Dirty Snow by Georges Simenon
Published in 1950
Simenon’s Frank Friedmaier is a Frenchman living under the Nazi occupation, or perhaps he is a German living under Allied occupation-—it is never made clear, and the character’s names (Kromer, Timo, Lotte) blur matters of nationality. Since Frank is apolitical and certainly not a patriot, where his oppressors come from means little to him. They are there. That is the situation. When he murders an occupation officer, it is not as a partisan, but merely to “lose his virginity”, as he puts it: to kill his first man, so that he may be more like his drinking buddies, who claim to have strangled their lovers for no reason, or killed to facilitate other crimes. They kill not out of passion or rage, but of indifference. Whether in war or in peace it is a man’s role to kill at least one other person and perhaps many. Frank is happy to see his crime blamed on a neighbor with a suspicious violin case, and he wishes for, an eventually gets, a green card that allows him to move through the city at will. The sight of the card makes the occupiers shrink away in fear. Frank kills another victim—-an old lady who recognizes him while he robs her house—-but his most disturbing crime is the false seduction and pimping out of Sissy, a young girl in his building.
It is too easy to conclude that Frank represents an amorality brought about by oppression. He is a monster who could operate under any flag. But the way in which he is dealt with—-by his neighbors, who fear turning him in because of his connections; by the authorities: his ultimate downfall is due not to his murders but to his link to some money stolen from an occupation authority safe and his strange interrogations seem to be about one department getting dirt on another-—do reflect the madness of country under the heel of an outside force.
Frank is a brutal creation, somewhat like Genet’s murderous protagonists but lacking their claims of passion. He lives in his mother’s brothel, and sex is something he takes from whichever woman happens to be nearby. He begins dating Sissy, but his motive is only to provoke her father and to find out if she is a virgin, the information he needs in order to calculate her worth. When he stonewalls his interrogators it is not out of pride, but spite. No one should be allowed to ask questions of him, no matter which uniform they wear.
There are hints of Kafka’s “The Trial”, but Frank is certainly no innocent man. What is strange here is that those in authority are not at all interested in punishing him for his true crimes.
(Note: I was interested to find out that “Dirty Snow” was written while Simenon was living for two years in my hometown, Tucson, AZ, and writing “westerns.”)