The Man Who Watched Trains Go By

By Georges Simenon
Translated from the French by Marc Romano
Introduction by Luc Sante

Kees Popinga is a solid Dutch burgher whose idea of a night on the town is a game of chess at his club. Or so it has always appeared. But one night this model husband and devoted father discovers his boss is bankrupt and that his own carefully tended life is in ruins. Before, he had looked on impassively as the trains to the outside world swept by; now he catches the first train he can to Amsterdam. Not long after that, he commits murder.

Kees Popinga is tired of being Kees Popinga. He's going to turn over a new leaf—though there will be hell to pay.

Reviews

Simenon's powerful imagination is what makes his novels so engrossing. One novel leads to another...until the reader comes to feel that he has discovered a world.
— Richard Vinen, The Times Literary Supplement

Every artist has a personality, his own spectacles through which he sees the world; by his spectacles he is known, and we decide whether we like his work or not. Simenon's spectacles may be said to be of pure glass, distorting nothing...A copy of a Simenon book can be said to appear somewhere, in some language, every few minutes around the clock. It almost matches the birth rate, and the product is considerably more interesting.
— Patricia Highsmith, The New York Times Book Review

A truly wonderful writer...marvelously readable—lucid, simple, absolutely in tune with that world he creates of rundown hotels, cold, dark barges, quayside canal-taverns, lurking prostitutes, potbellied burghers, taciturn youths, slippery barmen.
— Muriel Spark

. . . deserves all the movie-land adjectives. It is breath-taking, fast-paced, will hold you enthralled. But is is more than that. It is a first-rate study in abnormal pscychology . . . a great deal of action and suspense, wrapped up in Simenon's superb atmosphere.
— The New York Times

Simenon's finest work is in the romans durs, or ‘hard' novels. The romans durs are extraordinary: tough, bleak, offhandedly violent, suffused with guilt and bitterness, redolent of place (Simenon is unsurpassed as a scene setter), utterly unsentimental, frightening in the pitilessness of their gaze, yet wonderfully entertaining. They are also more philosophically profound than any of the fiction of Camus or Sartre, and far less self-conscious. This is existentialism with a backbone of tempered steel.
— John Banville, The New Republic

Also see:

Dirty Snow By Georges Simenon Translated from the French by Marc Romano and Louise Varese Afterword by William T. Vollmann Dirty Snow, widely acknowledged as one of Simenon's finest books, is a study of the criminal mind comparable to Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me.

Monsieur Monde Vanishes By Georges Simenon Translated from the French by Jean Stewart Introduction by Larry McMurtry Unsurpassed as an evocation of milieu, whether of staid bourgeois propriety or waterfront seediness, Monsieur Monde Vanishes is another triumph by the twentieth century's greatest popular novelist.

Tropic Moon By Georges Simenon Translated from the French by Marc Romano Introduction by Norman Rush In Tropic Moon, Simenon, the master of the psychological novel, offers an incomparable picture of degeneracy and corruption in a colonial outpost.

Red Lights By Georges Simenon Translated by Norman Denny Introduction by Anita Brookner Red Lights, one of Simenon's romans durs, is a dark and brilliant gaze at marriage, and is Simenon writing the American psyche at his best.

The Strangers in the House By Georges Simenon Translated by Geoffrey Sainsbury Introduction by P.D. James In The Strangers in the House, Georges Simenon, master chronicler of the dark side of the human heart, gives us a detective story that is also a tale of an improbable redemption.

The Engagement By Georges Simenon Afterword by John Gray New translation by Anna Moschovakis One of the most chilling and compassionate of Simenon's extraordinary psychological novels, The Engagement explores the mystery of a blameless heart in a compromised soul.

The Widow By Georges Simenon Translated from the French by John Petrie Introduction by Paul Theroux Two outcasts, a widow and a recently released murderer, become involved in a love triangle with the girl next door. Published in the same year and often compared to The Stranger, The Widow is one of Simenon's most powerful and disturbing romans durs.

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