The Engagement

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.

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 24-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.

Publishers Weekly

First published in 1933, this new English translation of a short, bleak psychological drama from Simenon (1903 1989), creator of Inspector Maigret (Lock 14, etc.), dispassionately describes the fate of the odd Mr. Hire, a reclusive middle-aged man whose life of dull routine begins an inevitable slide into disaster when a prostitute is brutally murdered near his apartment in a Paris suburb. Guilty only of a slightly disreputable occupation, a voyeuristic fascination and an unusual physical appearance, Hire inadvertently seals his fate with mundane, unremarkable observations and suggestions. His concierge brings him to the attention of the police. Though Hire is aware of the net being spread for him and tries to escape it, eventually, like a swimmer struggling against an undertow, he's gradually exhausted and sucked further away from the safety of the shore. This is a quietly compelling story with no hero, no villain and no justice just the inevitability of fate. (Mar.)

Georges Simenon (1903—1989) was born in Liege, Belgium. He started working as a reporter at the age of fifteen and by the end of his life had published hundreds of novels under his own name and sundry pseudonyms. Renowned all over the world for his series of mysteries featuring Inspector Maigret, Simenon was also the author of many psychological novels. The Engagement is one of eight novels by Simenon published by NYRB Classics.

John Gray is Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics. He is the author of many works of philosophy and is a regular contributor to the Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement. He lives in Oxford.

Anna Moschovakis is the author of a book of poems, I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone and co-founder of the Ugly Duckling Presse. In 2005 she translated The Authentic Bistros of Paris for The Little Bookroom. She teaches Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.