In late 2021, Farrar, Straus and Giroux president and publisher Mitzi Angel took the stage at the Center for Fiction’s annual gala and delivered an ode to what she called “a particular fancy of mine”: Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret series, centered on the titular, pipe-smoking French detective. She had discovered the series—comprising 75 novels published between 1931 and 1972—a few months earlier and swiftly devoured them. “I’m now approaching the 75th novel, and I’m fearfully anticipating the end,” Angel told gala-goers. “I’m obsessed.”
A couple years later, Angel received a serendipitous email from Andrew Wylie. The Wylie Agency had just made available the rights to Simenon's works, he wrote—would she be interested in acquiring them? She leapt at the opportunity. “I was passionate about these books and felt very strongly that they had a place on the list at FSG and Picador,” Angel said.
So this year, Picador, the paperback arm of FSG, will embark on its most ambitious backlist publishing program to date: the trade paperback reissue of all 75 Inspector Maigret novels over a three-year period starting in spring 2025. Reissues of 30 of his standalone psychological noirs—which Simenon himself called romans durs, or “hard novels”—will follow beginning in winter 2026. Picador is working closely with John Simenon, the late author’s son, whom Angel called “a wonderful partner with us in thinking about how we might present the work, who we might involve, how to describe the work.”
The first three Inspector Maigret novels—Pietr the Latvian, translated by David Bellos; The Late Monsieur Gallet, translated by Anthea Bell; and The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien, translated by Linda Coverdale—will be published by Picador on May 6. An additional 15 titles will be published throughout 2025. All titles in the series have announced print runs of 30,000.
Simenon, who died in 1989 at the age of 86, is one of the bestselling authors of the 20th century, and was extraordinarily prolific in his lifetime. His oeuvre, consisting of more than 200 novels, has been translated into dozens of languages, with some estimates placing worldwide sales of his books at around 600 million print copies.
While Simenon has cultivated a towering reputation among international readers and in certain literary circles stateside—Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Sigrid Nunez, and Gary Indiana have all counted themselves as fans—the author largely faded from American cultural consciousness after the midcentury. “I think there have been plenty of readers, but the books haven’t been quite as accessible, perhaps because of the distribution,” Angel said.
The Inspector Maigret novels are currently only available in the U.S. as import titles from Penguin Books UK, which undertook the task of reissuing the series in 2013 and published its final installment, Maigret and Monsieur Charles, in 2020. (Picador will largely use the translations published by Penguin, though some titles will receive new translations.) Between 2003 and 2011, NYRB Classics published at least nine Simenon's romans durs—including Tropic Moon (1933), The Widow (1942), and Dirty Snow (1948), which featured respective introductions by novelists Norman Rush, Paul Theroux, and William T. Vollmann—but all are now out of print.
The Maigret series was first—and last—published in the U.S. by Helen Wolff under her eponymous imprint at Harcourt Brace, which reissued around four of the author’s novels per year for roughly two decades starting in the mid 1960s. (Wolff and her husband Kurt also cofounded Pantheon Books, in 1942.) Angel suspects that many Simenon fans likely own copies of the Harcourt Brace editions, which she hopes will remain “beloved keepsakes.”
Designing new covers for the Maigret novels posed the challenge of not only establishing visual unity across all 75 titles, but also communicating the substance of the books, which straddle the line between genre and literary fiction. Angel praised designer Alex Merto, who “elected to do something slightly different and to draw in a range of readers who will be interested in the detective aspects of the Maigret novels but who also will be drawn in by the artistry of the work.”
Picador’s Simenon program comes on the heels of two other significant recent reissue programs at the imprint—of the works of Roberto Bolaño and Tom Wolfe, respectively—and precedes a forthcoming reissue of the oeuvre of the late Martin Amis, launching later in May. “I do like to think of FSG and Picador as a home for a certain kind of writing,” Angel said. “That means thinking about writers over the long term and gathering their work together and thinking about what their work means today.”
But the unprecedented scale of the Simenon program has required a uniquely all-hands-on-deck approach. “It’s involved making sure that we have everything lined up at the right time, it’s involved a lot of project management, so we're all working on it together,” Angel said. “There's a whole array of discussions that go on with lots of different people—design, production, sales, editorial—and it's true that we have to make space for that in our days and in our working weeks.”
Spearheading a reissue of this scale is something Angel admitted she would have “never imagined being able to do when I first read those books” in 2021. Now she’s eager to share her Simenon obsession with readers. “It’s my feeling that this private passion could be experienced by many, many other people,” she said, “and that’s what we want to do at FSG and Picador.”
