Ordinary People

         ..... the books conjure the workaday rhythms and guilty secrets of Paris and small-town France. Simenon's is a world of second-class hotels and third-class railway carriages, of drifters, bargemen, tarts and luckless creditors. His interest was not in intellectuals or master criminals but in his beloved ordinary people - les petits gens. Ordinary people are driven to ordinary acts of violence and social outrage. Criminals look like us, Simenon seems to be saying. His motto "comprende et ne pas juger" (understand and judge not)

Ian Thomson
The Spectator
2019

   https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/if-only-georges-simenon-had-been-a-bit-more-like-maigret/