We have applied ourselves to demonstrating how it is, if not impossible, at least highly unlikely that Pietr-le-Letton , the first "Maigret" signed by Simenon, was written in Delfzijl in September , as our author has many times claimed, affirmed, and repeated However, this tenacious "memory" seems to include a part of truth, according to our research.
Indeed, it was in this small harbor of the province of Groningen Netherlands that Train de nuit signed Christian Brulls was written in the fall of , and this Train de nuit is the first of the four "proto-Maigrets" written under pseudonyms. Netherlanders can therefore reassure themselves that the city of Delfzijl didn't usurp its title of "the birth place of Maigret", attested to publicly by the presence, very close to the Ems Canal, of the statue of the mythical Superintendent!
To this end, we have necessarily had to do some sorting among our author's declarations, often contradictory and not always in agreement with the stated facts. Here is how, during an explanation of the birth of Pietr-le-Letton , Simenon himself gave us, indirectly and involuntarily it is true, the key to the mystery of the origin of a troublesome confusion of novels First the streets of Paris, which I had left more than one year earlier, then the silhouettes of wharf rats I had seen in ports.
Then, a little like the froth on the sea, harbor tramps [ Simenon commits a flagrant error here: details that he provides close to fifty years later it is true! This confusion in the author's mind is all the more admissible and excusable, as this "competition" between the two investigators continued through On April 15 of that year, when the "Maigret" series was already well underway at Fayard, Georges Sim signed a contract with a young publisher, Jacques Haumont, for a parallel set of police investigations featuring Inspector G-7, alias Sancette!
In fact this corresponds perfectly with our placing the composition of Pietr-le-Letton in the spring of , in April, or at the latest, May. Indeed, the publisher's contract for this title was signed May 26, It is much less conceivable that Simenon wrote Pietr-le-Letton in September, , since it was not his habit to let a manuscript sleep for long in this case, eight months!
