Francois Combe, an actor of repute in his
native France, is in New York licking his wounds after his actress wife dumped
him for her younger leading man. Bitter, haunted and unable to sleep, he
cruises the bars of Manhattan in the early hours.
In one he meets Kay, not young, not pretty,
but alluring in a damaged kind of way. They talk; they drink; they walk; they
connect; and eventually stumble into the down at heel Ivy Hotel for a night of
mutual comfort.
Come the dawn (late afternoon actually)
Francois can’t let go, and Kay is content to start all over again with another
night on the town. After all she has nowhere to go having been kicked out of
her borrowed room.
Kay’s past is chequered and as details
emerge of her previous liaisons – marital (she’s divorced), pick-ups (like
him), and platonic (as if) – they torture Francois with a mixture of
unreasonable jealousy and a desperate need to possess.
A fragile trust develops as she moves into
his apartment; and he accompanies her to her old flat to regain some personal
effects. However events conspire to part them. It should be temporary but, as
both can see reasons to cut and run, who can tell?
Simenon of course wrote the Maigret stories,
and a host of other top-notch crime thrillers, and although the setting and
premise is different, the style and craft is familiar. The prose is admirably
concise, New York is as atmospheric as Paris, and the lead characters are
complex and credible (for 1950s New York).
The result is interesting and very readable,
but I prefer his whodunits (or as is often the case with Simenon, the whydunits).
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