The Engagement

By Georges Simenon
Afterword by John Gray
New translation by Anna Moschovakis

The 200th NYRB Classic

A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS ORIGINAL

On the outskirts of Paris, a prostitute is found murdered in a vacant lot. In a seedy apartment house nearby lives pasty, fat Mr. Hire. Mr. Hire who earns his living through a petty postal scam, is a convicted pornographer, a peeping Tom, and, once a week, the unlikely star of a Parisian bowling club, where people think he works for the police. He is a faceless man of regular habits who keeps to himself and gives his neighbors the creeps. After the murder, Mr. Hire's concierge points a finger at him: he was out late the night of the crime. The police have the suspect under twenty-four-hour surveillance. They are only waiting for him to make the inevitable mistake and give himself away. Except that creepy Mr. Hire is in fact an innocent man, whose only mistake is to have fallen head-over-heels in love with the wrong girl.

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.

View the reading group guide (PDF)

Reviews

The romans durs are extraordinary: tough, bleak, offhandedly violent, suffused with guilt and bitterness, redolent of place…utterly unsentimental, frightening in the pitilessness of their gaze, yet wonderfully entertaining.
— John Banville

A truly wonderful writer . . . marvelously readable, lucid, simple, absolutely in tune with that world he creates.
— Muriel Spark

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.

Three Bedrooms in Manhattan By Georges Simenon Translated from the French by Marc Romano and Lawrence G. Blochman Introduction by Joyce Carol Oates An actor and a divorcée meet in a deserted New York City bar. With little in common save loneliness, middle age, and a presentiment of escape, they improvise a love story.

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.

The Man Who Watched Trains Go By By Georges Simenon Translated from the French by Marc Romano Introduction by Luc Sante How different are the cautious routines of ordinary life from the compulsions of a killer? How reliable is even the most reliable man's identity? What finally is the truth about a person?

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 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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