 |
He said what?
British crime writer and critic
Julian Symons (1912-1994) |
Most
of the generation of writers that produced the Golden Age of detective fiction,
that brief era when the puzzle plot purportedly reigned supreme, had departed
not only from the field but from life itself when, a half-century ago in the
Spring of 1972, British crime writer and critic Julian Symons published Bloody Murder, his landmark study of
mystery, detective and crime fiction--there is a difference among them, to be
sure--and the first survey of the murder and misdeeds genre since Howard
Haycraft’s Murder for Pleasure: The Life
and Times of the Detective Story, published three decades earlier in
1941. What made Bloody Murder significant in a way that Haycraft’s book, notable as
it was, had never been, is indicated by Symon’ subtitle, From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel. As one of the contemporary reviewers of Bloody Murder put it:
[Symons]
accepts that fiction’s criminal records are primarily entertainments but
contends that inside this limit there is a point at which escapist and serious
writing converge. He defines this as the
crime novel. Here, puzzles take second
place to characterisation: the concern is not with murder but its consequences
and it is not simply man who is indicted but society itself….Not everyone will
accept the thesis—the diehards will insist that the puzzle is all—but few will
be able to resist the cause.
In writing Bloody Murder, Julian Symons wanted to isolate and quarantine from
the crime novel the “frivolous” but infectiously entertaining detective story,
which in his view had for too long hampered, if not prevented, the genre from
being taken, and taking itself, seriously.
By his own admission Symons wanted both practitioners and public alike to
appreciate that “[i]n the highest reaches of the crime novel, it is possible to
create works of [literary] art,” if admittedly ones “of a slightly flawed kind”
on account of their intrinsic dependence on “sensationalism,” which went back
to the crime novel’s roots in the days of the Victorian sensation novel. Even in superior crime novelists, Symons
avowed, there still was something “that demands the puzzle element in a book,
or at least the element of uncertainty and suspense, as a diabetic demands
insulin.” Symons did not say, as the
consciously highbrow mystery-hating critic Edmund Wilson doubtlessly would
have, “as a drug addict needs a fix,” although it actually would have been a
more accurate expression of the point which Symons was making: that there was
something slightly seamy in all forms of fictional mystery mongering.
1972 seemed a propitious year indeed
for finally putting the “detective story” back in its proper place as mere
entertainment and apotheosizing the serious novel of crime (note that Symons
does not dignify the “detective story” with the word “novel”), as the
generation which had produced so many prime specimens of the detective novel--I will use the word novel--was passing
from the world’s mortal scene. The
review of Bloody Murder quoted above,
which appeared in the pages of The
Guardian on April 6, 1972, came from the hand of Matthew Coady, successor
in the “Criminal Records” crime fiction review column to Anthony Berkeley
(under his pen name Francis Iles), who had died just a little over a year
earlier, on March 9, 1971. Along with
Agatha Christie, who would pass away less than five years later on January 12,
1976, Berkeley had been all that remained on earth of the original founders of
the Detection Club, started in London in 1930 as a social club for eminent
practitioners of the fine art of clued murder, as opposed to the purveyors of
mere thrills, or the shocker-schlockers, if you will, inheritors of the lowly
penny dreadful tradition, like Edgar Wallace, “Sapper” and Sax Rohmer.
Then pushing eighty years of age,
Anthony Berkeley had steadfastly remained in the reviewing saddle throughout
most of 1970. On October 15 he submitted
his final column, which included a review of one of Agatha Christie’s last and
least novels, a muddled political thriller, or something, titled Passenger to Frankfurt. About the lamentable Frankfurt Berkeley had little on point to say (What could one in
kindness say?), aside from an unintentionally amusing and characteristically
cranky bit of carping: “Of all the idiotic conventions attached to the thriller
the silliest is the idea that a car whizzing around a corner at high speed can
be aimed at an intended victim who has, quite unseen, stepped off the pavement
into the roadway at exactly the right moment.
Mrs. Agatha Christie uses this twice in Passenger to Frankfurt.” One
can almost hear that final triumphant Harrumph!
Agatha Christie happily enjoyed a
brief Indian summer the next year with her goodish, if by no means great, Miss
Marple detective novel Nemesis, but
she then published two more mysteries, Elephants
Can Remember (1972) and Postern of Fate
(1973), which were remarkable only as indicators of the author’s rapidly
diminishing powers. Anthony Berkeley
himself had not published a mystery novel in over three decades, having
contented himself with reviewing them under his Francis Iles pseudonym. While there were still a few old timers
around plying the clued murder trade with evident zest, like Ngaio Marsh,
Michael Innes and Gladys Mitchell, their ranks were sadly diminished, like
those of Great War veterans at an Armistice Day commemoration. Even Edmund Crispin, for a few brief years
after the war the wunderkind of detective fiction but now an alcoholic walking dead
man, struggled, zombie-like, for over a decade to complete a final mystery
before his tragic, untimely demise in 1978 at the age of fifty-six.
Julian Symons was well aware of all the
death and decline going on around him.
He began writing Bloody Murder in
1970 at the relatively youthful age of fifty-eight, after having retired from a
decade-long stint as the crime fiction reviewer for the Sunday Times. (His
replacement had been his philosophical opposite Edmund Crispin.) In his critical magnum opus, which he
completed the following year, he predicted
this dire fate for the future of the “detective story”: “A declining
market. Some detective stories will
continue to be written, but as the old masters and mistresses fade away, fewer
and fewer of them will be pleasing to lovers of the Golden Age.”
Symons
omitted from his study any mention of rising British murder mistresses P. D.
James, Ruth Rendell, Patricia Moyes, Catherine Aird and Anne Morice, all of whom
wrote mysteries in the classic puzzler vein and were more than acceptable to
“lovers of the Golden Age.” (Morice, long
out-of-print, was republished last year by Dean Street Press.) The Seventies in fact would see continued
success for all five of these authors, particularly James and Rendell, and
additional notable practitioners of detective fiction joined the murder muster
during the decade, like masters Peter Lovesey and Reginald Hill, both of whom
actually had published their first detective novels in 1970, and masters Colin
Dexter, Robert Barnard and Simon Brett, who came along but a few years later. By 1992 a now octogenarian Symons, who was
just a couple of years away from his own death, was still doggedly insisting
that the market for the detective story “has declined,” although face savingly
he added, albeit somewhat confusingly, that “few old-fashioned detective
stories are written.” Did he mean books
with country houses, men-about-town, stately butlers, terrified maids, bodies
in libraries and other such impedimenta?
Writers like P. D. James and Ruth Rendell hardly had need of those to
devise classic detective fiction.
Yet
“A Postscript for the Nineties,” the valedictory chapter of the third edition
of Bloody Murder, was filled with the
author’s grim foreboding for crime writing’s future. In it Symons lamented the sadistic violence
of James Ellroy's “strip-cartoon” neo-noir tales like L. A. Confidential (1990) and Thomas Harris’ gruesome serial killer
novel The Silence of the Lambs (1989)
(“the literary equivalent of a video-nasty”), as well as the startling,
disturbing rise of…the criminal cozy. Seemingly contradicting his prior claim in
the same volume that the detective story market had declined, Symons acknowledged,
with a certain sense of rue, that the previous reports (mostly his) of the
death of detective fiction had in fact been grossly exaggerated, especially in
his native country, as evidenced by the success of what he called the cozy
mystery (referencing the founding of Malice Domestic in the United States in 1989),
which he conflated with puzzle-oriented detective fiction:
In Britain the cosy crime story still
flourishes, as it does nowhere else in the world. We are a long way away from the fairy-tale
crime world of Agatha Christie, but a large percentage of the mystery stories
in Britain are deliberately flippant about crimes and their outcome….it would
seem that the British crime story has always been marked by its lighthearted
approach, from the easy jokiness of [E. C. Bentley’s] Philip Trent through the
elaborate fancifulness of Michael Innes and Edward [sic] Crispin to the show
businesses mysteries of Simon Brett. A similar refusal to
be serious about anything except the detective and the puzzle can be found on
the distaff side in a line running from Patricia Wentworth through Margery
Allingham and Christianna Brand to half a dozen current exponents of crime as
light comedy. This is a product for which there is still a steady demand, as
the recent foundation in the United States of a club for the preservation of
the Cosy Crime Story shows.
Symons
attempted to distinguish James, Rendell, Lovesey and Hill, long leading lights
in what might be termed the Silver Age of detective fiction, from their Golden
Age forbears, praising their more “serious” crime novels, like James’ A Taste for Death (1986), where the murderer
is revealed two-thirds of the way through the novel. But the truth is these authors wrote
plenteous puzzle-oriented detective fiction (embroidered, to be sure, with
lively characterization and social observation), just like their forbears from
the Golden Age did. Today of the
aforementioned quartet only Peter Lovesey, now himself an octogenarian, is
still alive and active, yet younger writers have carried on with the writing of
detective fiction in the classic vein, which has now achieved a popular and
critical cachet that it has not enjoyed since the Golden Age itself. New reprints of Golden Age mysteries, many by
authors long out-of-print and forgotten, appear every month. It becomes more obvious with each passing
year that Julian Symons greatly underestimated the public’s passion for “mere puzzles.”
The
dismissiveness which Julian Symons in Bloody
Murder expresses toward many prominent writers of vintage detective fiction
might startle those unfamiliar with his writing (and perhaps some of those who
think they are familiar with it.) His
animadversion against those detective writers, like Freeman Wills Crofts, John
Street and Henry Wade, whom he notoriously termed “Humdrum” is well-known and I
have written about this at length in my 2012 book Masters of the “Humdrum” Mystery, so I will not go into that again
here. Here I want to look at Symons’
disparagement of other Golden Age greats, beginning with one of the towering
figures of the era, Dorothy L. Sayers, whom, in the first edition of Bloody Murder, Symons repeatedly disrespects,
as I am sure Sayers herself would have seen it, by omitting the “L.” from her
name. (The “L.” is restored in the third
edition.) Symons likes Agatha Christie--though
he declares that she was not a good writer from a literary standpoint and that her
fictive world was a “fairyland”-- as well as John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen, Anthony
Berkeley (primarily on account of his Francis Iles crime novels), and even S. S.
Van Dine, creator of the extraordinarily obnoxious amateur sleuth Philo Vance;
yet when it comes to Dorothy L. Sayers he is positively withering in his
assessment:
There can be no doubt that by any
reasonable standards applied to writing, as distinct from plotting, she is pompous
and boring. Every book contains enormous
amounts of padding, in the form of conversations which, although they may have
a distinct connection with the plot, are spread over a dozen pages where the
point could be covered in as many lines.
This might be forgivable if what was said had some intrinsic interest,
but these dialogues are carried on between stereotyped figures…who have nothing
at all to say, but only a veiled clue to communicate….[Lord Peter Wimsey] is a caricature
of an English aristocrat conceived with an immensely snobbish, loving
seriousness….[His knowledge is] asserted rather than demonstrated, and when
demonstration is attempted it is sometimes wrong….Add to this the casual
anti-Semitism…and you have a portrait of what might be thought an unattractive
character. It should be added that many
women readers adore him….[Her later novels] show, with the exception of the
lively Murder Must Advertise, an
increasing pretentiousness, a dismal sentimentality, and a slackening of the
close plotting that had been her chief virtue.
Gaudy Night is essentially a
“woman’s novel” full of the most tedious pseudo-serious chat between characters
that goes on for page after page.
Altogether
more gently (the Sayers stuff is so edged as to seem personal), Margery
Allingham is faulted for not retiring Campion to the home for superannuated
aristocrat sleuths (her books “would have been better still without the
presence of the detective who belonged to an earlier time and a different
tradition”), while Ngaio Marsh is taken to task for seeking “refuge from [the
depiction of] real emotional problems in the official investigation and
interrogation of suspects,” with Symons adding chidingly that “one is bound to
regret that she did not take her fine talent more seriously.” He is even more critical of Josephine Tey,
long boosted by her many fans as something really new in crime fiction and the
Fifth Crime Queen (Christie, Sayers, Allinhgam, Marsh, and sometimes Tey), whom
he summarily dismisses as belonging to
the past and “really rather dull,” along with Ellis Peters, author of the
beloved Brother Cadfael mysteries (“I have tried three books without getting to
the end of one”), Gladys Mitchell, currently undergoing a revival (“an average
Humdrum….tediously fanciful….impenetrable”), and once hugely popular American mystery
writers Mary Roberts Rinehart (“crime stories which have the air of being
written specifically for maiden aunts”) and Mignon Eberhart, who barely rates a
sniffy mention. Repeatedly Symons
stresses his belief that the presence of a series sleuth was a ball-and-chain
around the narratives of Allingham and Marsh, stunting the artistic development
of their crime writing.
How
refreshing it is for me, as a lover of vintage detective fiction, to go back to
some of Symons’ earliest crime fiction reviews from the 1940s and 1950s—what
might be termed his pre-dogma days--and find him singing gustily a rather more
enthusiastic tune in regard to some of these same detective writers, as well as
others who were entirely omitted from the pages of Bloody Murder. It seems that
Julian Symons--like Raymond Chandler, another famous critic of Golden Age
detective fiction (see his essay “The Simple Art of Murder”)--was of a mind rather
more divided on the matter than he willingly acknowledged.
*******
One
of the biggest shocks, from one of Julian Symons’ “Life, People--And Books”
columns (1947) in the Manchester Evening
News, concerns Dorothy L. Sayers and the ardent devotion which Symons
professes to have for her criminal handiwork.
“A few weeks ago, Miss Dorothy Sayers, when asked if she was working on
a new detective story, replied that she was not,” Symons, then just
thirty-five, reported. “She added that
she did not even read new detective stories nowadays, because our present-day
mysteries were so markedly inferior to those of a few years ago. In common with many other readers I regard
Miss Sayers’ defection with dismay. I
hope she is really deceiving us, and is quietly hatching out a new story with a
brand-new detective.”
Were
Symons’ tears real human ones, or those of a crocodile? Perhaps his expressed hope that Sayers write
a new story with a brand-new detective really amounted to a wish that she would
rid the world of Lord Peter Wimsey. Yet
Symons claimed to regard her defection from detection with dismay. Symons even agreed with Sayers than detective
fiction in 1947 was worse than that from a decade earlier, although he praised
Christie, Carr and, more surprisingly, Ngaio Marsh, “who gives us every year a
piece of social satire with a mystery neatly embedded in it.” No complaints from Symons here about the “long
and tedious post-murder examinations of suspects” in Marsh’s mysteries, as
there would be in Bloody Murder.
In
a 1949 column Symons laments the loss of the “superman detective,” observing:
“The detective as a heroic or remarkable figure has almost vanished from the
detective story--and a certain liveliness has gone with him.” Fortunately for lovers of Super Sleuths there
was “Mrs. Agatha Christie,” who “may fairly be called the queen of detective
story writers now that Miss Dorothy Sayers has abdicated the throne; and it may
be fitting that, like Miss Sayers, she should have created one of the few
memorable modern detectives—the little Belgian Hercule Poirot….It is very
noticeable that the best of Miss Christie’s stories are those in which Poirot
appears.” So did Symons actually like
Lord Peter Wimsey at this time, then?
And if the presence of series detectives marred the work of Allingham
and Marsh, why did it not do so with Christie?
It
seems that back in the late Forties, Symons really liked those puzzles and he
was forthright in declaring his admiration for them, even at the expense of the
old Victorian masters of mystery whom he would later celebrate in Bloody Murder. “There are few more ingenious detective
writers than Ellery Queen and Carter Dickson,” Symons admiringly observed in
1949, sounding like a true modern miracle problem fanboy with a blog. “It is no exaggeration to say that in the way
they set and explain their puzzles these writers can knock Wilkie Collins and
Conan Doyle (or any other old-fashioned detective writer) into a cocked hat.”
By
1955, Symons, still conducting his column for the Manchester Evening News, admitted, in a review of Ngaio Marsh’s
latest mystery Scales of Justice, that he asked for “something more from the
modern detective story than a puzzle.”
Yet it seems that, at that time anyway, Marsh amply gratified Symons’
need:
The classical formula for the detective
story is well known. Introduce your
suspects in some rural scene. Let them
include the local vicar, doctor and solicitor.
Kill off the most unpleasant of them, and then proceed to long, long
interrogations by the police and amateur detectives….Ngaio Marsh uses this old
formula brilliantly….There are interrogations galore, conducted by that
gentlemanly professional Chief Detective-Inspector Roderick Alleyn. How is it that Miss Marsh managed to make all
this so wonderfully entertaining?
The
prime reason is that like all good modern crime writers she is also a lively
novelist. There is something individual
about her characters.
The
interrogation of suspects, as she manages it, reveals a genuine clash of
wits….Yet—and this is a rare thing—she can provide the puzzle, too. The solution…is highly ingenious. This is one of Miss Marsh’s two or three best
books. It is assured of a place on the
top shelf of crime fiction.
By
the time of Bloody Murder, however,
this “top shelf” Marsh had been, it seems, carelessly shelved. Yet in 1955 Inspector Alleyn and his endless
inquisitions had not served as an obstacle to Symons’ reading enjoyment--indeed,
far from it. What seems to have changed
is something in Symons himself. A
quarter of a century later, Symons selected, to represent Ngaio Marsh for the
1980 Collins Crime Club Jubilee Reprint series which he edited, not Scales of Justice but Spinsters in Jeopardy, an improbable
thriller that no one else I know of has ever praised as one of Marsh’s best
books. Citing “the problems facing the
writer [like Marsh and, presumably, himself] who wants to create characters,
yet knows the need to present and organize a puzzle,” Symons declared that happily
“Marsh has sometimes escaped from these problems by writing another kind of
book, the simple, pure, enjoyable thriller in which the puzzle is a secondary
element. Spinsters in Jeopardy is such a story.”
In
the same column in which he reviewed Marsh’s Scales of Justice, Symons assessed the detective novel Watson’s Choice by Gladys Mitchell. You remember Gladys Mitchell: the author
dismissed as “tediously fanciful” in Bloody
Murder. Back in 1955 Symons gratefully
deemed the author “an old reliable if ever there was one” and her latest book,
based on an “ingenious idea,” “well worked out” with “several good touches” (though
“rather lacking in liveliness”).
Admittedly this is a mixed review (Symons does so value “liveliness” in
murder fiction), but it is far from the curt dismissal which Mitchell receives
in Bloody Murder, where Symons acted
as if he could barely recall the poor woman.
At
least Gladys Mitchell merited a paragraph’s worth of notice in Bloody Murder. Other authors whom Symons once professed actually
to enjoy receive only the slightest of passing, patronizing nods in his 1972
survey. Take Elizabeth Daly, for
example. In Bloody Murder she is written off simply as one of the “Golden Age
writers whose work was once highly popular.”
However, in 1954 Symons reviewed her final detective novel, The Book of the Crime, in the Manchester Evening News, declaiming: “a
typical example of her craft, and very enjoyable it is too.” What was Daly’s craft, precisely? “[R]ather cozily horrific stories with a
strong feminine appeal.” Apparently this
appeal had become lost on Symons by 1972.
Then
there is the strange case of Mary Fitt, who in the Forties and Fifties had at
least three mystery books highly praised by Symons in the Manchester Evening News: the early Forties novels Death and Mary Dazill and Requiem for Robert, reprinted as Penguin
paperbacks (and soon to be reprinted in the present day by Moonstone Press with
introductions by me), and the short story collection The Man Who Shot Birds. The
novels Symons lauded lavishly as crime novels of character and atmosphere, although
he does not use the term explicitly. The
short story collection he raved as a model puzzler: “The detective short story
is a most difficult form—much more difficult than the full-length novel as
anyone who has tried to write both [like Symons] will know—and Miss Fitt
handles it very skillfully….the mysteries themselves are highly ingenious, with
false clues laid and misleading suggestions made most cunningly in limited
space.” By 1972, however, Symons
seemingly had forgotten that the talented Miss Fitt had ever existed, obviously
much preferring to write rapturously about the talented Mr. Ripley.
So
far I have detailed only women writers whom Symons left by the wayside or seriously
downgraded. One male writer who suffered
the same treatment, however, was versatile mainstream author Rupert Croft-Cooke,
who under his pseudonym Leo Bruce was during the Fifties and Sixties one of the
finest exponents of the classic detective story, which Symons insisted in Bloody Murder was rapidly wasting. In 1948 Penguin reprinted Bruce’s classic
debut detective novel Case for Three
Detectives, which simultaneously was an ingenious locked room puzzler and
an affectionate parody of Great Detectives Peter Wimsey, Hercule Poirot and
Father Brown. Symons’ praise for this
superb detective tale, which may have influenced his own poor attempt at
satirizing Philo Vance in The Immaterial
Murder Case, was high indeed:
I read “Case for Three Detectives” more
than ten years ago and thought highly of it then. I have refreshed my memory and can confirm
that this is one of the most slyly amusing tales of detection that has yet been
written. Lord Simon Plimsoll, Monsieur
Amer Picon and Monsignor Smith are three amateur detectives who bear a wicked
resemblance to the famous creations of Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie and the
late G. K. Chesterton.
Their
investigation of the mysterious death of Mary Thurston and the account of the
ingenious theories which are destroyed by solid, stolid sergeant Beef is very
good fun.
Yet
not a whisper of Bruce is heard in Bloody
Murder! Et tu, Brucey?
*******
Why
all these later revisions and omissions?
Was Symons simply a remarkably insincere reviewer in those Manchester Evening News pieces? Certainly there are always imperatives for
reviewers to give good notices to the books they review. Such notices make publishers happy, not to mention
readers, who are ever on the hunt for new books to read and do not like just to
be told how dreadful everything is. And
making both publishers and readers happy makes the reviewers’ employers happy
too, which is no small consideration. All
too often one has, after all, to sing for one’s supper.
Additionally,
most reviewers naturally dislike offending others. My previous blog post here at The Passing
Tramp, which criticized Julian Symons’ own first essay in crime fiction, that
weak little number The Immaterial Murder
Case (1945), provoked an internet friend of mine of over a decade’s
standing--a former blogger of fine distinction and discriminating taste who is also
something of a Symons fan, you might say--to accuse me, in rather off-color language, of wanting to “make Julian Symons
my bitch,” which took me aback. (I
assure you I have no desire to make anyone
“my bitch.”) In Symons’ case, he himself
was inducted into the Detection Club in 1950, meaning that he socialized with
some of the very writers he was reviewing above, like Christie, Fitt and
Mitchell. (Marsh, a native of New
Zealand, did not join the Detection Club until 1974.) Yet throughout his life Symons seems to me
to have been a man remarkably forthcoming, if not to say overbearing, with his
opinions and not especially concerned about hurting the tender feelings of
either authors or their fans.
In
the Sixties an incensed Margery Allingham took Symons’ mixed reviews of her novels
in the Sunday Times so personally that
she wanted to have him bounced from the Crime Writers Association. Across the pond, in the New York Times in 1977, not long after the death of esteemed
American mystery writer Rex Stout, creator of Great Detective Nero Wolfe,
Symons in a review of the recently published biography of the author boldly waved
a virtual red cape in front of the faces of Stout’s many fans, writing:
At the risk of outraging an accepted
American myth, it must be said that [Stout biographer Joseph] McAleer absurdly
inflates the [Nero Wolfe] stories’ merit….Stout was simply not in the same
stylistic league with Hammett, Chandler or Ross Macdonald. His prose is energetic and efficient, nothing
more. His plots lack the metronomic
precision of Ellery Queen’s….[The memorable Wolfe] operates in the context of books
that are consistently entertaining, but for the most part just as consistently
forgettable.
Letters of protest poured in from the late Stout’s offended American mythmakers, who angrily questioned whether any of this really must have been
said by Symons. Methodically Symons responded,
complaining at one point that one of the letter writers had been “gratuitously insulting”
to him.
Personally I do not doubt that in his
book reviews Symons was expressing his genuine beliefs at the time. What produced the change in them, then? I think over time Symons’ views hardened into
inflexible dogma, producing in Bloody Murder
a crusading book in which he was determined, finally, to put puzzle-oriented
detective fiction in its lesser literary (or non-literary) place for once and
all as the sort of freak it was, a changeling which had mischievously replaced
the crime novel in its cradle back in the Twenties and Thirties and continued ever
since to receive nostalgic genuflection.
Additionally I think Symons genuinely had gotten bored with detective
fiction, having had to read so many pedestrian examples of it in his capacity
as the Sunday Times mystery reviewer
for a decade. (Dorothy L. Sayers had
only been able to stick it out in that job for a couple of years). In Bloody
Murder Symons recalls that “I gave up [reviewing mystery fiction at the Sunday Times] chiefly because I knew I
was becoming stale, so that my reaction on seeing a parcel of new books was not
the appropriate slight quickening of the pulse marking the hope of a
masterpiece. I opened it rather with the
expectation that the contents would fulfill my belief that almost all crime
writers publish too much.”
Ironically
Bloody Murder--that lauded, landmark
study of mystery, detective and crime fiction--was written by a man nearing his
seventh decade who had lost his youthful enthusiasm for detective fiction and become
to a great degree jaded with the very genre to which he had devoted his
book. While he was able to summon up
something of his juvenile passion for Christie, Queen, Carr and even, in a true
testament to the power of nostalgia, Philo Vance—it appears to me that what he
now wanted desperately was for murder fiction to mean something, for tales of violent death to say something
meaningful to him about life. “Bloody Murder…makes discriminations
between thoroughbreds and hacks,” the ailing Symons declared in a cri de cœur near the end of the ‘92
edition, published not long before his death.
“It was part of my hope and intention that the book would, through such
discriminations, raise the status of the best crime stories so that they would
be considered seriously as imaginative fictions.” The books by “serious” crime writers like
Patricia Highsmith, Dashiell Hammett, Eric Ambler, he still found rewarding
reading, but so many other makers of mystery seem largely to have lost their
luster for him. Perhaps Bloody Murder should have been titled Bloody Bored.
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