The Belgian author Georges Joseph Christian Simenon (February 13, 1903 - September 4, 1989) must have been one of the most productive crime authors.  He published well over 400 novels and short stories -less than half under his own name- , but he will be best known as the author of 75 novels and 28 short stories about Commissaire Maigret.

Born in Liege (Belgium), he had to abandon school at the age of sixteen and start working because of his father's poor health.  He worked as a baker and a bookseller and started his writing career at a local newspaper.  After having published his first novel at seventeen he moved to Paris in 1922.  He had various jobs, and in between he wrote several hundred novels, mostly pulp fiction, under more than a handful of different names.  The first Maigret novel he published was also the first novel under his own name, in 1930.

Simenon's private life was quite the opposite of that of Maigret's.  None of his marriages proved to be succesful, and his daughter committed suicide.  He himself claimed he needed sex several times per day, and has slept with more than twenty thousand different women.  He died in Lausanne of a brain tumor.