Julian Gustave Symons (originally Gustave Julian Symons, pronounced SIMM-ons;[1] 30 May 1912 – 19 November 1994) was a British
crime writer and poet. He also wrote social and military history, biography and studies of literature. He was born in
Clapham, London, and died in
Walmer,
Kent.
Life and work
Julian Symons was born in London to auctioneer Morris Albert Symons (died 1929), of Russian-Polish Jewish immigrant parentage, and Minnie Louise (died 1964), née Bull.[2] He was a younger brother, and later the biographer, of writer
A. J. A. Symons. Like his brother, due to the family's straitened financial circumstances, he left school at 14, having attended a "school for backward children" owing to his severe
stutter. He was subsequently mainly self-educated, whilst working as a typist and clerk for an engineering firm.[3][1] He founded the poetry magazine Twentieth Century Verse in 1937, editing it for two years. His crime writing in the 1930s was incidental; later he became a major crime writer; by using irony, he pointed out the violence hidden in everyday life. His writing advanced beyond the mystery genre.[4]
Symons's 1972 book Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel (published as Mortal Consequences in the US) is one of the best-known critical works in the field of crime fiction. Revised editions were published in 1985, 1992 and finally in 1994. Symons highlighted the distinction between the classic puzzler mystery, associated with such writers as
Agatha Christie and
John Dickson Carr, and the more modern "crime novel," which puts emphasis on psychology and motivation.
Symons published over thirty crime novels and story collections between 1945 and 1994. His works combined elements of both the detective story and the crime novel, but leaned clearly toward the latter, with an emphasis on character and psychology which anticipated later crime fiction writers such as
Ruth Rendell and
P.D. James. His novels tend to focus on ordinary people drawn into a murderous chain of events; the intricate plots are often spiced with
black humour. Novels typical of his style include The Colour of Murder (1957), the
Edgar-winning The Progress of a Crime (1960), The Man Whose Dreams Came True (1968) The Man Who Lost His Wife (1970) and The Plot Against Roger Ryder (1973).[5]
Symons wrote two modern-day
Sherlock Holmespastiches, as well as a pastiche set in the 1920s. In A Three-Pipe Problem (1975), the detective was "...a television actor, Sheridan Hayes, who wears the mask of Sherlock Holmes and assumes his character. The book neatly reversed the usual theme of the criminal behind the mask by having a rather commonplace man wearing the mask of the great detective." A sequel The Kentish Manor Murders was written in 1988. For his 1981 book The Great Detectives, he wrote a Sherlock Holmes pastiche instead of a biographical sketch. Entitled "How a Hermit was Disturbed in His Retirement," the events of the tale take place in the 1920s as Sherlock Holmes is drawn out of retirement to solve an unusual missing persons case. The story was included in the collection The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, in which it was given the more Doylean title of "The Adventure of Hillerman Hall." He also made occasional forays into historical mystery, such as The Blackheath Poisonings (1978), which was
filmed for television in 1992, and with Sweet Adelaide (1980).
In 1941, Symons married Kathleen Clark; they had a daughter Sarah and a son, Mark.[6] Symons died at his home at
Walmer, in Kent, and was survived by his widow and son.[1][7]
The Criminal Comedy of the Contented Couple (1985), as A Criminal Comedy (US)
Death's Darkest Face (1990)
Something Like a Love Affair (1992)
Playing Happy Families (1994)
A Sort of Virtue: A Political Crime Novel (1996)
Collected short crime fiction
Francis Quarles
Murder! Murder! (1961)
Centre Court Mystery; Test Match Murder; The Grand National Case; The Case of SW2; The Unhappy Piano Tuner; A Pearl among Women; Credit to William Shakespeare; Meeting in the Snow; The Wrong Hat; The Absent-Minded Professor; Each Man Kills; Time for Murder; The Case of the Frightened Promoter; Picture Show; Sailors' Hornpipe; The Hiding Place; Airport Incident; The Plaster Pekingese; Comedy in Venice; The Invisible Poison; Little Man Lost
Francis Quarles Investigates (1965)
Strolling in the Square One Day; The Archer; Out of the Mouths; Thirty Days Hath September; The Woman Afraid of October; Blue Paint; One Little Letter; The Santa Claus Club; Hot Summer Night; Coffee for Three; Four Letters; Kidnap Plot; A Matter of Dentistry; By the Sea; Ace of Spades
Red Rum Means Murder; Death in the Scillies; Poison Pen; An Exercise in Logic; Summer Show; The Desk; Mrs Rolleston's Diamonds; Murder - But How Was it Done?; Ancestor Worship; Iced Champagne; No Use Turning a Deaf Ear to Murder; The Duke of York; Double Double Cross; Tattoo; Jack and Jill; The Conjuring Trick; Happy Hexing; No Deception; The Second Bullet; Preserving the Evidence; Death for Mr Golightly; A Man with Blue hair; The Two Suitors; Airborne with a Borgia; Art Loving Mr Lister Lands a Fake; The Collector; Ghost from the Past; The Swedish Nightingale; The Barton Hall Dwarf; The Pepoli Case; Nothing up His Sleeve; A Present from Santa Claus; The Link; Little Boy Blue; Affection Unlimited; The Whistling Man; Party Line; Who Killed Harrington?; Murder in Reverse; The Vanishing Trick; The impossible Theft; Final Night Extra
Other collections
How to Trap a Crook (1977)
Experiment in Personality; A Theme for Hyacinth; Eight Minutes to Kill; 'Twixt the Cup and the Lip; How to Trap a Crook; Strolling in the Square One Day; The Tiger's Stripe; Love Affair; Credit to Shakespeare; The Main Chance; The Santa Claus Club; The Sensitive Ears of Mr. Small; Pickup on the Dover Road
The Great Detectives: Seven Original Investigations (1981)
The Tigers of Subtopia; The Dupe; Somebody Else; The Flowers That Bloom in the Spring; The Boiler; The Murderer; A Theme For Hyacinth; The Last Time; The Flaw; Love Affair; The Best Chess Player in the World
The Man Who Hated Television (1995)
The Man Who Hated Television; In the Bluebell Wood; Et in Arcadia Ego; Has anybody here seen me?; The birthmark; Waiting for Mr. McGregor; The Conjuring Trick; The dream is better; The Borgia Heirloom ; Did Sherlock Holmes meet Hercule?; Holocaust at Mayhem Parva
A Julian Symons Sherlockian Duet (2000)
Did Sherlock Holmes Meet Hercule...?; The Affair of the Vanishing Diamonds
Crime and Detection: An Illustrated History from 1840 (1966)
Critical Occasions (1966) essays
Between the Wars (1972) history
Notes From Another Country (1972) autobiographical
Bloody Murder – From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History (1972) (US title: Mortal Consequences) Special Edgar Award, 1973; revised in 1985, third revised edition 1992, fourth revised edition 1994.
Tom Adams' Agatha Christie Cover Story (1981) (US title: Agatha Christie: The Art of Her Crimes. The Paintings of Tom Adams) (1981) introduction by
John Fowles
Critical Observations: Diverse Essays (1981)
Crime and Detection Quiz (1983)
1948 and 1984. The Second
Orwell Memorial Lecture (1984)
Murder at the Grand National. (London)
Evening Standard, 11 March to 1 April 1956. Collected in
Murder! Murder! as "The Grand National Case" (Francis Quarles)
The Centre Court Mystery. (London)
Evening Standard, 25 June to 7 July 1956. Collected in
Murder! Murder! as "Centre Court Mystery"(Francis Quarles)
The Oval Test Murder. (London)
Evening Standard, 20 August to 1 October 1956. Collected in
Murder! Murder! as "Test Match Murder" (Francis Quarles)
^The Rare Book Game, George Sims, Holmes Publishing Company, 1985, p. 69
^The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Penguin Books, 1985;
ISBN0-14-007907-6. Introduction.
^Grimes, Larry (1984). "Julian Symons". In Bargainnier (ed.). Twelve Englishmen of mystery. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press.
ISBN978-0-87972-249-4.
^Mystery Voices- Interviews with British Crime Writers, Dale Salwak, Wildside Press, 1991, p. 95
Julian Gustave Symons (originally Gustave Julian Symons, pronounced SIMM-ons;[1] 30 May 1912 – 19 November 1994) was a British
crime writer and poet. He also wrote social and military history, biography and studies of literature. He was born in
Clapham, London, and died in
Walmer,
Kent.
Life and work
Julian Symons was born in London to auctioneer Morris Albert Symons (died 1929), of Russian-Polish Jewish immigrant parentage, and Minnie Louise (died 1964), née Bull.[2] He was a younger brother, and later the biographer, of writer
A. J. A. Symons. Like his brother, due to the family's straitened financial circumstances, he left school at 14, having attended a "school for backward children" owing to his severe
stutter. He was subsequently mainly self-educated, whilst working as a typist and clerk for an engineering firm.[3][1] He founded the poetry magazine Twentieth Century Verse in 1937, editing it for two years. His crime writing in the 1930s was incidental; later he became a major crime writer; by using irony, he pointed out the violence hidden in everyday life. His writing advanced beyond the mystery genre.[4]
Symons's 1972 book Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel (published as Mortal Consequences in the US) is one of the best-known critical works in the field of crime fiction. Revised editions were published in 1985, 1992 and finally in 1994. Symons highlighted the distinction between the classic puzzler mystery, associated with such writers as
Agatha Christie and
John Dickson Carr, and the more modern "crime novel," which puts emphasis on psychology and motivation.
Symons published over thirty crime novels and story collections between 1945 and 1994. His works combined elements of both the detective story and the crime novel, but leaned clearly toward the latter, with an emphasis on character and psychology which anticipated later crime fiction writers such as
Ruth Rendell and
P.D. James. His novels tend to focus on ordinary people drawn into a murderous chain of events; the intricate plots are often spiced with
black humour. Novels typical of his style include The Colour of Murder (1957), the
Edgar-winning The Progress of a Crime (1960), The Man Whose Dreams Came True (1968) The Man Who Lost His Wife (1970) and The Plot Against Roger Ryder (1973).[5]
Symons wrote two modern-day
Sherlock Holmespastiches, as well as a pastiche set in the 1920s. In A Three-Pipe Problem (1975), the detective was "...a television actor, Sheridan Hayes, who wears the mask of Sherlock Holmes and assumes his character. The book neatly reversed the usual theme of the criminal behind the mask by having a rather commonplace man wearing the mask of the great detective." A sequel The Kentish Manor Murders was written in 1988. For his 1981 book The Great Detectives, he wrote a Sherlock Holmes pastiche instead of a biographical sketch. Entitled "How a Hermit was Disturbed in His Retirement," the events of the tale take place in the 1920s as Sherlock Holmes is drawn out of retirement to solve an unusual missing persons case. The story was included in the collection The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, in which it was given the more Doylean title of "The Adventure of Hillerman Hall." He also made occasional forays into historical mystery, such as The Blackheath Poisonings (1978), which was
filmed for television in 1992, and with Sweet Adelaide (1980).
In 1941, Symons married Kathleen Clark; they had a daughter Sarah and a son, Mark.[6] Symons died at his home at
Walmer, in Kent, and was survived by his widow and son.[1][7]
The Criminal Comedy of the Contented Couple (1985), as A Criminal Comedy (US)
Death's Darkest Face (1990)
Something Like a Love Affair (1992)
Playing Happy Families (1994)
A Sort of Virtue: A Political Crime Novel (1996)
Collected short crime fiction
Francis Quarles
Murder! Murder! (1961)
Centre Court Mystery; Test Match Murder; The Grand National Case; The Case of SW2; The Unhappy Piano Tuner; A Pearl among Women; Credit to William Shakespeare; Meeting in the Snow; The Wrong Hat; The Absent-Minded Professor; Each Man Kills; Time for Murder; The Case of the Frightened Promoter; Picture Show; Sailors' Hornpipe; The Hiding Place; Airport Incident; The Plaster Pekingese; Comedy in Venice; The Invisible Poison; Little Man Lost
Francis Quarles Investigates (1965)
Strolling in the Square One Day; The Archer; Out of the Mouths; Thirty Days Hath September; The Woman Afraid of October; Blue Paint; One Little Letter; The Santa Claus Club; Hot Summer Night; Coffee for Three; Four Letters; Kidnap Plot; A Matter of Dentistry; By the Sea; Ace of Spades
Red Rum Means Murder; Death in the Scillies; Poison Pen; An Exercise in Logic; Summer Show; The Desk; Mrs Rolleston's Diamonds; Murder - But How Was it Done?; Ancestor Worship; Iced Champagne; No Use Turning a Deaf Ear to Murder; The Duke of York; Double Double Cross; Tattoo; Jack and Jill; The Conjuring Trick; Happy Hexing; No Deception; The Second Bullet; Preserving the Evidence; Death for Mr Golightly; A Man with Blue hair; The Two Suitors; Airborne with a Borgia; Art Loving Mr Lister Lands a Fake; The Collector; Ghost from the Past; The Swedish Nightingale; The Barton Hall Dwarf; The Pepoli Case; Nothing up His Sleeve; A Present from Santa Claus; The Link; Little Boy Blue; Affection Unlimited; The Whistling Man; Party Line; Who Killed Harrington?; Murder in Reverse; The Vanishing Trick; The impossible Theft; Final Night Extra
Other collections
How to Trap a Crook (1977)
Experiment in Personality; A Theme for Hyacinth; Eight Minutes to Kill; 'Twixt the Cup and the Lip; How to Trap a Crook; Strolling in the Square One Day; The Tiger's Stripe; Love Affair; Credit to Shakespeare; The Main Chance; The Santa Claus Club; The Sensitive Ears of Mr. Small; Pickup on the Dover Road
The Great Detectives: Seven Original Investigations (1981)
The Tigers of Subtopia; The Dupe; Somebody Else; The Flowers That Bloom in the Spring; The Boiler; The Murderer; A Theme For Hyacinth; The Last Time; The Flaw; Love Affair; The Best Chess Player in the World
The Man Who Hated Television (1995)
The Man Who Hated Television; In the Bluebell Wood; Et in Arcadia Ego; Has anybody here seen me?; The birthmark; Waiting for Mr. McGregor; The Conjuring Trick; The dream is better; The Borgia Heirloom ; Did Sherlock Holmes meet Hercule?; Holocaust at Mayhem Parva
A Julian Symons Sherlockian Duet (2000)
Did Sherlock Holmes Meet Hercule...?; The Affair of the Vanishing Diamonds
Crime and Detection: An Illustrated History from 1840 (1966)
Critical Occasions (1966) essays
Between the Wars (1972) history
Notes From Another Country (1972) autobiographical
Bloody Murder – From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History (1972) (US title: Mortal Consequences) Special Edgar Award, 1973; revised in 1985, third revised edition 1992, fourth revised edition 1994.
Tom Adams' Agatha Christie Cover Story (1981) (US title: Agatha Christie: The Art of Her Crimes. The Paintings of Tom Adams) (1981) introduction by
John Fowles
Critical Observations: Diverse Essays (1981)
Crime and Detection Quiz (1983)
1948 and 1984. The Second
Orwell Memorial Lecture (1984)
Murder at the Grand National. (London)
Evening Standard, 11 March to 1 April 1956. Collected in
Murder! Murder! as "The Grand National Case" (Francis Quarles)
The Centre Court Mystery. (London)
Evening Standard, 25 June to 7 July 1956. Collected in
Murder! Murder! as "Centre Court Mystery"(Francis Quarles)
The Oval Test Murder. (London)
Evening Standard, 20 August to 1 October 1956. Collected in
Murder! Murder! as "Test Match Murder" (Francis Quarles)
^The Rare Book Game, George Sims, Holmes Publishing Company, 1985, p. 69
^The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Penguin Books, 1985;
ISBN0-14-007907-6. Introduction.
^Grimes, Larry (1984). "Julian Symons". In Bargainnier (ed.). Twelve Englishmen of mystery. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press.
ISBN978-0-87972-249-4.
^Mystery Voices- Interviews with British Crime Writers, Dale Salwak, Wildside Press, 1991, p. 95