Dirty Snow

In the world of novel writing, Georges Simenon was a natural, a kind of Mozart of the novel. He quit school for good as a teenager, never participated in a writing workshop, never enrolled in a writing program and never attended a writing class. With his innate ear for language and dialogue, eye for detail and feel for storytelling, all he needed was four dozen freshly sharpened pencils lined up on his desk and a 'Do Not Disturb' sign to hang on his door. And presto – a first-rate novel written at fever pitch in two weeks. Goodness, what some writers wouldn’t give to have a fraction of his talent.

After ten years of writing dime store potboilers, Simenon decided to get more serious and started writing his Detective Maigret novels. A show more few years after pumping out detective novels, again Simenon decided to become even more serious and thus began writing what he sometimes characterized as romans durs, that is, “straight novels” or “hard novels,” meaning hard on the reader. P.D. James termed these Simenon third phase books as “dark novels.” Personally, I like the sound of all three together: straight, hard and dark. And let me tell you folks, Dirty Snow is exactly that - straight as in straight psychological study (a mile away from detective fiction), hard as in very hard on the reader and dark as in the deep recesses of the human psyche.

Simenon’s novels are nearly always strict point-of-view narratives where readers see people and unfolding events only as the main character sees them. With Dirty Snow, the novel’s main character is a burly eighteen-year-old by the name of Frank Friedmaier, a despicable lout if there ever was one.

The novel isn’t written in first-person but it’s a close cousin – in each and every scene it’s as if we are standing directly behind Frank, gazing over his brawny, swinish shoulder. Judging this novel set in an unnamed European city under World War II-type foreign military occupation as hard on the reader would be understatement; anyone opening the book’s pages had better be prepared for a story that’s tough to swallow; actually, on further reflection, make that extremely tough to swallow.

At various points in the narrative Dirty Snow reminded me of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange (random youth violence), Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (eerie dystopia), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago (state sponsored fear) and Franz Kafka’s The Trial (nightmarish interrogations). Likewise Albert Camus’ 1945 novel, The Stranger, written three year prior to Simenon’s, in the sense Dirty Snow is coated with existential alienation as snow in the novel is coated with dirt, and also is structurally similar to The Stranger in that it is divided into two distinct parts – Frank living on the outside and Frank shut up on the inside.

My strong sense is if Georges Simenon didn’t write all those potboilers and Detective Maigret novels and only wrote a few of his romans durs, then Dirty Snow would be studied and discussed alongside such classics of existentialism as The Stranger and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea. Now I can see why George Simenon thought himself worthy of the Nobel Prize and resented publishers and literati who labeled him a hack catering to the clamoring, detective fiction-loving rabble.

In the first chapter we learn Frank links sex with violence and feels inferior to other, slightly older men who have committed murders, thus Frank plans to murder his first man, a fat officer in the army of occupation known as the Eunuch who is drinking in a bar, murder him with a knife that very evening as a kind of rite of passage. We also come to understand Frank has an odd relationship with an older man, his neighbor, Gerhardt Holst, a man we might infer is a kind of father figure for Frank.

Frank waits in the snow of the back alley, knife at the ready, waiting for the Eunuch to walk out of the bar. Just at that moment Holst walks down the alley. Holst would never see him pressed up against the wall but Frank coughs to make sure Holst knows he is there. Frank reflects: “Of course it wasn’t because of Holst that he was going to kill the Eunuch. That was already decided. It was just that, at that moment, his act had made no sense. It had been almost a joke, a childish prank. What was it he had said? Like losing his virginity.” Let us recall how in traditional societies the rite of passage from boyhood to manhood does not happen in isolation but is a community event, witnessed by older men. Perhaps Frank yearns for such a communal passage.

The plot quickly thickens. I highly recommended this penetrating existential novel published by New York Review Books since there is a most insightful ten page Afterward written by William T. Vollmann. Afterward rather than Introduction is ideal in this case - under the assumption one has already read Dirty Snow, Vollmann critiques the novel in detail without risking giving anything away. At one point Vollmann observes: “Here is Simenon’s genius. Frank wants to be recognized. He wants to be known. He scarcely knows himself, or anything else worth knowing. But if he can somehow stand revealed to the gaze of the Other, then maybe he will achieve some sort of realization. Don’t you and I want to be more real than we are? And wouldn’t it be convenient if somebody else could help us get there?” I hope your literary appetite has been whetted. Again, highly recommended.


Georges Simenon - The first cup of coffee. Awake at 6:00, he prepares it himself and drinks it installed at his machine. He gives himself until 9:00 to write a whole chapter. He works only by electric light. show less

In the world of novel writing, Georges Simenon was a natural, a kind of Mozart of the novel. He quit school for good as a teenager, never participated in a writing workshop, never enrolled in a writing program and never attended a writing class. With his innate ear for language and dialogue, eye for detail and feel for storytelling, all he needed was four dozen freshly sharpened pencils lined up on his desk and a “Do Not Disturb” sign to hang on his door. And presto – a first-rate novel written at fever pitch in two weeks. Goodness, what some writers wouldn’t give to have a fraction of his talent.

After ten years of writing dime store potboilers, Simenon decided to get more serious and started writing his Detective Maigret show more novels. A few years after pumping out detective novels, again Simenon decided to become even more serious and thus began writing what he sometimes characterized as romans durs, that is, “straight novels” or “hard novels,” meaning hard on the reader. P.D. James termed these Simenon third phase books as “dark novels.” Personally, I like the sound of all three together: straight, hard and dark. And let me tell you folks, Dirty Snow is exactly that - straight as in a mile away from detective fiction, hard as in very hard on the reader and dark as in the deep recesses of the human psyche.

Simenon’s novels are nearly always strict point-of-view narratives where readers see people and unfolding events only as the main character sees them. With Dirty Snow, the novel’s main character is a burly eighteen-year-old by the name of Frank Friedmaier, a despicable lout if there ever was one. The novel isn’t written in first-person but it’s a close cousin – in each and every scene it’s as if we are standing directly behind Frank, gazing over his brawny, swinish shoulder. Judging this novel set in an unnamed European city under World War II-type foreign military occupation as hard on the reader would be understatement; anyone opening the book’s pages had better be prepared for a story that’s tough to swallow; actually, on further reflection, make that extremely tough to swallow.

At various points in the narrative Dirty Snow reminded me of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange (random youth violence), Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (eerie dystopia), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago (state sponsored fear) and Franz Kafka’s The Trial (nightmarish interrogations). Likewise Albert Camus’ 1945 novel, The Stranger, written three year prior to Simenon’s, in the sense Dirty Snow is coated with existential alienation as snow in the novel is coated with dirt, and also is structurally similar to The Stranger in that it is divided into two distinct parts – Frank living on the outside and Frank shut up on the inside.

My strong sense is if Georges Simenon didn’t write all those potboilers and Detective Maigret novels and only wrote a few of his romans durs, then Dirty Snow would be studied and discussed alongside such classics of existentialism as The Stranger and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea. Now I can see why George Simenon thought himself worthy of the Nobel Prize and resented publishers and literati who labeled him a hack catering to the clamoring, detective fiction-loving rabble.

In the first chapter we learn Frank links sex with violence and feels inferior to other, slightly older men who have committed murders, thus Frank plans to murder his first man, a fat officer in the army of occupation known as the Eunuch who is drinking in a bar, murder him with a knife that very evening as a kind of rite of passage. We also come to understand Frank has an odd relationship with an older man, his neighbor, Gerhardt Holst, a man we might infer is a kind of father figure for Frank.

Franks waits in the snow of the back alley, knife at the ready, waiting for the Eunuch to walk out of the bar. Just at that moment Holst walks down the alley. Holst would never see him pressed up against the wall but Frank coughs to make sure Holst knows he is there. Frank reflects: “Of course it wasn’t because of Holst that he was going to kill the Eunuch. That was already decided. It was just that, at that moment, his act had made no sense. It had been almost a joke, a childish prank. What was it he had said? Like losing his virginity.” Let us recall how in traditional societies the rite of passage from boyhood to manhood does not happen in isolation but is a community event, witnessed by older men. Perhaps Frank yearns for such a communal passage.

The plot quickly thickens. I highly recommended this penetrating existential novel published by New York Review Books since there is a most insightful ten page Afterward written by William T. Vollmann. Afterward rather than Introduction is ideal in this case - under the assumption one has already read Dirty Snow, Vollmann critiques the novel in detail without risking giving anything away. At one point Vollmann observes: “Here is Simenon’s genius. Frank wants to be recognized. He wants to be known. He scarcely knows himself, or anything else worth knowing. But if he can somehow stand revealed to the gaze of the Other, then maybe he will achieve some sort of realization. Don’t you and I want to be more real than we are? And wouldn’t it be convenient if somebody else could help us get there?” I hope your literary appetite has been whetted. Again, highly recommended.


Georges Simenon - The first cup of coffee. Awake at 6:00, he prepares it himself and drinks it installed at his machine. He gives himself until 9:00 to write a whole chapter. He works only by electric light. show less

Frank is nineteen years old in a city under an occupying force, presumably Paris during WWII. He lives on the fringes of society, even more so than others in the city. His mother runs a brothel that’s popular with the occupying army. Frank beds the girls as his due and lives large through crime.

Frank proceeds through life under occupation with a fatalistic attitude. He’s committed two murders – one during a robbery and the other for no particular reason. He summons “fate to take an interest in him.” He’s “courting it, searching everywhere for it.” “He didn’t have enough enemies and he was trying his best to create them.”

When he’s finally picked up and held by the occupiers Frank thinks he’s ready. He holds out show more as long as he wants to, although he’s not really tortured – more like questioned repeatedly. Since he has touched, and actually courted - corruption at a high level, Frank knows he’s not going to get out alive. He can at least dictate his circumstances a bit until he manipulates a visit from a girl he wronged and her father, whom he simultaneously detests and admires. Then he gives his interrogators what they want and welcomes his punishment. show less

Frank, il protagonista di questo noir psicologico, è un ragazzo di diciannove anni che per avviarsi “alla vita” e per emergere dall’anonimato di una squallida esistenza in un ambiente degradato, sceglie la via del delitto.
Come se avesse frapposto uno schermo invalicabile tra le proprie emozioni e ciò che lo circonda, tanto il rito iniziatico dell’omicidio, quanto la serie di crimini gratuiti che commette in seguito, sembrano non scalfire minimamente la sua freddezza e il suo cinismo.
Simenon affonda con precisione chirurgica il bisturi della sua indagine fino nei più remoti recessi del cervello del suo personaggio, collocandolo nel sordido scenario di una città del Nord durante l’occupazione nazista, dove predominano show more l’invidia e il tradimento. Un paesaggio freddo, tetro e angosciante che ha come emblema “la neve sporca” del titolo, ma che non può impedire il dipanarsi di una pur strana storia d’amore ed una resa dei conti finale con i sentimenti. show less

(Read in French)

I downloaded and starting reading this because somehow I had confused Simenon and Patrick Modiano in my head - I was about 100 pages in when I realized that this wasn’t the kind of book I thought it would be, and figured I’d just finish it for French practice anyway.

It kinda struck me as a second rate L’Etranger, taking that books nihilistic dread and turning it into a kind of set piece for a very inconsequential crime story. The finest scene was the break in and murder and the psychological writing about the days that followed where our main man Frank, so detached from any kind of healthy social connections tries to tamp down the part of his humanity that makes him feel guilt. But in contrast to the show more aforementioned Camus or Crime and Punishment, this murder is merely a plot point, lacking the pathos and depth of those great books. show less

It's winter in an occupied country. Frank, a 19-year old living on the fringes in the brothel his mother runs, wants to kill someone because every else has. Somehow, I had envisioned Simenon as the writer of somewhat tidy police procedurals, but this is deep, dark noir, as unlike a "cozy" mystery as anything I can imagine. It works as a psychological study of a disturbed, murderous mind, as a picture of the bleakness of life in an occupied country (unnamed, but presumed to be France during WW II), and as a cat and mouse game of crime solving. I'll be reading more Simenon, a lot more.

Where is the humanity of being the worst person, in the worst place, at the worst time, doing the worst things? Dirty Snow (aka: The Snow is Dirty) by Georges Simenon is a bleak, ugly experience by design. Frank is a 19-year-old piece of human trash who lives in some unnamed European city devoid of beauty. It is the middle of some kind of fascist occupation, wherein murder, human trafficking, and weapon sales go ignored while accidentally passing off a counterfeit bill can result in long-term imprisonment or torture.

For approximately 200 pages we are at Frank’s side, and in his head. He commits some low-level and high-level crimes against humanity, and tromps through the snow glowering at every person who crosses his path. And yet, show more something about the reading experience aligns with what we know of humanity. Dirty Snow was written in 1946, with Simenon only having left Occupied France the year before – just before the War ended. One can only imagine what it would be like to immediately set out to write a crime novel set in a version of the city only just vacated which was occupied by a Fascist regime. There’s something true, nightmarish, and compelling about Simenon’s Dirty Snow. show less