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 fi...

Julian Symons, himself a writer of detective stories, gives a straightforward, knowledgeable account of Poe's life in The Tell Tale Heart. This in itself is no mean feat: more than one biographer has turned the life into a florid gothic tale. But Symons is so wary of the maudlin and the melodramatic, so devoted to recording every event in its proper sequence, that he fails to uncover the full dimensions of his subject. The Poe Symons speaks of most often is the contented family man, the industrious j...

Julian Symons' "The Tell-Tale Heart" is a … dependable guide to Poe's life. This book makes no claim to original research but offers a brisk synopsis of extant biographical knowledge, leavened by an experienced novelist's insights. Mr. Symons handles well the tangled narrative of Poe's troubled life, sensibly telling this tale without pausing to analyze Poe's stories. Criticism is deferred to Mr. Symons' last 70 pages…. Mr. Symons has mas...

[Julian Symons] has been putting together intricately crafted and plotted novels for roughly four decades, earning along the way more respect from peers than public fame…. [Symons] is not so well known as [Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, and Daphne du Maurier], but like them he can invest a plot with significance beyond its conclusion…. Yet he may now be on the brink of solving the mystery of his comparative obscurity. At an age when most writers are, to put it gently, no longer productive, he is ...

In going over ground likely to be familiar to the general reader, biographers often feel the need to buttress their presumption with a theory; if that theory can hint, no matter how vaguely, at some kind of 'reassessment', then all the better. The nervousness is understandable, but rarely can it have resulted in so eccentric a presentation of the material as in Symons's book on Edgar Allan Poe [The Tell-Tale Heart]. What we get is not so much a reassessment as a rearrangement, the manus...

Julian Symons is mystery fiction's grand old man. Novelist, historian of the genre and student of true crime as well, he has brought all three passions together in his most recent novels: "The Blackheath Poisonings," "Sweet Adelaide" and now "The Detling Secret." All three are set in Victorian England, a period and place that are to connoisseurs of crime what catnip is to a kitten. And with good reason…. Jack the Ripper excepted, it is the Victorian er...

I have to say that Julian Symons's Bloody Murder … ("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...

If you have a passing interest in learning a bit about the detective story without having actually to read one, [Mortal Consequences: A History From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel] is just the book for you. Mr. Symons, with a good deal of critical insight and a pinch of condescension, tells us in his opening chapter what detective stories are ("part of the hybrid creature we call sensational literature") and why we read them (to exorcise "the guilt of the individual or the group...

[A three pipe Problem] is historically based … in a contemporary sense: the action takes place today. But the detective is Sherlock Holmes! Rather, he is an actor named Sheridan Haynes who is playing the great detective in a long-running TV series, and occupies a flat in Baker St provided by the television company as part of their publicity drive. Haynes is, too, a Holmes connoisseur: he knows the books intimately, and he treasures the values they represent, as well as the skills of the great detecti...

Almost everyone likes a good mystery. Approximately one fourth of all fiction published in the United States and Great Britain falls into the category that includes crime fiction, detective stories, mysteries, thrillers, and spy novels…. In his history of the genre [Mortal Consequences] Julian Symons traces its development from Poe's time to ours. All the major names are there, from Poe and his contemporaries—William Godwin, the first to delve into the psychological aspects of crime, an...

In "Mortal Consequences," his distinguished study of detective fiction, Julian Symons states that the best Victorian mysteries were those that assumed memorable characters and stories to be as important as ingenious puzzles. "The Blackheath Poisonings," Mr. Symons' own attempt at a Victorian mystery, makes the same assumption, with delightful results. Mr. Symons' 1890's setting is described in intricate detail but also with a sense of fun and wit….

Dudley Potter [the protagonist of The Name of Annabel Lee] is a bit of a nerd…. Dudley's soul lies dormant until a traveling avant-garde theater group involves him in audience participation, and he meets the blond and beautiful actress Annabel Lee. (Her mother had a thing for Poe.) But after a few months of passion, Annabel splits, leaving only a note; "End of the affair. Sorry I have to go." Has she really ceased to care? Dudley must know and goes in hot pursuit, without even a ...

Leave it to Julian Symons. When he writes a mystery, you can be assured that this urbane stylist, this master of the traditional detective story, will have a puzzler that will keep your mind racing. And so it is with "The Plot Against Roger Rider"…. Even the title is comfortably traditional. But unlike such veterans as Agatha Christie, there is nothing old-fashioned about Symons. His dialogue is crisp and modern. He is capable of wry humor without becoming heavyhanded about it. And his ...

The Plot Against Roger Rider [is] by Julian Symons …, who is probably the foremost scholar of crime and thriller fiction now writing. Actually, there are two overlapping plots, one against Geoffrey Parradine, Rider's old friend, currently sleeping with Rider's wife; and one against Rider himself. There is a large cast of characters, and the action sweeps quickly from England to Spain and finally to Italy. disappearances and/or murders abound; there is a fetching Spanish detective who dr...

Mr. Symons has always given full measure. That is to say, he has never chosen to stand by ingenuity of plot alone; he also gives his attention to character, setting, and tone. In his new novel [The Name of Annabel Lee]—about a stiff British professor of English literature at a New England college who loses his habitual poise and balance in the arms of a transient English girl named Annabel Lee Fetherby—those qualities are present in abundance: in, unfortunately, an overabundance. The story is ...

It is difficult to fault [The Progress of a Crime, a] shrewd, sardonic account of how, in our time, murder quite easily gets done; how a case is handled in the cells and in the courts; what life is like on a local newspaper; and what a newspaper peer sounds like at the Fleet Street end of a telephone. Among the cynical go-getters, the brutal and the wayward, a young reporter and his girl keep a flag or so flying without being at all sentimentalised over. This is one of the truest and most sensible (and, bec...

Julian Symons seems to be deliberately trying, in ["The Belting Inheritance"],… to see to what extent a first-rate professional can animate such moldy stencils as the will-changing old lady and the long-lost claimant who may be an impostor. His success is astonishing, especially in view of the fact that he sets himself the further problem of writing from an 18-year-old viewpoint. This exercise in virtuosity (especially brilliant in its scenes of a young man's discovery of Paris) ...

Mr. Symons is always an enjoyably sly and deceiving writer, and he has seldom been trickier than in [The Plot Against Roger Rider]…. It is not, however, among his better stories. He has seldom been so diffuse or so labored, and he has never been so tediously generous with unnecessary characters and unfinished subplots. It must also be said that although he gives us a plentitude of bloody murders, nothing much seems to happen. A review of "The Plot against Roger Rider," in T...

Julian Symons does not repeat himself: each novel stands alone on its own credentials, which are usually impressive. Thus The Blackheath Poisonings …, "A Victorian Murder Mystery." So effectively does Symons conjure up the Blackheath suburb of London, with Albert House and Victoria Villa and the family that lived and died—of arsenic—there in the 1890's, that the join between fiction and history is seamless. (pp. 11-12) Allen J. Hubin, "AJH Review...