In this book, one of Georges Simenon’s roman durs (hard novels), we meet attorney Hector Loursat as he wakes to the sound of a gunshot, and sees one figure fleeing his house before finding another man dead upstairs. Loursat, despite a promising early career, has withdrawn from society and spends his days drinking too much wine and trying to avoid interacting with his grown-up daughter. However, he sets about trying to solve the crime that has taken place within his own house, and the second part of the story details the ensuing court case.

This is less a detective story than a psychological study, and thus not what I expected. While I could appreciate the writing and the careful construction of the characters, I can’t say that it was particularly enjoyable. I can see why it would appeal to others, but I wasn’t invested enough in the characters (the vast majority of whom were pretty unpleasant) to care much about the outcome of the trial or what followed. I would, however, read more by this author.

My thanks to the author, NetGalley, and the publisher for the arc to review.

With the feel of a crime noir, I was envisioning a classic black and white movie as I was reading this fascinating story.

A man in decline, Hector Lousart spends his days and nights drinking Burgundy wine, holed up in his room and shut away from the world. He's lived this way for eighteen years, ever since his wife left him and their daughter Nicole for another man.

It's a night like any other, when a gun shot is heard and so begins the curious case of the stranger in the house, shot dead.

The case animates Hector and connects him with his daughter Nicole for the first time.

Culminating in an explosive court-room scene, this was an immersive and compelling read.

Waking up of a drunken beauty.

Beauty as in all humans have beauty and Simenon's keen eye is one who brings out the facets in his characters like all the facets that let diamonds shine.

This was a chilling but genial read! As usual in Simenon' s novels, I have been captivated by the powerful characterisation. It is one of those books where characters take over the (excellent) plot, and make the book unforgettable! Highly recommended!

A more traditional crime novel without Maigret to hold it together or drive the investigation. That said and understood this is a literary masterpiece; showing the slow decline of a popular lawyer.

Hector Loursat unfortunately is a shadow of his former self, intelligent, but he has withdrawn from social life after his wife left him for another man. He was left to bring up his two year old daughter. For these eighteen intervening years he has presented himself as a cantankerous recluse; drinking heavily, with little self respect and living more like a wounded animal than a human being.

The Strangers in the House refers to his daughters’ friends, a gang of mainly young people from good families who live in a make believe world of drinking, performing outrageous stunts or dares and using Loursat’s home as a den of thieves. Nicole’s father is oblivious of these antics due to his drunken stupor and mostly using only part of the house.
However when a petty criminal is shot in one of the upstairs rooms; Loursat is awakened by the gunshot and goes to investigate.

This is a very seminal moment as it provides a fresh impetus to Loursat as he unpicks all these events, tries to understand the gang members and the circles they moved in. All the time wondering who among them fired the fatal shot.

I quickly warmed to this washed up lawyer who suddenly has a purpose and finds himself enjoying leaving the house and trying to solve the murder.
He is like a man reborn and it is as though he himself was a stranger in his own home.

The story and range of characters shows Simenon’s observations of cross sections of society, his ear for dialogue and ability to write a tense crime mystery.
It compliments his Maigret series and enhances his status as a serious author.

The strangers in the house by George Simenon.
Hector Loursat has been a drunken recluse since his wife left him eighteen years ago. Shut away in his dilapidated mansion in the small town of Moulins, he barely speaks to his daughter. But when the sound of a gunshot penetrates the padded walls of his study one night, and he discovers a body, Loursat is forced to act. No longer able to ignore the world, he determines to get to the truth of what happened, and save an innocent life.
A good read. Likeable story. 4*.

Hector Loursat is a lawyer who has not worked for some years and has now become a consumer of vast quantities of alcohol and withdrawn from society and life in general.
When he awakens one night to find a stranger in his house events start to unfold that will shake up his life and bring him to his senses.
This is Georges Simenon at his finest, a detective story that is not a detective story, but is but also has courtroom drama.
His characters are wonderful as ever, the settings and circumstances are unusual but believable.
Much of the story takes place in the underbelly of the city of Moulins, but Simenon makes the reader comfortable there.
At the start of the book the reader is likely to feel sorry for Loursat, but at the end they will be cheering with him.

Brilliant plot. Brilliant structure. Marvellous book.
Howard Curtis’s translation is impeccable, often stories of this sort become insipid because of the poor translation of difficult concepts, if you didn’t know that this book had been written in French you would believe it had been written in English. Great Job.

I was hooked from the first page. The writing is superb and enthralling and overall, I just loved this book.

'The Strangers in the House' is one of the Simenon novels which are considered psychological novels or "romans durs", in other words, his serious work, unlike the Maigret novels. But to me, this just highlights the brilliance of Simenon and of his creation, Maigret; Simenon may not have considered the Maigret novels to be of such value but I can’t agree. This is the first Simenon novel I have read not to feature Maigret but in the first part of the book in particular, Maigret could have walked in at any point and not been in the slightest out of place. This is Simenon’s France: distinctive, certainly a little depressing, but very real and quite addictive!

Simenon’s writing (even in translation) is so distinctive, the atmosphere he created so palpable, and what he reveals about life and the interactions of people so profound that any of his novels can really be considered as psychological, "hard" novels. The Strangers in the House probably does take a little longer than most Maigret novels to explore certain ideas, but although still short, it is nice to have a Simenon work you can really 'get your teeth into'.

It is great to see Penguin continuing to republish new Simenon translations. This one is another winner.

This is another remarkable and I would imagine influential Simenon crime/courtroom drama. It's really tautly written and, perhaps as a consequence, seems very contemporary in style (if not setting). Described at one point as "this undramatic drama", it has a lot to say about love, loss and existence. The isolation of the central figure, the alcoholic lawyer Loursat, from live and aliveness brings this all together very powerfully: "he had never been able to join in other people's peaceful, everyday lives. He envied this men. He envied everything that was alive around him, these strangers walking, going somewhere." You can't really go wrong with a Simenon.

I am slightly ambivalent about The Strangers In The House. A good deal of it was excellent, but there are aspects I wasn’t so keen on.

First published 1940, it’s a story with a pretty well-worn trope at its heart: a misanthropic recluse forced back into daily life by circumstance and beginning to live again. This part, Simenon does with great subtlety and considerable insight, I think, as a murder in the house of lawyer Hector Loursat brings him inevitably back into contact with the pre-war small-town society he has shunned and despised for so long. I found the portrait of Loursat, of his small household and of the bourgeoisie of the town very convincing and rather gripping. Curiously, the story of the murder seemed much less successful – especially its courtroom denouement which didn’t ring true at all – which meant that the book rather lost its way for me, although the central thread of Loursat’s character continued to be very well done.

I have been somewhat dubious about all of Simenon’s non-Maigret books that I have read; this was one of the better ones for me. I see that John Banville has described it as a masterpiece and it does carry many of the hallmarks of Banville’s own work in its intense study of the minutiae of a character’s behaviour and personality, although it has a commendable concision which Banville often lacks. I can’t agree that it’s a masterpiece, but it has enough real quality to be an involving and rewarding read which I can recommend.

(My thanks to Penguin Books for an ARC via NetGalley.)

The Strangers in the House is one of the many standalone novels written by Simenon that are described as romans dur, or ‘hard novels’. I’m not entirely sure what that term means, but as far as I can tell, it refers to the dark, noirish atmosphere, and the hard, bleak lives that the characters are leading. And the life of our protagonist, Hector Loursat, is certainly bleak! Once a successful lawyer, he fell into a depression when his wife left him eighteen years earlier and turned to alcohol for comfort. Since then, he has spent his time sitting alone with his books and a constant supply of red wine, living in the same house as his daughter Nicole, but barely aware of her presence.

Loursat’s miserable, solitary existence continues until, one night, he hears a gun being fired inside the house and discovers a dead body in one of the bedrooms. When Nicole and her friends become implicated in the murder investigation, Loursat is forced to acknowledge that his daughter is now a stranger to him…or is it in fact Loursat himself who is the stranger in the house?

There’s a detective fiction element to this novel, as Loursat sets out to uncover the truth behind the murder. When suspicion falls on Nicole’s lover, he agrees to defend the young man in court and finds that getting involved in the legal profession again gives him some purpose in life. However, although we see Loursat speaking to the suspects, getting to know Nicole’s circle of friends and learning all he can about the victim, this is not a conventional mystery novel and not one that the reader has much chance of being able to solve. If you’re expecting a story with clever twists and surprises you’ll be disappointed; even the court scenes which take up about half of the book lack suspense.

The book is much more successful as a psychological study of a lonely, reclusive man who is forced to confront his own behaviour and gradually engage with the people and things he has neglected for years. Watching Loursat’s reawakening as he becomes aware of the things that have been going on in his own house without his knowledge is fascinating. Whether or not he finds redemption and whether it’s too late to repair the damage to his relationship with Nicole I will leave you to discover for yourself, if you read the book. All I will say is that Simenon’s storytelling is realistic, unsentimental and ‘hard’.

I am so pleased that Penguin Classics is publishing a collection of Simenon’s ‘romans durs’ and have read several. This is up there with the best of them as it has all the features of his writing that I have come to admire. No wasted words and no padding create an intense atmosphere. It is nearly always night-time and raining, and the town and the house itself are dark and forbidding, just waiting for a mysterious murder to take place.

The characters are all shady in their own way, hiding their thoughts and nursing individual grievances. None more so than Hector Loursat and his gradual emergence from years of sulking and resentment is central to the novel.

‘To shake himself, shake off the straw from his pigsty, shake off the dubious smells that still clung to his skin, the sourness of his ego which had stewed for too long within book-lined walls.
And to charge ahead …..’

‘He had discovered people, smells, sounds, shops, lights, feelings, a magma, a swarming life that didn’t resemble classical tragedies, fools who were passionate and unexpected, indefinable relationships between people and things, windy street corners, a lingering passer-by, a shop still open for some reason, and a short young man waiting nervously, waiting beneath a big clock that was familiar to the whole town for a companion who was to lead him to the future ….’

I thought the courtroom scenes were particularly well done - more impressions and reactions than wordy testimony. Loursat’s moment of redemption and I loved that in his new-found enthusiasm he even considered putting himself forward to represent another case.

A terrific read and highly recommended.

Simenon is known for the Maigret novels however is standalone fiction/crime is up there with Maigret; the quality of the writing and plotting are exceptional making his work a joy to read. Simenon writes the psychology of characters really well, they are believable, with their dark sides being totally convincing. The Stranger in the House is Simenon at his creative best; Hector Loursat is a reclusive lawyer who has hidden from the world and his daughter ever since his wife left him for another man. However, Loursat finds himself thrust into the centre of a murder investigation when he discovers that his daughter has been inviting a group of friends to party at his house without his knowledge, when the group drunkenly run over a man they take him to the house so that he can heal, unfortunately the man is murdered.

Exceptionally good.

Vintage Noir..
Character takes centre stage in this vintage noir from Simenon. Hector Loursat, a recluse, hears a gunshot and subsequently finds a body and from there the tale is born. No word is wasted here but the genius lies in the overwhelming feeling of compassion ingrained in this lonely man. Beautifully written.

It usually took Georges Simenon just eight days to write a novel. Over the years I have endeavoured to avoid overly prolific authors, preferring quality to quantity, but the one exception has always been Simenon, surely one of the most prolific authors of all time with at least 431 novels published (and lots more written for pulp magazines in the 1920s and 1930s under pseudonyms or anonymously). The man was a genius and like Dickens his writing has stood the test of time. And it isn't just the Maigret novels that are still worth reading.
Monsieur Hector Laursat de Saint-Marc is an extraordinary character: living the life of a recluse for eighteen years, in the same house as his daughter Nicole, whom he has ignored. He is rarely sober. It takes the discovery of a murdered man in his house to bring him back to reality. Simenon explores many themes through his eyes, giving him compassion and empathy and individuality in abundance. A poignant and compelling masterpiece.

For a lover of crime fiction, I’m embarrassed to say that I had never read a Georges Simenon novel up to this point and I can honestly say I now regret it and have lots of catching up to do.The Strangers in the House is an excellent introduction and features the reclusive bitter and borderline alcoholic Hector Boursat. Following the death of a stranger in his home following the escapades of his daughter and her friends ,Boursat lift s the veil of his closed life and ventures back into society to defend the accused. Part of crime fiction and part exploration of a man’s desire to step out of society and live a reclusive and lonely life following his wife’s departure for another man. The awakening of Boursat as his eyes open to a new world is just as rewarding as the detective fiction element.
An enjoyable period crime read but also somewhat profound in its journey in to one man’s battle to understand who he has become and the required metamorphosis to fulfil the next stage of his life.

The Strangers in the House is an interesting read as a drunken recluse wakes up to find a dead man in his house.

If you have read any of Georges Simenon’s previous books then you will recognise and enjoy the style of writing as the story unfolds

A good book