Autographed letter in English signed by Georges Simenon, 1955, writer of Maigret

  
Letter on a thin white paper sheet for air mail, printed with the name and address in Mougins on the Côte d'Azur of the writer Georges Simenon, typed and signed by his hand. Otmar Meisel in Braunschweig, Germany: Dear Mr. Meisel, I would certainly have written to you before to tell you how touched I was by your note of July 4th, but it arrived when my wife was still quite seriously ill. It is very rewarding for an author to receive comments such as yours on his work. With my very best wishes.

Undated letter, but the postmark on the envelope is October 1, 1955, from Cannes. (Simenon spent the year 1955 on the Côte d'Azur).

Sheet size: 26.7 x 17.8 cm. Good condition, usual folds in four from being placed in an envelope (see scan). The abundance and success of his detective novels, including the Maigret series, partly overshadow the rest of his very rich body of work: 193 novels, several autobiographical works, and many articles and reports published under his own name, as well as 176 novels, dozens of short stories, romantic tales, and articles published under 27 pseudonyms.

He is the most widely read Belgian author in the world. The combined print runs of his books reach 550 million copies. According to Index Translationum, Georges Simenon is the seventeenth most translated author of all nationalities, the third French-language author after Jules Verne, and the most translated Belgian author in the world (3,500 translations into 47 languages). Among the first men of letters to recognize him as a great writer was André Gide, fascinated by the creativity of Georges Simenon, whom he had wanted to meet since his success with detective fiction. He questioned him many times, exchanged an almost weekly correspondence to follow the creative twists and turns of this popular writer, and adopted the surprising habit of annotating all his novels in the margins, concluding in 1939: "Simenon is a novelist of genius and the most truly novelistic writer we have in our literature today.

" He was the first contemporary novelist to be adapted for the screen at the very beginning of the sound era, with The Night at the Crossroads and The Yellow Dog, released in 1931 and brought to the screen in 1932. Simenon and the actor were very good friends, and the actor appeared in a total of ten films adapted from Simenon.