Julian Symons

• Born: May 30, 1912
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: November 19, 1994
• Place of death: Kent, England

Types of Plot: Inverted; psychological

Principal Series: Chief Inspector Bland, 1945-1949; Francis Quarles, 1961-1965; Detective Chief Superintendent Hilary Catchpole, 1994-1996

Contribution

Julian Symons produced a body of crime fiction that moved beyond genre formulas with its emphasis on the artistic representation of a particular worldview, its exploration of the human psyche under stress, and its ironic commentary on a world in which the distinctions between the lawbreaker and the forces of law frequently blur into uselessness. Symons viewed the crime novel as a vehicle for analysis of the effects of societal pressures and repressions on the individual. Symons mainly concentrated on psychological crime novels that delineate what he called “the violence that lives behind the bland faces most of us present to the world.” Typically, his characters were ordinary people driven to extreme behavior, average citizens caught in Hitchcockian nightmares; the focus was on the desperate actions prompted by the stresses of everyday life. Symons expanded the limits of the crime novel, proving through his work that a popular genre, like orthodox fiction, can serve as a vehicle for a personal vision of Western society gone awry, of human lives in extremis.

Any assessment of Symons’s contribution to crime literature must include mention of his two histories of the genre: The Detective Story in Britain (1962) and Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel (1972, revised 1985; also known as Mortal Consequences: A History, from the Detective Story to the Crime Novel). In both of these works, Symons detailed what he perceived to be a shift in both popularity and emphasis in the genre from the elegantly plot-driven classic detective story of the Golden Age of the 1920’s and 1930’s to the more psychologically oriented crime novel with its emphasis on character and motivation.

Biography

Julian Gustave Symons (the name rhymes with “women’s”) was born on May 30, 1912, in London, the last child in a family of seven. His parents were Minnie Louise Bull Symons and Morris Albert Symons, but Julian never learned his father’s original name or nationality. A seller of secondhand goods until World War I brought him profits as an auctioneer, the elder Symons was a strict Victorian-era father.

As a child, Julian Symons suffered from a stammer that placed him in remedial education despite his intelligence. Although he overcame his speech problems and excelled as a student, Symons nevertheless ended his formal education at the age of fourteen and began an intense program of self-education that encompassed all that was best in literature. Symons worked variously as a shorthand typist, a secretary in an engineering firm, and an advertising copywriter and executive, all in London, before he became established as an important and prolific writer of crime fiction.

At first glance, Symons’s literary career appears to fall rather neatly into two distinct and contradictory phases: radical poet in the 1930’s and Tory writer of crime fiction. A founder of the important little magazine Twentieth Century Verse and its editor from 1937 to 1939, Symons was one of a group of young poets who in the 1930’s were the heirs apparent to Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden. Before the outbreak of World War II, Symons was already the author of two volumes of poetry and was acquiring a reputation as an insightful and astute literary critic.

In 1941, Symons married Kathleen Clark; they had two children, Sarah and Maurice. From 1942 to 1944, Symons saw military service in the Royal Armoured Corps of the British army. A major turning point in Symons’s career was the publication of his first crime novel, The Immaterial Murder Case (1945). Originally written as a spoof of art movements and their followers, this manuscript had languished in a desk drawer for six years until Kathleen encouraged him to sell it to supplement his wages as a copywriter.

The success of this and the novel that followed, A Man Called Jones (1947), provided Symons with the financial security he needed to become a full-time writer and spend time on books that required extensive research. With his fourth novel, The Thirty-first of February (1950), Symons began to move away from the classic detective forms to more experimental approaches. He supplemented his freelance income with a weekly book review column, inherited from George Orwell, in the Manchester Evening News from 1947 to 1956. Through the years, he also wrote reviews for the London Sunday Times (1958-1968), served as a member of the council of Westfield College, University of London (1972-1975), and lectured as a visiting professor at Amherst College, Massachusetts (1975-1976).

A cofounder of the Crime Writers’ Association, Symons served as its chair from 1958 to 1959. That organization honored him with its Crossed Red Herrings Award for best crime novel in 1957 for The Colour of Murder, a special award for Crime and Detection in 1966, and the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for lifetime achievement in 1990. Symons also served on the board of the Society of Authors from 1970 to 1971, succeeded Agatha Christie as president of the Detection Club from 1976 to 1985, and presided over the Conan Doyle Society from 1989 to 1993. The Mystery Writers of America honored him with the Edgar Allan Poe Award for The Progress of a Crime in 1961, a Special Edgars Award for Bloody Murder in 1973, and the Grand Master Award in 1982. The Swedish Academy of Detection also made him a grand master in 1977; he won the Danish Poe-Kluhben in 1979, and was named a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1975. His final novel, A Sort of Virtue: A Political Crime Novel, appeared in 1996—two years after his death.

Analysis

Although Julian Symons’s intricately crafted crime novels have their roots in the classic detective tradition, they also represent his lifelong fascination with genre experimentation, with moving beyond the confines of the tightly structured detective story that provides, through a sequence of cleverly revealed clues, an intellectually satisfying solution to a convoluted crime puzzle. In Bloody Murder, Symons has made clear the distinctions he draws between the detective story and the crime novel. To Symons, the detective story centers on a Great Detective in pursuit of a solution to a crime, generally murder. Major emphasis is placed on clues to the identity of the criminal; in fact, much of the power of the detective story derives from the author’s clever manipulation of clues and red herrings. Typically, the British detective story is socially conservative, set in a rural England that still reflects the genteel lifestyle of a bygone age. The crime novel, by contrast, generally has no master detective, but rather probes the psychology of individuals who have been driven by their environment—usually urban or suburban—to commit crimes or to become victims. Quite often the crime novel is critical of the social order, especially of the ways in which societal pressures and institutions gradually and inexorably destroy the individual.

Chief Inspector Bland

Although Symons began his career with three formula detective novels featuring Chief Inspector Bland of the slow but adequate methodology, he soon abandoned both the form and the icon for the more ambitious project of using crime literature as social criticism. Nevertheless, these three early novels manifest in embryonic form the themes that dominate Symons’s later fiction: the social personas that mask the true identity and motivations of an individual, the games people play to keep their masks in place, and the social pressures that force those masks to fall away, leaving the individual vulnerable and uncontrollable. In fact, masks and game playing are the dominant motifs in Symons’s fiction, functioning at times as metaphors for escape from the more unpleasant realities of existence. About his decision to move beyond the series detective, Symons said, “if you want to write a story showing people involved in emotional conflict that leads to crime, a detective of this kind is grit in the machinery.”

In Symons’s crime novels, the central focus is frequently on individuals who are driven to violent behavior by external forces over which they have—or believe they have—no control. “The private face of violence fascinates me,” Symons acknowledged in an interview. More specifically, Symons is intrigued by the violence inherent in suburban dwellers, in respectable middle-class people who commute daily to numbingly dull jobs and return home to stiflingly placid homes and families in cozy English neighborhoods. Not for Symons the placid world of the English village with its hollyhocks and quaint cottages and population of genial eccentrics. His is the world of the ordinary and the average, at home and in the workplace; he delineates the sameness of the workaday routine and the anonymity of the business world that neatly crush the individuality out of all but the most hardy souls, that goad the outwardly sane into irrational and destructive actions. Symons has commented that in his work he consciously uses acts of violence to symbolize the effects of the pressures and frustrations of modern urban living. How these pressures result in bizarre and uncontrollable behavior is sharply described in The Tigers of Subtopia, and Other Stories (1982), a collection of stories about the latent tiger buried in the most innocuous of suburban denizens, about submerged cruelty and violence released by seemingly inconsequential everyday occurrences.

Nearly all Symons’s characters disguise their true selves with masks, socially acceptable personas that hide the tigers inside themselves, that deny the essential human being. The early work A Man Called Jones unravels the mystery surrounding a masked man who calls himself Mr. Jones. Bernard Ross, prominent member of Parliament in The Detling Murders (1982), once was Bernie Rosenheim. May Wilkins in The Colour of Murder, anxious to hide the existence of a thieving father and an alcoholic mother, takes refuge behind a forged identity as a nice young married woman who gives bridge parties and associates with the right sort of people. Adelaide Bartlett (Sweet Adelaide, 1980) plays the part of an adoring and dutiful wife even after she has murdered her husband. In The Gigantic Shadow (1958; also known as The Pipe Dream), the mask is literal and very public. Disguised as “Mr. X—Personal Investigator,” Bill Hunter, a popular television personality, conceals the fact that he is really O’Brien, a onetime prison inmate. When his charade is exposed and he loses his job, he becomes Mr. Smith, with disastrous consequences. False identities are important to The Paper Chase (1956; also known as Bogue’s Fortune ), The Belting Inheritance (1965), and The Man Whose Dreams Came True (1968). Many of Symons’s protagonists masquerade behind aliases: Anthony Jones as Anthony Bain-Truscott or Anthony Scott-Williams, Arthur Brownjohn alias Major Easonby Mellon, Paul Vane as Dracula. Each of these characters is forced at some point to come to terms with one of the truths of Symons’s world: The person behind the mask cannot—must not—be denied, and role-playing cannot be continued indefinitely. Person and persona must be integrated, or face destruction.

To maintain the fictions of their public personas, Symon’s characters often play elaborate games with themselves and with others. Lenore Fetherby (The Name of Annabel Lee, 1983), in an effort to acquire irrefutable proof that she is her sister Annabel Lee, sets up a complicated trans-Atlantic charade in which she (as Annabel) has an intense affair with a bookish American professor who can be relied on to remember his only romance. May Wilkins (The Colour of Murder) pretends to outsiders that her marriage is the perfect union of two ambitious young people. Determined to make his way in a class-dominated society, Bernard Ross (The Detling Murders) disguises his Jewish ancestry by concocting an appealingly down-to-earth background as the son of immigrant farmers in America. For others, games are safety mechanisms that allow people to cope with the tensions and insecurities of urban existence. Mrs. Vane (The Players and the Game, 1972), bored and disillusioned by the failure of her marriage, takes refuge in endless bridge games. Bob Lawson works out his frustrations through visits to a prostitute who pretends to be a physician and subjects him to the various indignities of physical examinations.

The Colour of Murder

Frequently, the game playing takes on the more dangerous aspect of fantasy in which a character convinces himself of the truth of some impossible scenario and proceeds to live his life as though the fantasy were reality. Such is John Wilkins’s problem in The Colour of Murder. Convincing himself, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that Sheila Morton nurses a secret passion for him, Wilkins forces his way into her company, even intruding on her vacation at a seaside resort. Consequently, he is convicted of her murder by a jury that, in an ironic parallel of his refusal to see the obvious vis-à-vis Sheila’s feelings about him, chooses to misapprehend the clues and to believe Sheila’s murder to be the result of Wilkins’s thwarted passion.

Sweet Adelaide and The Players and the Game

For many characters, fantasy has more than one function. Not only does it enable the dreamer to exist comfortably within the mask, but also it becomes an avenue of escape from everyday monotony or an intolerable situation. Immersed from childhood in a fantasy about her aristocratic forebears and her true position in society, Adelaide Bartlett (Sweet Adelaide) imagines herself too refined and too delicate for the grocer she is forced to marry. Her dreams of a pure love that permits only celibate relationships between the sexes lead her first to fantasize a chaste affair with a young minister, then to escape to monastic weekends alone at a seaside resort, and finally to murder the man whom she regards as a importunate, oversexed clod of a husband. Paul Vane of The Players and the Game has a fully realized fantasy life. As Vane, he is the efficient and respectable director of personnel of Timbals Plastics; as Dracula, he keeps a diary in which he records his alternative life. Ultimately, Dracula intrudes on Vane’s life; fantasy and reality collide. The results are tragic for both identities.

Death’s Darkest Face

Symons would play on the theme of identity from a different angle in some of his final works. In Death’s Darkest Face (1990), a fictional version of Symons himself is asked to evaluate the progress of an unsuccessful investigation, and the intersection of the author’s life with fiction lends belief to fictional characters who are in reality just so much paper—another series of masks.

Playing Happy Families and A Sort of Virtue

In his final two novels, Playing Happy Families (1994) and A Sort of Virtue: A Political Crime Novel (1996), Symons once again takes up the series detective, this time with an amused affection that makes Detective Chief Superintendent Hilary Catchpole much more sympathetic to the reader than Symons’s earlier investigators. Though Catchpole is a model of the virtuous police officer, his aspirations, foibles, and failings are all too human—he is a hero, but not the elevated supersleuth of Golden Age detective fiction. A Sort of Virtue provided Symons a last chance to comment on larger social issues. Catchpole’s proffered epitaph, “He had a sort of virtue,” stands in for Symons’s final comment on human nature—“an ever-surprising mixture of virtue and vice, in which the most realistic aspiration for heroes is simply to do more good than harm.”

Throughout many of Symons’s novels, his characters live within a stifling, inhibited society in which conformity and bland respectability are prized, and individuality has no place. Progress has created a mechanical world of routine, populated by automatons engaged in the single-minded pursuit of material and social success. Spontaneity, creativity, and play are discouraged by a moralistic society that has room only for those whose behavior is “suitable.” The result is the tightly controlled public personas that mask all individual preferences and needs, personas that ultimately become operative not only in the professional life but also at home.

For many of Symons’s characters, role-playing or an active fantasy life often begins as a harmless activity that serves to relieve the stresses induced by society’s demands and restrictions. In a number of instances, however, the games and the fantasies gradually begin to take precedence over real life, and the individual begins to function as though the imaginary life were real. Tragedy often ensues. Symons has pointed out that all human beings can be broken under too much pressure; his characters—especially those whose energies are devoted to maintaining two separate identities, and who crack under the strain of the effort—prove the truth of that observation. The quiet average neighborhood in a Symons novel seethes with malevolence barely concealed by civilized behavior.

In the Symons crime novel, violence is not an irregularity as it so often is in the classic detective story. Violence—physical, psychological, moral, spiritual—is inherent in the society that suppresses and represses natural actions and desires. Behind the stolid facades of suburban houses, beneath the calm faces of workaday clones, hides the potential for irrationality and violence, denied but not obliterated. “The thing that absorbs me most,” says Symons, “is the violence behind respectable faces.” In his novels, it is the assistant managers and personnel directors and housewives—good, solid, dependable people—whose carefully designed masks crumple and tear under the pressures of life. Violence erupts from those of whom it is least expected.

In short, the concerns of crime writer Symons were the same concerns addressed by mainstream fiction. Symons portrayed microcosms of Western civilization in decay; he described a world in which the individual has no place, communication is impossible, acceptable behavior is defined by a society determined to eliminate all rebellion against the common standard. He examined the fate of those who will not or cannot conform, and he laid the blame for their tragedies on an environment that shapes and distorts the human psyche into an unrecognizable caricature of humanity.

Like those writers who have earned their reputations in the literary mainstream, Symons created a body of work that embodies a distinctive view of life, a concern with the effects of society on the fragile human psyche, and a realistic portrayal of the alienation and frustration of individuals in late twentieth century England, still struggling to regain a sense of equilibrium decades after World War II. His characters, like so many in twentieth century fiction, are fragmented selves who acknowledge some facets of their identities only in fantasy or role-playing and who otherwise devote all of their energies to repressing their less socially acceptable personas. As a writer of crime fiction, Symons opened up innumerable possibilities for innovation and experimentation in the genre; as a serious writer and critic, he brought to a popular form the serious concerns and issues of the twentieth century novel at its best.

Principal Series Characters:

• Chief Inspector Bland is an appropriately named police investigator, who is not impressive or even confidence inspiring at his first appearance. Subsequent appearances, however, prove him to be capable and efficient, even if unimaginative.
• Francis Quarles is a private investigator who sets up his practice shortly after World War II. Large of build and flamboyantly dandyish of costume, Quarles masks his efficiency and astuteness behind deceptively languorous behavior.
• Detective Chief Superintendent Hilary Catchpole is a virtuous, compassionate, middle-class police investigator. Happily married to a jovial wife, Catchpole represents the stalwart hero of the people, the prototypical “good man.”

Bibliography

Craig, Patricia, ed. Julian Symons at Eighty: A Tribute. Helsinki, Finland: Eurographica, 1992. Collection of essays written in homage to Symons by both novelists and scholars of detective fiction.

Grimes, Larry E. “Julian Symons.” In Twelve English Men of Mystery, edited by Earl F. Bargainnier. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1984. Summary and analysis of Symons’s career, comparing him to other important mystery authors.

Herbert, Rosemary. The Fatal Art of Entertainment: Interviews with Mystery Writers. New York: G. K. Hall, 1994. Lengthy interview with Symons discusses crime writers from Charles Dickens to modern writers such as Elmore Leonard and Symons’s personal history and his writing habits.

Horsley, Lee. The Noir Thriller. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Scholarly, theoretically informed study of the thriller genre. Discusses Symons’s The Players and the Game.

Malmgren, Carl D. Anatomy of Murder: Mystery, Detective, and Crime Fiction. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green States University Popular Press, 2001. Includes analysis of Symons’s The Thirty-first of February. Bibliographic references and index.

Pritchard, William H. “The Last Man of Letters: Julian Symons.” In Talking Back to Emily Dickinson and Other Essays. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. An essay in praise of Symons, emphasizing his career as both writer and critic.

Walsdorf, Jack, and Kathleen Symons, eds. Julian Symons Remembered: Tributes from Friends. Council Bluffs, Iowa: Yellow Barn Press, 1996. Another homage to Symons, collecting memories of the author from those who knew him personally.

Walsdorf, John J., and Bonnie J. Allen. Julian Symons: A Bibliography with Commentaries and a Personal Memoir. New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 1996. Combines the tribute form with critical writings on Symons’s work and a bibliography of his publications.