ABSTRACT
Most short story writers strive for the utmost economy of means, scaling down plot developments and stripping out all unnecessary detail. The intensity of the form derives from this challenge to the writer to set up a situation and resolve it, to bring characters to life and let them go, in the minimum of pages. Georges Simenon's record on Jews is unedifying. Working as a journalist in the 1920s he wrote a series of openly anti-Semitic articles. In later life he distanced himself from them, claiming that he was ordered to write them and that they did not reflect his real views. At the heart of Simenon's story is a quite different insight. The man on the street of the title does not submit himself to his ordeal for profit or to escape justice; he is not motivated by anger, hatred or fear.
