Julian Symons has helped to increase the range and worth of crime fiction in many ways. For example, his crime novels, like Ross Macdonald's, combine ingenious plotting with psychological and social probing. In addition, he has a gift, like Nicolas Freeling, for wry humor and satire. However, the variety of his forms and techniques goes beyond that of any other crime writer. He has written conventional detective novels (Bland Beginning, Bogue's Fortune, The Belting Inheritance), a detective fiction parody (The Immaterial Murder Case), a political thriller (The Broken Penny), several psychological crime novels (The Man Who Killed Himself, The Man Whose Dreams Came True, etc.), some nightmarish portrayals of modern society (The Thirty-First of February, The Players and the Game, etc.), some acute social satires (The Plain Man, The End of Solomon Grundy), and a humorous novel about a contemporary incarnation of Sherlock Holmes (A Three-Pipe Problem). The success of many of his experiments in the form has shown that the mystery need not constrain a talented writer either technically or thematically. His main contribution to the crime novel is that he has proven how flexible a vehicle it is for presenting a personal vision of the stresses of modern western civilization….
Symons is disturbed most by the narrowing of personality through western civilization's excessive emphases on order, respectability, mechanical routine, and material "success"; by lack of communication stemming from inhibitions of narrowed personalities, from efforts to maintain respectable images, and from fears of facing difficult and unpleasant issues; by society's moralistic attempt to eliminate relatively harmless games (sexual and otherwise) which offer an "unsuitable" release from social tensions; and by the lack of sufficient alternatives to the stresses of civilization. All of these serious concerns, appropriate for mainstream fiction, are treated in depth in Symons' crime novels….
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