The more one reads of Georges Simenon, the stranger the writer and his writings become. His novels, most of them composed in a week or two, are simple, straightforward, shallow-seeming even, but below the surface lie dark and fathomless depths.

Many readers will know him as the creator of Commissioner Jules Maigret of the Paris Police Judiciaire, the most unpretentious, humane and convincing of the great fictional detectives. However, his finest work is to be found in what he called his romans durs, or hard novels, including such masterpieces as Dirty Snow, Monsieur Monde Vanishes and the jauntily horrifying The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By. Now, Penguin Classics has launched a series of 20 of the romans durs in new translations, starting with The Cat, originally published in French in 1967.

The plot focuses on a Parisian couple, the retired builder Émile Bouin and his wife, Marguerite. Both were widowed, and remarried in their 60s. Theirs is not a match made in heaven. Indeed, they inhabit a domestic hell in a claustrophobic Parisian cul-de-sac, where they spend their days devising means of taunting and tormenting each other in a battle of wills that can only end in tragedy. They are no longer on speaking terms, and only communicate, if that is the word, by exchanging the briefest of notes.

The cat of the title was a stray that Émile rescued from a building site. The creature afforded him a little warmth and companionship in the melancholy of his days, until Marguerite poisoned it, or so he is convinced. In response, he mutilated Marguerite’s pet parrot so badly that it died. Now the bird, stuffed and mounted in its cage, presides over their living room, a standing rebuke to Émile, and a grotesque assertion of his wife’s unrelenting animosity and vengefulness.

We first meet them seated by the fire of an evening. Émile writes a couple of words into a notebook he keeps for the purpose, and tears out the page. “He rolled the paper between his thumb and index finger. He curled back his thumb and released it rapidly, flicking the message into Marguerite’s lap. He never missed his target, as it were, inwardly jubilant each time.” Marguerite pretends not to notice, but in the end she opens the note and reads the message: The cat. In retaliation, “she answered him wordlessly: The parrot”.

Their predicament is hideous and hideously comic, yet the tale overall is deeply sad, and becomes increasingly so as it progresses. Much of the sadness is generated out of remembrances of things and times past. Émile’s first wife, Angèle, was a jolly farm girl with red hands and a raucous sense of humour. Also she loved to make love: “I don’t know who invented this thing, but whoever it was deserves a statue.” Then one day on the Boulevard Saint-Michel she was run down by a bus, and lived on, disabled, for two painful years before dying.

Marguerite is made of steelier stuff than her predecessor. She comes from a wealthy middle-class family – her father built and owned all the houses in the cul-de-sac where she and Émile live – and her late husband played first violin in the orchestra of the Paris Opera. She despises Émile for his working-class origins, and besides, her passions all are spent, except her passion for revenge. They married in their 60s, and even at the start, when they were still speaking, “they were awkward with each other, more inhibited than very young lovers”.

Inevitably, Émile seeks solace elsewhere – though the idyll cannot last. When he returns to his old life in the cul-de-sac, relations between the couple are more vindictive than ever. And yet The Cat, for all its bleakness, is, in a strange, Simenonian fashion, a kind of love story. Only an artist of genius could have wrought pathos out of the ghastly plight of Émile and Marguerite, lost souls clinging to the raft of their mutual dependence.