Crime compendium
I have been brooding over this column for weeks, because it ill becomes a youngster like myself to denounce from the heights a book by the foremost British scholar of crime fiction. Nonetheless, I have to say that Julian Symons's Bloody Murder (now available in paperback from Penguin at 40p; "heartily recommended" in these columns by Kingsley Amis when it appeared in hardback; and, in spite of what I have to say, essential reading for all crime fans) is a pernicious and dangerous piece of work. In essence this book — sub-titled 'From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: a history' — is a sustained and bitter, if unacknowledged, attack on the classical detective story, 'and on Dorothy Sayers in particular.
The fundamental fact is that Symons prefers the brooding, psychological, sociological modernism of Simenon and his followers to the puzzle story of the Golden Age of detective fiction; and to enforce this preference he tells all manner of fibs about the detective puzzles of the 'twenties and 'thirties — viz.; that their structure forbade characterisation, that their heroes and people were of purest cardboard, that the puzzle element itself forbade human interest. Hastily acknowledging Sayers's quality as a crime critic, Symons ignores the detailed passages in Gaudy Night in which Lord Peter and Harriet discuss just this problem, and triumphantly resolve it. Again, the high and beautiful comedy of the Ngaio Marsh novels is to all intents and Purposes ignored, in favour of a friendly study of the appallingly cardboardish Agatha 'Christie.
Enough, or almost enough, said; but the ghosts of the Golden Age continue to rise up to reproach Julian Symons. For Collins, in their reprint series, have just brought out, at £2.25, Philip MacDonald's classic The Link, last available in 1935. The Link has as hero MacDonald's favourite sleuth, Colonel. Anthony Gethryn. A boorish brewing baronet is found dead, in circumstances which suggest that the killer is either his wife, or the young vet (and narrator of the story) who loves her, or the local publican. Now., the whole imaginative fabric of the book depends on the love story, which is of a weight, intensity and importance quite equal to the detective element, and utterly convincing in the way that, for example, P. M. Hubbard's suspense stories are marvellously convincing today — they, I imagine, would be highly acceptable to Symons as crime stories; alas, Hubbard does not rate even a mention in Bloody Murder.
Its basic proposition is that the detection element in a story — the puzzle element, to put it more precisely — tends to exclude the human; and that, therefore, the purer a detective story is the more bloodless it is, unless the author has an imagination sufficiently powerful to create a figure of myth — like Sherlock Holmes.
i Now, of course t s true that the detective element in a detective story, if over-pursued, will exclude the human, the literary and the cultural elements. But there is no need to over-pursue it. Emotions and human foibles can themselves be clues, as Lawless,
the narrator in The Link, d4covers when he begins to penetrate the mind of Anthony Gethryn. Moreover, the Symons exclusivity also eliminates from consideration the high comedy of the better Golden Age detective stories, as I have already mentioned in regard to Ngaio Marsh. In a brief but friendly disquisition, for example, he wholly misunderstands this facet of the early achievement of Michael Innes in such masterpieces as Death At The President's Lodging and Hamlet Revenge!; alas, he consigns Innes to the same discarded and reviled bracket of snobbish fun in which he has incarcerated Dorothy Sayers and Ngaio Marsh. (Incidentally, he also ignores Innes's great crime (not detective) novel, Lament for a Maker, perhaps the best example this century of the novel's Gothic tradition.) And I could go on on this theme of Symons's misunderstanding.
But I will not, for it is painful that a junior like myself should have so to rebuke a man the finesse of whose reviewing of crime fiction has been a delight and an instruction for a generation. I can only end by recalling the young gentleman of Eton to whom John Buchan's The Three Hostages is dedicated. In the dedication Buchan explains that, the young man having expressed a liking for Buchan's novels, and an older relation having marked that expression by sending him a dull historical tome written by the creator of Hannay and Leithen and Clanroyden, wrote to the author enjoining him to pull his socks up. Buchan responded with The Three Hostages. Pull your socks up Julian.
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