TEHRAN-The Persian translation of “The Two-Penny Bar,” a detective novel by Belgian writer Georges Simenon featuring his character Inspector Jules Maigret, has been released in the Iranian book market. 

Jahan-e Ketab Publishing House, based in Tehran, has published the book translated by Abbas Agahi, as a new volume in the ‘Neqab’ (mask) series, which focuses on detective stories, Mehr reported.

In the story, Maigret visits Lenoir, a condemned man in prison, who says he knows someone at the Two-Penny Bar, who is equally deserving of the death penalty. Lenoir further reveals that he and an accomplice had witnessed a man whom they knew from the bar take a body and dump it in the Canal Saint-Martin. Maigret is unable to find the bar, but later he chances to overhear a man mention it; following him, the inspector discovers he is M. Basso, a married businessman, who leads him to a party at an inn on the Seine at Morsang.

Mingling with the crowd, Maigret is invited to join the party by James, an English bank clerk, and discovers they meet regularly there at weekends. Now part of the set, Maigret returns the following week, where one of the men, Feinstein, is shot dead by Basso after an altercation. Now Maigret has two deaths to investigate; he also uncovers blackmail, murder, and financial irregularities in the social set before unmasking the murderer.

Simenon describes Maigret's view of the turning point in an investigation; where it goes from a frustrating search for any lead at all to the point where they start to come thick and fast.

He also describes an investigation as a matter of painstaking labor and good luck; how after instigating a county-wide search for a suspect, he was eventually found when an off-duty policeman became suspicious of an old woman buying much more ham than she would need for herself.

Georges Simenon (1903–1989) was one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century, who published nearly 200 novels, over 150 novellas, several autobiographical works, numerous articles, and scores of pulp novels written under more than two dozen pseudonyms. Altogether, about 550 million copies of his works have been printed. 

He is best known, however, for his 75 novels and 28 short stories featuring Commissaire Maigret. The Maigret novels were translated into all major languages and several of them were turned into films and radio plays. Two television series (1960-63 and 1992-93) have been made in Great Britain.

Abbas Agahi, 83, is a prominent translator of French literature. A graduate of Paris-Sorbonne University, he has translated over 80 books, mainly works of detective fiction, which is a subgenre of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which an investigator or a detective investigates a crime, often murder.

The veteran translated has rendered works by various authors into Persian, including George Simenon, Frederic Dard, Michel Bussi, Olivier Norek, Jean-Christophe Grangé, Fred Vargas, Stanislas-Andre Steeman, Pierre Boileau, and Thomas Narcejac among others.

The Neqab series of Jahan-e Ketab Publishing House is a rich collection of more than 100 books in the genres of crime, thriller, and mystery. Although most of the works are from French literature, there are translations from English and German literature as well.

SS/