In a career in which he wrote the incredible number of some 400 novels – or as many as 500 by some counts (early efforts used several pen-names) – Simenon (1903-1989) wanted his literary reputation to rest on his tightly plotted, often bleak noir stories rather than the acclaimed series of more populist crime procedurals featuring the French police detective Jules Maigret.

Seventy-five “Maigret”s appeared between 1930 and 1972, outselling the “romans durs”, but the author quickly grew weary of his creation and announced his intention to write something different. He hoped to win the Nobel Prize for Literature but didn’t. Eventually the “hard” books totalled 117, most translated into English, only a handful not.

Penguin Random House has been publishing new translations of the hard stuff over the past decade. The Budapest Times has already looked at “The Hand”, first issued as “La Main” in 1968. The best of the psychological books are viewed as scalpel-sharp dissections of human nature and its various obsessions about sex, jealousy and regret, for instance. Circumstance and personality usually force people to the end of their rope, forcing them to extreme acts.

Often, respectable, middle-class protagonists find themselves tripped up by some surprise event out of their control. Or, for reasons of their own, they simply shed their old lives in the hope of finding something different, usually involving refuge in a faraway, transient, exotic, low-life environment (“The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By”, originally “L?homme qui regardait passer les trains”, 1938, and ?Monsieur Monde Vanishes?/”The Flight of Monsieur Monde”, originally ?La fuite de Monsieur Monde?, 1945, spring to mind).

“Betty” is told from the point of view of a woman in her late 20s whose sexual urges, stemming back to a childhood shock, manifest in a compulsion to be promiscuous and a desire for this to be discovered. The book begins just after she has been cast out of her prosperous marriage and is existing as a barfly in a French holiday town. Rescued by a kindly woman, the widow of a prominent doctor, Betty is nursed back to health but her deeper habits are not easily broken.

While Europe is the backdrop for many romans durs, Simenon set several in the United States, where he lived for a decade after the Second World War, and including “La Chambre Bleue”. His skills as a novelist are on full display here, particularly the continual switching from the past to the present as he deftly unfolds his plot incident by incident, inexorably drawing in the reader as each fresh revelation unfolds. Only near the end do we find out what it’s all been leading up to, what actually happened, with a lot of tantalising reading along the way.

We open up in favoured Simenon territory, the bedroom, where we find Tony and Andrée getting their breath back after some eye-popping sex. None of the many women that 33-year-old Tony had known “had given him as much pleasure as she had, an animal pleasure, complete and wholehearted, untainted afterwards by any disgust, lassitude or regret”.

This is the “blue room” in the Hôtel des Voyageurs on the Place de La Gare in Triant, a small town in the French countryside. Tony’s brother Vincent owns the place, and knows what’s going on. Tony and Andrée are both married, though not to each other.

The “blue” refers to the décor and not the adulterer’s frenzied coital activities while there, though the sexually charged Simenon (he of the “10,000 women”, 8000 of them prostitutes) goes a bit nearer the knuckle than normal with a racy description or two. Still, this was published in France in 1963 as the birth-control pill heralded a sexual revolution, and don’t the French have a bit of a liberal reputation in this regard?

Simenon slips in the background. Tony Falcone, of Italian descent, has a company selling agricultural machinery in the village of Saint-Justin-du-Loup, near Triant. He lives in the village with his modest wife of seven years, Gisele, and their daughter Marianne, and so do Andrée and her sickly and morose husband Nicolas Despierre, owner of a grocery store.

The two adulterers went to school together but there was never anything between them until Andrée seduced Tony when he stopped in his car one evening to fix her broken-down Citröen at the side of the road. In a typical Simenon fantasy, Tony discovers that Andrée always had a soft spot for him and she drags him off for a fuck (that’s how the brazen lady puts it) in the tall grass and nettles beside Bois de Sarelle.

Subsequently they have met eight times in the blue room over the past 11 months, and, as stated, the book begins after their latest sweaty session on a ravaged bed. Suddenly, immediately, the scene shifts in the blink of a sentence to mention of Tony being questioned by his lawyer, Maître Demarié. When and why we don’t know yet.

Then it’s back to the naked bodies, sated and recovering from their carnal delights, with another quick switch from Simenon in which it is revealed that Tony met first a sergeant, then a lieutenant from the Police Judiciaire in Poitiers followed by a psychiatrist, Professor Bigot, and the examining magistrate, Diem.

What’s going on? Why the interrogations? What does Simenon have up his sleeve? Masterfully, he leads us on. It is a page-turner. Tony is in handcuffs for the questioning – it’s something serious. With Simenon, a murder is virtually guaranteed but if there was one we must wait to find out who and how. Anyway, you can bet Tony hasn’t been busted for stealing hotel towels.

Thanks to Simenon’s fine balancing trick, with a peep here and a peep there, we aren’t going to find out the nature of the crime until the big revelation near the end. It’s a sort of literary carrot-and-donkey trick. Perhaps it’s not a previously unknown novelistic technique but Simenon has it down pat. The jumps in time are brilliantly handled; no seams visible.

Along the way, as the crime is investigated, every corner of Tony’s life is examined. Things turn nasty. Turns out there are two dead bodies. And when the end comes, it’s a wham-bam. Plus, we now realise, it all basically related back to one casual question that Andrée had asked Tony in the opening pages in the blue room, and Tony obviously never realised what would be the consequences of his unconsidered answer. It’s the clue we missed.

One more neat trick, then, by Simenon, pulling off a classy whodunnit where you don?t actually know who dunn it or what was dunn until near the denouement. Moral (spoiler alert): sometimes it’s better to keep your pecker in your pants.

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