An enthralling biography of a man whose life was the stuff of fiction. Numbering more than 400 in all, including the beloved Inspector Maigret stories, Georges Simenon's novels have been translated into 50 languages, with sales exceeding 500 million worldwide. Now, drawing on unprecedented access to Simenon's papers, family and friends, Pierre Assouline gives readers the utterly absorbing story of this tormented and egomaniacal genius of literary mass production. 16-page photo insert. The Belgian-born author, whose many novels include the mega-selling Inspector Maigret books, doesn't come across as a terribly nice man in this coolly detached biography by French editor Assouline. Simenon (1903-89) womanized flagrantly, promoted himself unabashedly, and, late in life, penned a series of controversial memoirs that unsparingly delineated his tortuous relations with his parents, wives, and children. He was also a dedicated writer as committed to growing artistically as to piling up royalties, and his complex personality--perceptively analyzed by Assouline--makes for engrossing reading. French editor and author Assouline, who has written a number of biographies (e.g., on the life of Parisian art gallery owner D.H. Kahnweiler, An Artful Life, Fromm Internat., 1991), probes in his latest the life and work of Georges Simenon, best known in the United States as the author of the Inspector Maigret mysteries. In fact, he wrote over 400 novels, in addition to uncounted newspaper articles and stories. He wrote quickly and disliked rewriting, which accounts, in part, for his prodigious output. For this biography, Assouline has amassed a wealth of information on his life, which rivaled his fiction for adventure and amazement (for example, he had a love affair with Josephine Baker, traveled about the European continent in his houseboat, and filmed an Inspector Maigret story with Jean Renoir). Mystery readers, especially fans of Maigret, will find this biography riveting, and all readers will find much to fascinate them in the life of Simenon. Recommended for public libraries.?Denise Johnson, Bradley Univ. Lib., Peoria, Ill. Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. Few artists' lives are actually as interesting as they would like others to think. Simenon is one of the rare writers whose life actually lives up to public interest and his own propaganda. Born in Belgium and living much of his life in France, Simenon developed an insatiable appetite for love, travel, writing, and other vices. From his early work as a journalist to his clever positioning in the right literary circles to threats of his arrest and worse from the French Resistance at the close of World War II, Simenon encountered great literary figures such as Henry Miller and AndreGide and even fell deeply in love with Josephine Baker. Assouline reveals the details of Simenon's life, the discrepancies with his often self-created history, and the complexities that fueled him to produce such an enormous body of work. Interest in Simenon is likely to continue, largely because readers still devour the Inspector Maigret stories that made him famous and, perhaps, because of meticulous and careful studies such as Assouline's Janet St. John The legendary and extraordinarily prolific Belgian novelist Georges Simenon is profiled in a detailed but surprisingly dry biography. Simenon, creator of the unforgettable Inspector Maigret mysteries, published over 400 books in his lifetime. Almost a decade after his death, his detective and psychological crime novels remain both popular and influential. Assouline, editor of the French magazine Lire, patiently chronicles the evolution of Simenon's style and sifts fact from fiction in the novelist's own memoirs. He examines Simenon's egocentric behavior and compulsive womanizing (he bragged of bedding ten thousand woman) with a noncensorious Gallic shrug. Assouline is at his best when uncovering suppressed areas of Simenon's life, such as his early anti-Semitic writings and his wartime near-collaboration. But for the most part the writer fails to come to life in this narrative, in which mountains of facts take the place of revealing anecdotes. Simenon took his business dealings as seriously as his writing, and Assouline follows suit by presenting his every contract negotiation in tedious detail. Rather than discussing Simenon's art while documenting his life, he saves his discussion of Simenon's body of work for one chapter awkwardly placed near the book's end. In addition, Assouline finds the key to understanding Simenon's character in his relationship with his daughter Marie-Jo, whose obsessive love for her father ultimately led to her suicide. But he hides this information until the last chapter of the book, when he springs it on the reader, acting rather like Maigret revealing some villainy. But playing detective novel tricks with a real family's tragedy comes across as coy at best, exploitative at worst. Assouline's biograph