The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By

Simenon, Georges

ISBN 10: 0141025875 / ISBN 13: 9780141025872

Published by Penguin, London, 2006

About this Item

2nd printing of this mass market paperback edition - a Penguin Red Classic. Translated from the French by Stuart Gilbert with revisions by David Watson. Originally published as L'Homme qui regarderait passer les trains in 1938. A clean, unmarked copy in printed wrappers.

Seller Inventory # 102341

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By
• Publisher: Penguin, London
• Publication Date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0141025875
• ISBN 13: 9780141025872
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition: Later printing.
• Condition: Very good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Crime, Thrillers & Mystery

About this title

Synopsis

Of Simenon's many novels, certain titles stand out as classics. This terrifying reconstruction of a madman's mind is one of them. Known in the little Dutch town of Groningen as a respectable family man, Kees Popinga is the managing clerk of a reputed shipping firm. But when the company collapses under dubious circumstances just before Christmas, taking all his money with it, something snaps in Popinga's mind. From the shell of this model citizen emerges a calculating paranoiac, capable of random acts of violence - even murder. The fugitive Popinga makes his way to Paris, playing a bizarre game of cat and mouse with the police - determined to force a hostile world to recognize his newfound criminal genius ...

In The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By, Simenon created a compelling portrait of a man pushed too far, vividly reconstructing the effect on a mind in the spiralling grip of madness.

About the Authors

Georges Simenon was born in Liège, Belgium, in 1903. He is best know in Britain as the author of the Maigret novels and his prolific output of over 400 novels and short stories have made him a household name in continental Europe. He died in 1989 in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he had lived for the latter part of his life.

Anita Brookner was born in south London in 1928, the daughter of a Polish immigrant family. She trained as an art historian, and worked at the Courtauld Institute of Art until her retirement in 1988. She published her first novel, A Start in Life, in 1981 and her twenty-fourth, Strangers, in 2009. Hotel du Lac won the 1984 Booker Prize. As well as fiction, Anita Brookner has published a number of volumes of art criticism.