The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By (Masterplots II: World Fiction Series)
At a glance:
- Author: Georges Simenon
- First Published: 1938
- Type of Work: Psychological realism
- Time of Work: The 1930’s
- Setting: Gronigen, Amsterdam, and Paris
- Principal Characters: Kees Popinga, Mums, Julius de Coster, Pamela Mackinsen, Louis, Jeanne Rozier, Goin, Rose, Inspector Lucas
- Genres: Long fiction, Psychological fiction
- Subjects: France or French people, Murder or homicide, Paris, 1930’s, Detectives, Trains, Netherlands or Dutch people, Fraud
- Locales: Paris, France, Amsterdam, Netherlands
The Novel
The novel opens on December 22. Kees Popinga is bored by the evening routine in his respectable household: children doing homework, wife pasting cards from chocolate packages in an album, stove making the air heavy. He goes out to check whether the shipping firm for which he works has outfitted the Ocean III properly. Nothing ordered has been delivered; his employer,de Coster, is getting drunk in a bar and confides that he plans to abscond,faking suicide. The firm is based on fraud: Kees’s job is gone, his savings are lost. De Coster gives him five hundred...
[The entire page is 2051 words long]
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