I’ve been on a bit of a Simenon kick after reading The Man Who Watched Trains Go By. Having enjoyed that book immensely, I decided to try my hand at The Strangers In the House. I’m not not to far into the book, but already in the first chapter, I found another glaring example of Simenon’s simple mastery of writing riveting prose. I’m not giving anything away, since the flap copy on the book details it specifically, by telling you that the book opens with the main character, Loursat, discovering that someone has been shot in an upstairs room of his house. In the scene below, Simenon — in perfectly crafted prose, not an extra bit of fat or superfluous description — captures the moment of discovery when Loursat first hears the sound of a gunshot. Read a bit:

Normally few sounds reached him in his study. There was Joséphine, of course, who slept in a room immediately above. She went upstairs at exactly ten o’clock every night, and stumped about overhead for a good half hour before finally getting into bed.

But Phine had got into bed at least an hour ago. The sound he had just heard was quite an unusual one, in fact it was precisely its strangeness that had roused Loursat from his torpor.

At first he thought of the crack of a whip, a common enough sound to hear in the early morning when the garbage-men went on their rounds. Continue reading →