenon’s prolific activity in the popular press of the interwar period.
Although its plot differs, Le Gorille-Roi shares many similarities with Le Sous-Marin dans la forêt, another novel published by Simenon under the pseudonym Georges Sim by Tallandier in 1928: a submarine, pirates seizing a ship carrying diamonds, gangs organized like genuine warring troops, the Yem-Yem — monstrous intermediaries between man and ape —, a hostile forest, and mischievous, menacing green monkeys.
These variations are characteristic of the popular novels Simenon was then writing at a frantic pace. Before Maigret, before the “romans durs,” he ran this rapid serial-fiction factory for several years, fueled by exotic adventure and maritime incident, recycled from one text to another. His first detective novels would begin the following year, with the sequel we all know.