Books: Novels by the Hundred

DESTINATIONS (320 pp.) — Georges Simenon—Doubleday ($3.95).

What is a simenon? Most literate Europeans can give the answer, but a lot of U.S. readers would hate to have it thrown at them as the $64,000 question. A simenon is a novel written by Belgian-born Georges Simenon. No one knows how many simenons there are, least of all Author Simenon himself, but the total cannot be far from 400, and the man who is responsible for them all cannot even remember how he ended his first book, written at 16.

In the U.S., Simenon is best known as the creator of pipe-smoking Inspector Maigret,...