A respectable middle-aged office-worker becomes aware of the absurdity of human life and finds himself committing a motiveless violent crime. No, not Albert Camus, but Simenon, in 1938, four years before L'Etranger appeared.

L'Homme qui regardait passer les trains is not so much a conventional roman policier as a pursuit thriller coupled with a psychological exploration of what happens when we throw off all the shackles of conventional society. Although the subject is similar to L'Etranger, the technique is very different: instead of Camus's gaunt, spare prose we have a wealth of everyday detail about Kees Popinga's life both before and after the cataclysmic act. The story is, however, told almost exclusively from the POV of Kees, and Simenon (like Camus) effectively forces us to identify with the character. Simenon's approach centres on weaving together the details of Kees's calm and rational approach to avoiding arrest with hints of an increasingly paranoid state of mind.

This is a book that should resonate with modern readers: the background of the economic collapse of the thirties is becoming relevant to us again, and the picture of someone who faces losing job, home and pension because his boss has been siphoning off money from the company into unwise investments is not as dated as we might have thought ten years ago. What also struck me as very modern is the way the fugitive interacts with the press: reading about himself as "Le satyre d'Amsterdam" both infuriates and validates him, and he can't resist writing letters of complaint to the papers when they get things wrong about him. Eventually we realise that the policeman - who plays a key role throughout the book, even though he never directly appears in it - is manipulating the press for his own reasons as well. ( )

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