Header overlay

The Man Who . . .

The only fan letter I ever wrote was to Julian Symons (1912–94). A polymath – poet, editor, biographer, historian, novelist and reviewer – his non-fiction books encompassed Dickens, Carlyle, Wyndham Lewis, the General Strike and the Gordon Relief Expedition, but what fascinated me were his crime novels and his critical insights into the genre.

His The Progress of a Crime (1960) was the first contemporary crime novel I read, and it was quite unlike the traditional puzzles of Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle that I’d devoured as a boy. The storyline, based on a real-life miscarriage of justice involving a killing on Clapham Common, was much bleaker, and his use of irony and the crisp way in which he wrote – Symons never wasted words – drew me in. I began to seek out more.

One in particular I found especially gripping. The Man Who Killed Himself (1967) represented a dazzling departure from his earlier work. Symons had concocted whodunits in the classic tradition as well as novels of psychological suspense and a Cold War thriller, The Broken Penny (1953), with a protagonist based on his friend George Orwell. He’d also won ‘best novel of the year’ awards in both Britain and the United States – and not for the same book. But like most writers of distinction, he wasn’t content to rest on his laurels.

Although a few characters make more than one appearance in his novels, he never created a memorable series detective. Partly as a result, his books were never bestsellers; he acknowledged that his ‘abomination’ of series sleuths was ‘commercially foolish’ but added that: ‘[Raymond] Chandler once said that the puzzle plot is a kind of crutch needed by the crime writer, and much the same is true of the series detective. A crutch is useful, no doubt, but it is better to stand on two legs.’ The argument is flawed, because the best crime writers are capable of developing their characters over the cou

Subscribe or sign in to read the full article

The full version of this article is only available to subscribers to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly. To continue reading, please sign in or take out a subscription to the quarterly magazine for yourself or as a gift for a fellow booklover. Both gift givers and gift recipients receive access to the full online archive of articles along with many other benefits, such as preferential prices for all books and goods in our online shop and offers from a number of like-minded organizations. Find out more on our subscriptions page.

Subscribe now or

The only fan letter I ever wrote was to Julian Symons (1912–94). A polymath – poet, editor, biographer, historian, novelist and reviewer – his non-fiction books encompassed Dickens, Carlyle, Wyndham Lewis, the General Strike and the Gordon Relief Expedition, but what fascinated me were his crime novels and his critical insights into the genre.

His The Progress of a Crime (1960) was the first contemporary crime novel I read, and it was quite unlike the traditional puzzles of Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle that I’d devoured as a boy. The storyline, based on a real-life miscarriage of justice involving a killing on Clapham Common, was much bleaker, and his use of irony and the crisp way in which he wrote – Symons never wasted words – drew me in. I began to seek out more. One in particular I found especially gripping. The Man Who Killed Himself (1967) represented a dazzling departure from his earlier work. Symons had concocted whodunits in the classic tradition as well as novels of psychological suspense and a Cold War thriller, The Broken Penny (1953), with a protagonist based on his friend George Orwell. He’d also won ‘best novel of the year’ awards in both Britain and the United States – and not for the same book. But like most writers of distinction, he wasn’t content to rest on his laurels. Although a few characters make more than one appearance in his novels, he never created a memorable series detective. Partly as a result, his books were never bestsellers; he acknowledged that his ‘abomination’ of series sleuths was ‘commercially foolish’ but added that: ‘[Raymond] Chandler once said that the puzzle plot is a kind of crutch needed by the crime writer, and much the same is true of the series detective. A crutch is useful, no doubt, but it is better to stand on two legs.’ The argument is flawed, because the best crime writers are capable of developing their characters over the course of a number of books, but although Symons’s determination to keep trying something different led to inconsistency, his literary ambition meant that even his weaker books have merit. He was in his mid-fifties when he decided on a fresh approach to his fiction. This produced The Man Who Killed Himself, a novel often grouped with the two that followed, The Man Whose Dreams Came True (1968) and The Man Who Lost His Wife (1970). Although the characters and storylines in each are very different, the ‘Man Who’ stories reflect broadly similar preoccupations. Years later, he explained the thinking behind his shift of focus:
A novelist’s strategies, the approaches he makes to his material, change with the years; even the material changes, or seems to him to do so, those raw shapes of life he is trying to coerce into a pattern . . . There is a moment when one realizes that the old kind of plotting won’t do, that the order which had seemed to serve well over a number of books no longer satisfies. So, halfway down the Sixties, I realized . . . that I wanted to write something more loosely constructed, giving scope for a more casual interweaving of characters and perhaps for increased depth in considering them. I had done with novels about the police and the administration of justice . . . [The ‘Man Who’ novels] are the result, books in which there is no puzzle to be solved, but an attempt to show the social ironies of urban life . . . and people, seen realistically although with a touch of exaggeration.
He set the tone of The Man Who Killed Himself in the opening lines:
In the end Arthur Brownjohn killed himself, but in the beginning he made up his mind to murder his wife. He did so on the day that Major Easonby Mellon met Patricia Parker. Others might have come to such a decision earlier but Arthur Brownjohn was a patient and, as all those who knew him agreed, a timid and long-suffering man. When people say that a man is long-suffering, they mean that they see no reason why he should not suffer for ever.
Arthur is an unsuccessful inventor, married to a wealthy bully called Clare who has the good sense not to invest in his eccentric business ventures. His penchant for fantasy and escapism finds an outlet when he begins to lead a double life. Suppressed aspects of his personality come to the fore when he creates the extrovert Major Easonby Mellon, who runs a highly dubious matrimonial bureau. In the guise of Mellon, he is married to pleasant but naïve Joan, and so as to explain his frequent absences from their home in Clapham, he has managed to persuade her that he is actually a secret agent. (These passages enable Symons to satirize the James Bond phenomenon, with entertaining results.) And then Joan shocks Arthur by telling him that a man called Flexner – a fellow spy who is the product of Arthur’s imagination – has called at the house while he was out. What on earth is going on? The plot thickens and darkens as Arthur becomes infatuated with an attractive client of the matrimonial bureau and forges a cheque in Clare’s name to fund a new invention. His fascination with the famous old murder cases recounted in Notable British Trials leads him to dream about Clare’s demise, and before long he comes up with a cunning plan to get away with murder. Twists of fate abound, but ultimately this story is a study of psychological disintegration. Symons had tackled that subject before, notably in The Thirty-First of February (1950), and he would revisit it subsequently, but this novel stands out for its sheer zest and wit. On first reading, I loved it. When I revisited The Man Who Killed Himself decades later, I detected the influence of two writers, very different from each other, whom Symons knew and admired. There is more than a touch of Patricia Highsmith about his exploration of the character flaws that lead a seemingly ordinary individual into criminality. His portrayal of Arthur also owes something to that of Dr Bickleigh in Francis Iles’s masterly suspense novel of 1930, Malice Aforethought. But Symons fashioned these elements into a distinctive entertainment which captured the anything-goes mood of the Swinging Sixties. The novel was swiftly adapted into a film starring Donald Pleasence, Shelley Winters and Terry-Thomas, with several British acting stalwarts among the supporting cast, but it was never released in UK cinemas. What went wrong? Well, there’s a clue in the excruciating title: Arthur? Arthur! The story is presented as a black comedy, with the subtler elements stripped out and a completely different resolution. Pleasence performs the dual roles of Arthur Brownjohn and Easonby Mellon with gusto and there are some funny moments, but overall it is a mess. For the curious, the film is now viewable online, courtesy of BFI Player. The Man Whose Dreams Came True was another engaging study of a fantasist who becomes embroiled in murder, while The Man Who Lost His Wife was a less successful attempt to emulate Highsmith. ‘The Man Who’ books may not really form a trilogy, but they explore character and crime with irony and teasing wit. As Symons said, they are ‘all emphatically books about town life and people, seen realistically although with a touch of exaggeration . . . With the three books completed, I appear to have worked out the vein and have never returned to it.’ He continued to experiment, venturing into historical mysteries and Sherlockiana, even introducing himself as a character in the unorthodox mystery Death’s Darkest Face (1990). His most celebrated book was Bloody Murder (1972), an elegantly written history of the genre which charted its progress (as he saw it) ‘from detective story to crime novel’. Unquestionably his report of the death of the classic detective story was exaggerated. Not long after Bloody Murder first appeared, Colin Dexter introduced Inspector Morse, disrupting the smooth course of literary evolution that Symons had described. Today the truth is clear: traditional detective fiction hadn’t disappeared, nor had the public appetite for it faded. Books of that kind had simply fallen out of critical fashion. Bloody Murder isn’t perfect, but it expanded my knowledge and understanding of the genre and I’ve returned to it a hundred times. As a young graduate, trying to write my first crime novel, I wrote to Symons to express my enthusiasm for The Man Who Killed Himself and Bloody Murder. To my delight, he replied generously and thoughtfully, and many years later I enjoyed meeting him at crime writers’ conferences. Today, though, despite the fact that he was the most garlanded male British crime novelist of his generation, most of his books are out of print. I’ve been glad to reintroduce three of his early novels to a new readership in the twenty-first century through the British Library’s Crime Classics series and I keep hoping that The Man Who Killed Himself will be brought back into print. Meanwhile I remember him fondly as the man who introduced me to the rich possibilities of contemporary crime fiction.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 77 © Martin Edwards 2023


About the contributor

Martin Edwards is the author of twenty-one crime novels and a newly published history of mystery, The Life of Crime. You can also hear him in Episode 33 of our podcast, discussing the Golden Age of crime writing

Comments & Reviews

Leave a comment

Sign up to our e-newsletter

Sign up for dispatches about new issues, books and podcast episodes, highlights from the archive, events, special offers and giveaways.