A fascinating character study of one man under Nazi occupation of France, although Simenon seems to leave the question open as to whether protagonist Frank Friedmeier would have been any different without the war. Frank was a young teenager when the war began, we are told, which became an excuse for him not to return to school; now he is 18 or 19, living in his mother’s tiny apartment brothel, with a series of starving teenage prostitutes rotating in and out. His preoccupations are crime, cruelty, and, most importantly, the Holsts—father and daughter—who live a respectable life across the hall; he has never known a father or any kind of caring relationship not based in manipulation. A series of escalating (and inexplicable) crimes finally brings Frank to the attention of the authorities, with what Simenon suggests is an inevitable conclusion in a corrupt system. William Vollman’s Afterword somewhat misses the mark, intent as he is on measuring this against other noirs rather than absurdist or existential novels (although he does mention Camus’s ‘The Stranger’). It is a Bildungsroman, but it also a political novel about how ordinary *and* unsavory characters navigate a totalizing system, and what it does to even the most personal aspects of their lives.