A.F. Bhuyan has been writing short stories for a number of years. His work appeared in Best New Writing in 2008 and was an Editor’s Choice Award selection. He has also had stories in Gargoyle and in our sister publication, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. His first story for EQMM, “Moldova, 1992,” appears in our current issue, November/December 2023. In this post, he talks about a childhood experience that helped trigger his need to write fiction.  —Janet Hutchings

In the photograph, a young man hangs by the neck from a tree. He is dressed in a long beige shirt and pants. Next to him hangs another, although facing away from the camera, so it is this first man, with his head bent down at an odd angle, who holds my attention.

The hanged man’s features droop. His eyes are closed. Pants ride up from his ankles as his feet dangle above the ground.

I recall seeing this picture and being unable to look away from it. The finality of the image shocked me. At the age of eight or nine, I couldn’t make sense of it. I knew that I had stumbled on something significant and mysterious, and that, aside from the shock and the revulsion, the photograph had provoked other reactions inside me. What they were, I couldn’t then understand.

The photograph was in a book in my grandparents’ library. The book mostly dealt with World War II. It was an old tome, with yellowed pages and a tattered grey cover. Written by a former Field Marshal, it recounted various campaigns, interspersed with photographs and maps. Red attack arrows on those maps were the only splashes of color. I was grateful for that. The scenes of carnage in the photograph inserts shocked me even in black and white.

It was the only book in my grandparents’ library that left such a mark. Across four bookcases, with each row packed two-deep, there were gothic tales, classics, tales of adventure, crime and even early science fiction. People died in those other works. Heads were parted from bodies. Joints and sinews snapped as some poor folk were drawn and quartered. Characters made decisions that led to destruction and murder. But those happenings didn’t faze me. Why was that? Perhaps, I like to think now, it was because I had understood their intent.

Having read through a chunk of my grandparents’ library, it was apparent to me that those stories were designed to entertain. Violence and death, in those books, were easily explicable. It was part of the plot. A death in a story like that only made me turn the pages faster, so that I could find out more of what the book held. It didn’t make me stop and stare at the page. The images didn’t linger.

Death was present in those other books, but it was part of the bigger story and made to make sense. It therefore seemed all right.

Some years later, once in a while, a random snippet of news would startle me. I’d read in the paper of a man in his forties beaten to death at a bus stop for no reason. A cat horrendously mutilated. A child whose innocence had been taken. These stories would haunt me long after I had turned the page or flicked the screen.

The reactions from when I was younger and that I had almost forgotten returned. By then, I was better at discerning something of their nature. There was still shock. There was anger, also. And bewilderment: how could anyone do that?

The books that I had read shed no light on this point. If they did, the explanations they offered didn’t resonate. Perhaps I wasn’t reading the right books, or not reading them in the right way, if such a way exists. But I thought it more likely that the novels I read simply couldn’t get to the place where those reactions lived.

The photograph in that old grey tome and the violence and the cruelty in it belonged to the real world. That was the distinction. It wasn’t fiction, and could never be reconciled with it. While not especially illuminating, this line of thinking was enough for me to move on.

My viewpoint began to shift around the time that I had come across the works by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon. His works played a part in reconciling, for me, the fictional and the real. One of Simenon’s novels specifically comes to mind.

In The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien, Inspector Maigret investigates the suicide of a shabbily-dressed man who, despite his apparent poverty, mails to himself significant sums of cash. As he delves into the man’s past, Maigret faces increasing danger. The resolution is both elegant, tying together the various strands of the investigation, but also unexpected. At the same time, the emotional climax of the story doesn’t lie in finding out the man’s secret.

The emotional resolution, as it often is for Simenon, lies deeper. While Maigret is portrayed as solid and staid, with eyes “as still and dull as a cow’s,” his visage “blank-faced” and his overall aspect containing “something implacable and inhuman”, this facade belies the depth of his emotional engagement. There is Maigret’s “sense of anguish” over his involvement in the suicide. The recurrent theme of windows, through which characters gaze seeking something beyond–something, with which they are unable to connect. And then there are Maigret’s persistent observations of the characters’ worlds, seemingly tangential to the investigation, like the passing glimpse of a young woman and her “little boy of four . . . having breakfast at a nicely laid table”.

And it is on these tangential moments that the final twist in the story rests, where the private sphere illuminates and pushes forward the decision that Maigret ultimately takes—one that is both at odds with the formal resolution of his investigation and yet, in view of his concerns, the only decision that can be right for Maigret.

Not only a suspenseful page-turner, this and many other Simenon’s novels explore—in action—the motivations, thoughts and feelings of the victims and the perpetrators, as well as those who bring them to justice.

As I read Simenon’s works, I got to explore, alongside the author, some of the same reactions I had first felt when I chanced upon the photograph of the hanged man.

What were those reactions?

I now could name them: the wish to set things right, where possible. A sense of the inexplicable, chaotic cruelty of life. And the paradoxical desire for the world to make sense once more.