Novel
The Snow Was Dirty
La neige était sale
Georges Simenon · 1948
Synopsis
In a city occupied by a foreign army that the book never names, Frank Friedmaier, nineteen, lives in idleness at the home of his mother, Lotte, who runs a brothel. Out of defiance, he kills an officer of the occupier and takes his revolver, then goes on to commit other misdeeds on behalf of a trafficker. He goes out with Sissy, the daughter of his neighbour across the landing, Holst, who loves him, and he betrays her through an odious piece of staging. Nothing drives him to it, neither money nor politics.
Context
The novel was written in 1948 in Tucson, Arizona, during its author's American years: at the Liberation, the suspicion that hung over him, notably over his contracts with a German film firm, had driven him to leave France. It appeared the same year from Presses de la Cité, the publisher with whom he had just signed. Luis Saslavsky made a film from it in 1954, and the book was reissued in 2003 in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.
Who it is for
A short, dark novel, outside the Maigret series, reprinted in the volumes of hard-edged novels published by Omnibus; available in paperback.
Prizes and reception
One of the author's novels included in the Pléiade, adapted for the screen and, in 2024, as a comic book.
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