David P. Simmons

Sunday, June 18, 2017

On why Louis, the protagonist, is not Georges, the writer

David P. Simmons: A New England native, David studied at Exeter Academy, Yale College, and the Yale School of Medicine. After completing surgical residencies at the University of Michigan and Harvard, he practiced orthopaedics in the Boston area. Once retired in 1999, David started writing fiction, spending whatever was left of his time reading French, sculpting wood, and photographing nature. After producing two murder mysteries in English, The Sum of Her Parts and No End of Guilty Creatures, he switched to writing in French. The first product was Le Docteur Maigret, a novel that transformed the famous detective, Jules Maigret, the superstar of 103 stories by Georges Simenon, into a different man. Since Maigret attended medical school for two years, continued to read medical articles and textbooks throughout his police career, and used that knowledge during his investigations, a doctor like David was ideally prepared to construct an original story about the detective’s fate. Translating the novel into English was the logical next step and a new adventure. Doctor Maigret was the result.

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