Blues on the rocks

Can one be influenced by a work in retrospect? If so I'd cite Georges Simenon's The Blue Room (1964) which is everything in a story I find attractive yet am reading only just now. The Blue Room is a magnetic little drama folded up like a pocket knife, ducking between timelines with the simplest of signifiers, and it's short. There's no hiding in a short novel.

Simenon's name is synonymous with the Maigret mysteries which I've never gotten far with. When I was living in London I'd go to Foyles in Charing Cross Road and flick through the crime section. There's a species of narrative that opens on page one with a body or darkness or mutilation (The Eyeball Collector etc) which is not bad – there are rules but no rules, ever, in fiction – and their authors were all far more successful than I am, but it was never my kind of thing. What I did find to read was inevitably by someone dead. So there's your corpse, there – before page one: the name on the cover.