Georges Simenon // Monsieur Monde Vanishes

Translation from the French La Fuite de Monsieur Monde (1945). 

A fine copy, signed by Simenon, with an unclipped dust jacket in near-fine condition designed by Wendell Minor. 

It is interesting to note that a second edition of the book was published in French in New York by Bretano's on January 10, 1946. For Simenon, it was a way to collect some money, to compensate for the temporary absence of copyrights from France, which he left in October 1945 to live in the United States (after a temporary halt in Canada). 

One of Simenon’s “romans durs”—his darker, psychological novels, the story is about Lionel Monde, a wealthy, respectable Parisian businessman who, at almost 50, abruptly walks out of his life. Without warning his wife or children, he boards a train heading south, seeking anonymity and a chance to start over. 

In Marseille, he drifts into a new existence among ordinary people. He rescues a young woman attempting suicide, and the two form a fragile companionship as he tries to reinvent himself far from the suffocating routines of his former bourgeois life.