"They have Everything!" Georges Simenon in Arizona‪.‬

The annals of Southwestern literature seldom include Georges Simenon (1903-1989), but he was here all right, just after the Second World War. The Belgian-born, Francophone author of some two hundred novels, including the world-famous Inspector Maigret detective stories, lived for more than two years in southern Arizona and wrote four remarkable "Westerns" chronicling the region's mores and mentalities during the postwar boom years. A half-century later, this period in our culture is suddenly a hot topic. Simenon's portrayal of life in America in the late 1940s and early 1950s is therefore newly relevant. In the hands of one of the twentieth century's master storytellers, these tales of the emerging New West have always been gripping, daring, and disturbing. A legacy of Georges Simenon's stay in southern Arizona--from the end of August 1947 to the end of October 1950--is that people from these parts pronounce his name correctly. Among Americans, I'm usually embarrassed to do this, to give the accented first syllable the long eee sound, to drop the middle e, and to Frenchify the last syllable, making it appropriately oink-like: Seem'-non This seems pretentious. The average person looks at me strangely. George who?