Simenon also wrote romans durs (hard novels) that are noted for their psychological darkness, such as Dirty Snow (New York Review Books Classics) From NYRB:
"Nineteen-year-old Frank Friedmaier lives in a country under occupation. Most people struggle to get by; Frank takes it easy in his mother’s whorehouse, which caters to members of the occupying forces. But Frank is restless. He is a pimp, a thug, a petty thief, and, as Dirty Snow opens, he has just killed his first man. Through the unrelenting darkness and cold of an endless winter, Frank will pursue abjection until at last there is nowhere to go."
Hans Koning has described Dirty Snow as “one of the very few novels to come out of German-occupied France that gets it exactly right.”
The Man Who Watched Trains Go By (New York Review Books Classics), NYRB:
Kees Popinga is a solid Dutch burgher whose idea of a night on the town is a game of chess at his club. Or so it has always appeared. But one night this model husband and devoted father discovers his boss is bankrupt and that his own carefully tended life is in ruins. Before, he had looked on impassively as the trains to the outside world swept by; now he catches the first train he can to Amsterdam. Not long after that, he commits murder.
Kees Popinga is tired of being Kees Popinga. He’s going to turn over a new leaf—though there will be hell to pay.
Tropic Moon NYRB:
A young Frenchman, Joseph Timar, travels to Gabon carrying a letter of introduction from an influential uncle. He wants work experience; he wants to see the world. But in the oppressive heat and glare of the equator, Timar doesn’t know what to do with himself, and no one seems inclined to help except Adèle, the hotel owner’s wife, who takes him to bed one day and rebuffs him the next, leaving him sick with desire. But then, in the course of a single night, Adèle’s husband dies and a black servant is shot, and Timar is sure that Adèle is involved. He’ll cover for the crime if she’ll do what he wants. The fix is in. But Timar can’t even begin to imagine how deep.
In Tropic Moon, Simenon, the master of the psychological novel, offers an incomparable picture of degeneracy and corruption in a colonial outpost.
The NYRB Classics are one my favorite sources for excellent, older books. They have just brought out Pedigree (New York Review Books Classics). The NYRB page for the book: http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/pedigree/ describes it as:
Pedigree is Georges Simenon’s longest, most unlikely, and most adventurous novel....In the early 1940s, Simenon began work on a memoir of his Belgian childhood. He showed the initial pages to André Gide, who urged him to turn them into a novel. The result was, Simenon later quipped, a book in which everything is true but nothing is accurate. Spanning the years from the beginning of the century, with its political instability and terrorist threats, to the end of the First World War in 1918, Pedigree is an epic of everyday existence in all its messy unfinished intensity and density, a story about the coming-of-age of a precocious and curious boy and the coming to be of the modern world.In 2008, Paul Theroux wrote a fascinating essay for in the Times Literary Supplement titled, Georges Simenon, the existential hack in which he compares Simenon to Camus. OK, now you know Simenonon was no ordinary detective mystery writer. "A bleak vision and relentless seriousness earned his non-Maigrets the appellation romans durs, because dur means not just hard but implies weight, seriousness: not only a stony quality, but density and complexity – a kind of challenge, and even a certain tedium."
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The Friend of Madame Maigret (Inspector Maigret Mysteries)
If you don't know Maigret and you like detective stories, then you are in for a treat - or about 76 treats because that's how many Maigret novels the prolific Georges Simenon published. (I take this number from an excellent essay in the Times Literary Supplement about Simenon by Paul Theroux called "Georges Simenon, the existential hack". The essay is available online.) As with many of the Maigret stories, this one is also published under another name, Madame Maigret's Own Case. Most, if not all, of the books in this new series were previously published under a different title.
Maigret is a seasoned French chief inspector of detectives with an eye for human foibles and a distinct humanism about his policing. Some lists include this title as one of the best of Maigret. Personally, I haven't found much to choose between them - as long as they are primarily set in Paris. Don't be put off by the title (either title). Madame Maigret's role, while key, is also collateral. She provides some crucial information, but Jules really does the work along with his crew of Lucas, Janvier and a very young La Pointe.
Highly recommended.
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A Man's Head (Inspector Maigret Mysteries)
Although not strictly speaking one of Georges Simenon's "psychological novels", Maigret's War of Nerves nonetheless explores the psychology of several characters. Detective Maigret arranges the `escape' from prison of a convicted killer that he helped put away in the first place. Maigret had become convinced of the defendant's guilt, but the evidence at trial had been overwhelming. In this 1940 work, Maigret places his well-established career at risk.
Maigret slowly unravels the mystery behind the true killer, but will it be enough to save the wrongly convicted man or Maigret's own reputation? Simenon leads the reader through an examination of the most basic and most extreme human motivations. Simenon wrote dozens of Maigret mysteries as well as other `romans durs'. Maigret's War of Nerves is one of his better efforts.
Note: A number of the Maigret books have been published under duplicate names. This book was also published As Maigret's War of Nerves. It would be useful if someone put together a definitive list of these duplicate titles
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