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Hello and welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. My name is Thomas Jones, and today I'm

talking to John Lancaster, who's written a piece in the current issue of the Al-Rabé about Georges

Simon and his 75 Megre novels, which Penguin have just finished reissuing in new translations.

Hello, John. Hi, Tom. Thanks for having me. Thank you. Thank you for joining me. And I thought we

could begin

where you begin your piece with Simonon's colossal output, as you put it, and that nobody knows

how many books he actually wrote, though it was probably more than 400, which is fewer than Barbara

Cartland, but still puts the rest of us to shame. No, he did, he didn't half crack on, that's true.

Yes, he started as a young man in Liege, his hometown in Belgium,

and he got a job as a reporter on a local paper.

Age, I think he was not quite 16, which is properly strange. It's like something out of a

high concept kids TV show, you know, Georges Simon-on boy reporter. And very early on, latched

onto the idea of making money through writing. And they started doing it in his first book,

he began writing when he was 18, came back when he was 19. He started writing every sort of potboiler,

thrillers, romances, sort of semi-porn, westerns, things like that, at an absolutely

astounding rate of productivity. And he would write, his daily target was 80 pages a day, typewritten.

And even on the assumption that a page is sort of, I mean a short page would be 150 words.

And it could well have been more.

I don't think we know, but there's 10,000 words a day.

And he did that every single day.

...