Le Roman d’une dactylo

Simenon published his first novel, Au pont des Arches, by subscription in 1921, but his first “popular” novel was this Roman d’une dactylo, published under a pseudonym: Jean du Perry, a name borrowed from a street in Liège, the rue du Péry.

Simenon liked to claim that he wrote it in a single long morning, at a table on the terrace of the Parisian café “Le Rêve,” rue Caulaincourt, while his wife “Tigy,” whom he had married in 1922, exhibited just across the street at the Montmartre “Foire aux croûtes,” place Constantin-Pecqueur. This fair, invented in April 1921 by Jules Depaquit, the first mayor of the free commune of Montmartre and a cartoonist for humorous newspapers, began as a hoax but drew such crowds that a second edition soon followed, on 5 June of the same year. Given its success, it was thereafter repeated every three months, and later held as often as six or seven times a year at the same spot. For the fair of June 1928, the painter Jean Hélion, whose “stand” stood next to Régine Simenon’s, recalled in his memoirs how Simenon would occasionally step away from his writing to defend his wife’s paintings to passers-by with great verve, between two paragraphs of his book. The manuscript was delivered to his publisher a few days later, on 30 June.

Le Roman d’une dactylo features Jean Sovrinos, who would reappear four years later in another popular novel, Brin d’amour, published this time under yet another pseudonym, Georges-Martin-Georges. Until 1930, Simenon published tales, short stories and novels with various publishers and in various periodicals, before turning in earnest to detective fiction and the first Maigret novels.

This first story under this particular pseudonym was followed in October by Amour exilée.

This fascinating period of Simenon’s career was recently depicted in comic-strip form by Jacques de Loustal in L’Ostrogoth, published by Dargaud.

Menguy, Bibliographie Simenon, 291-1.