All sources give different totals. He had many pseudonyms, dating back to the time when he was starting out as a hyper-prolific hack in his Belgian youth.
To complicate things further, many of his books were published serially and are of a length somewhere between longish short story and shortish novella, so people of good faith can disagree about whether they count as books. In any case, we can agree that he wrote an almost inconceivable number of novels and stories: more than four hundred, according to his current English publisher, Penguin.
His career divides with convenient clarity into fifths. His first novel, Au Pont des Arches , came out in , when he was Over the next few years, under a variety of pseudonyms, he wrote or so pulp books, mainly of novella length, from titillating near porn to thrillers to Westerns.
This early work was undertaken as a conscious project to learn his craft and make money in the process. Not an easy trick.
The first Maigret novels were written in a burst of creative energy that began in Simenon thought he was done with Maigret by the end of this period: in the novel simply called Maigret the inspector has retired and moved back to his homeland in the Loire, but comes out of retirement to help a nephew out of a scrape in Paris.
