1941. It is too bad that there are so few books written about mysteries. One reason for this is that the genre is looked down on by most literary historians. Another is that most readers are too busy reading mysteries to think about them seriously. Julian Symons is an intelligent and perceptive man who has fallen into neither of these traps. (p. 36)

William R. Evans, in a review of "Mortal Consequences," in Best Sellers, Vol. 32, No. 2, April 15, 1972, pp. 35-6.

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 through ritual and symbolic sacrifices"), then launches into a chronicle of the genre from the Godwin-Vidocq-Poe era to the present, gradually shedding enroute his academic regalia in favor of the fighting trunks of the professional reviewer cum literary critic.

When he analyzes, Mr. Symons is occasionally superb; when he opines, frequently silly. For instance, immediately after he has pointed out to us that the code of the Golden Age mystery writers dictated crimes should not be committed for reasons of state or on behalf of theoretical principles, we find him saying: "almost all of the British writers in the twenties and thirties, and most of the Americans, were unquestionably Right Wing…. It would have been unthinkable for them to create a Jewish detective, or a working-class one aggressively conscious of his origins…." (pp. 384-85)

Despite occasional accesses of the how-can-you-stand-there-eating-that-cookie-while-little-children-starve syndrome (viz. "The Coles were both deeply involved in the Labour movement, and G.D.H. Cole was a famous figure within it, yet their books ignored the very existence of the social realities with which in life they were so much concerned"), the fact remains that Mr. Symons is quite literate and knowledgeable, and has a good nose for literary values. The mystery buff, with a bit of judicious skimming, will find the book useful in leading him to many choice and generally overlooked works in the field. I must emphasize the word "skimming," however, because often, to swell his essay to book length, Mr. Symons has committed the unpardonable sin of his profession: blowing the gaff. With malicious persistence he spoils stories for would-be readers, while telling those who have read them nothing they do not know already…. (p. 385)

Robert Harrison, in a review of "Mortal Consequences: A History from the Detective Story to the Crime Novel," in The Georgia Review, Vol. XXVI. No. 3, Fall, 1972, pp. 384-85.

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 dreams of consuming bitter with his confréres of Scotland Yard and a pair of tiresome young lovers who, by pushing here and pulling there precipitate a solution to the eventual disappearance and death of Rider. It's an excellent, crackling read, but the structure is a little too academic; the cunning brain of the author of Bloody Murder is too busy with timetables rather than people; and the sociological orientations of that remarkable critique are too much in evidence, particularly in the case of the young hero who can't make up his mind if he is queer or not. Good: but for Symons a bit disappointing.

A review of "The Plot against Roger Rider," in The Spectator, Vol. 231, No. 7572, August 11, 1973, p. 187.

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 characters have life in them.

In "Roger Rider," Symons has cooked up a plot about the love-hate relationship of a domineering, successful man with one of his employees—and the relationships of those associated with him. All of this is done in virtuoso fashion, even if the pace is slow. Symons spends much time establishing those relationships. Not until he's at the half-way mark does catastrophe strike. There may be some slight murmurs about least likely suspects. But after it is all over, it can be seen that the author has played fair within the conventions. As he always does.

Newgate Callendar, in a review of "The Plot against Roger Rider," in The New York Times Book Review, December 9, 1973, p. 50.

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 The New Yorker, Vol. XLIX, No. 42, December 10, 1973, p. 200.

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 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….

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. Now, of course it is 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…. 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…. 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.

A review of "Bloody Murder," in The Spectator, Vol. 232, No. 7618, June 29, 1974, p. 805.

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 mastered Poe's own milieu and renders well the social insecurity of the orphan raised among rich Virginians, his hard-scrabble life of drudging journalism, his fractious dealings with editors and minor writers. Mr. Symons properly emphasizes Poe's repeated and ever-blighted efforts to found his own literary review. (p. 15)

Mr. Symons cautions. "It would be idle to ask what reality lay beneath the masks he assumed. The reality was the sum of the parts he played." A more speculative reader of Poe may well wonder why such curiosity is idle, and whether Poe's reality is indeed the sum of his appearances.

But Mr. Symons is a common-sense empiricist with small patience for theories not grounded on the tangible and obvious. Himself a plotter of detective tales, he favors neatly plausible explanations of complex experiences. His book shows both the strengths and limitations of such a cast of mind explaining Poe, whose own cast of mind included this one but in other respects was decidedly different from it.

Mr. Symons classifies two tendencies in Poe. Logical Poe is responsible for editing magazines, writing analytic criticism, devising puzzles and cryptograms, and creating tales of detection. Visionary Poe, on the other hand, sees poetry as a sacred mystery and is driven by the impulse to write stories "of a terror merging into horror and disgust." This bipartite separation, although reductive, appears convincing. Yet much of Poe's behavior, like his writing, was based on complex and mingled motives. In fact there are many more Poes than only two; but to deal with these other aspects of a writer, a critic must be willing to seek what lies behind the masks of his appearances. It would be well to ask why Poe was so obsessed with terror, horror and disgust as well as with sublunary visions and mechanistic puzzles and plots.

Mr. Symons' critical pages are perfunctory, without extended analyses of individual works. He derisively dismisses recent American criticism "as in varying degrees nonsensical … or trivial." Mr. Symons takes the work of such critics, myself among them, as attempts "to show widespread conscious symbolism in Poe"; such efforts result in "breathtaking absurdities," "gobbledegook," "theories spun entirely from the cloth of fantasy."

The truth is, Mr. Symons prefers his Poe unexamined—"The overt is to be preferred to the covert … the literal reading is certainly the best"—because he agrees without demur to Poe's Romantic assumption that imprecision of meaning is required for the production of beauty or the illusion of terror. "Any attempt to clarify that vagueness runs the risk of damaging a story." In his own assumption that we must murder to dissect, Mr. Symons would seem to have confused an indestructible great work of fiction with a chicken.

In his no-nonsense scanting of the speculative interpretations of Richard Wilbur and others, Mr. Symons misrepresents their intentions. Few sensible critics maintain that all of Poe's symbolism is wholly conscious, nor does it need to be. Symbolism can be present in a tale—as Poe (calling it allegory in his review of Hawthorne) said it should—as "a profound undercurrent … never to show itself unless called to the surface." Mr. Symons can tell us little about "The Fall of the House of Usher" or "Ligeia" because he balks at examining the profound undercurrents in such tales. (pp. 15, 36)

Daniel Hoffman, "Big with Baudelaire and Roger Corman," in The New York Times Book Review, July 9, 1978, pp. 15, 36.∗

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 journalist, the courteous southern gentleman. Of the darker side, like a good detective storyteller, he gives us all the evidence. But the mystery of Poe is not easily solved; a summary of the evidence is not enough to suggest a solution. Consider the case of Poe's bizarre marriage to his 13-year-old cousin. What are we to make of this? Earlier biographers have suggested that Poe entered the marriage to save himself from a life of sexual activity he clearly feared….

But Symons shies away from any such conjecture. He gives only two pages to this most central fact of Poe's adult life, beginning with the erroneous statement that, "the extraordinary nature of this marriage has been little commented on by Poe's biographers."… What was the emotional importance of the marriage? Symons does not say….

Symons remains steadfastly superficial throughout his treatment of the life. Most often he is content to describe the ups and downs of Poe's life as "hard" periods, "happy" times, or "very strange" events. The very thought of applying principles of psychoanalysis to a life that almost begs for interpretation seems reprehensible to him; "the psychoanalytic approach" receives scarcely five pages at the end of his book, most of which are given over to refuting an outdated Freudian interpretation of the work. (p. 43)

There may be no real answers to the questions Poe's life raises. But when Symons reports an incident near the end of Poe's life, in which the poet was persuaded to attend church services at midnight only to "rush out when the passage, 'He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief' was spoken and repeated," we suddenly realize that Symons has altogether failed to introduce this character. Who was this Poe, and what were his sorrows? Having read Symons, we still don't know.

Symons is even more reluctant to plumb the depths of Poe's work…. [He] is content to state the obvious, labeling Poe's detective fiction "Logical," the horror stories "Visionary," and at best identifying combinations of "Logical" and "Visionary" writing in the poetry and criticism that make certain works "effective." As we have seen from his treatment of the life, struggle is not a subject Symons is competent or even willing to handle….

Besides this disappointingly superficial reading of the work, Symons provides a few more pages debunking the two theories he knows about that attempt to reach further below the surface. First, he condemns all psychoanalytic interpretation of Poe's work on the basis of Marie Bonaparte's 1949 Freudian analysis…. Bonaparte's work would no doubt seem crude even to a fellow Freudian in the 1970s. Psychoanalytic interpretation has made such progress towards subtlety and sophistication since 1949. Symons's choice of Bonaparte's work as representative of the field is simply irresponsible.

Even more sophistical is Symons's rejection of symbolist interpretations of Poe. Symons mistakenly assumes that symbolist interpretations can only be made when the author has been proved to be "almost wholly conscious" of his use of symbols. Since Symons can find no explicit statement of symbolist intent in Poe's critical work, we must therefore stop looking for symbols in his poetry and fiction. I'm not sure what sort of criticism Symons has been reading lately, if any at all,… but certainly few symbolist critics today regard conscious intent on the part of an author as a prerequisite for discussing symbols that may emerge in a work. This last may in itself be worthy of attack—and if Symons had fought his battle on these grounds there might have been something worth reading here….

Symons feels he must come up with some way of explaining the enduring fascination of Poe's work. And after 250 pages of anti-analytical writing on both life and work, Symons offers this frustrating conclusion: "It is impossible to ignore [Poe's] life in dealing with his art…." The fascination we feel is with "the personality of Poe expressed through his art. The two are as nearly as possible identical." Why, then, has Symons separated his discussion of the work from the life? Why does he dismiss psychoanalytic interpretation of both the work and the life? Nowhere does he tell us how the personality is expressed through the art, nor even what personality is expressed. Symons fails to give his readers any feeling for Poe's genius as it was manifested during his life, nor any sense of the life as it is revealed in the art. This is the very least one expects from a biographer.

Edgar Allan Poe has been as little understood by his biographers as he was by those who knew him during his life. Unfortunately, Julian Symons's new biography does little to reverse that trend. The Tell-Tale Heart has pitifully little to tell. (p. 44)

Megan Marshall, in a review of "The Tell-Tale Heart: The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe," in The New Republic, Vol. 179, Nos. 9 & 10, August 26-September 2, 1978, pp. 42-4.

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 manuscript being presented in two sections; first the life, then the works. Symons reasons that in few literary case histories has there been so marked a contrast between the bread-and-butter journalistic labours on the one hand, and the real creative achievement on the other, and that if we are to proceed in the conventional style, by taking a period of the life together with the works which appeared during it, we are likely to end up with a most misleading portrait; as Symons writes, it is the unconscious Poe who chiefly interests the twentieth century, but this was not the man his contemporaries saw.

I doubt the validity of the argument…. In any case, there is only ever one valid excuse for a biographer, and that is his ability to write well. This Symons does. I find his narrative as charming as his theory justifying it is specious. For those who know nothing of Poe apart from his development of the honourable trade of curdling the blood, much of the text will come as a surprise, especially an astonishing letter written by Poe in 1844, astonishing because it discusses such unUsheresque themes as umbrellas, veal cutlets and carpet slippers.

There are certain biographical themes which seem to suit Symons particularly well, and Poe is perhaps one of them. Where once emotions clashed furiously, where the echoes still resound of controversy, Symons is a welcome guide, because of a certain worldliness which helps him disengage himself from the confusions and to understand at least some of the more contentious actions of his subject…. [So] sensible are many of Symons's remarks that they are in grave danger of being dismissed as platitudes when in fact they are nothing of the kind. I cite as one example among many his reflection that generally Poe's relationships with women were emotional, with men intellectual. He also confirms the theory first floated many years ago that Poe's life was a flight from the sham bestowed upon him by a foster-father who managed to bring himself to foster him but not to father him. The sting of not quite belonging left Poe with an overwrought conception of dignity, of aristocracy, of an élite which should order the world as it should be ordered. (p. 20)

If Symons's discussion of the writings very nearly disintegrates into a series of papers, they are at any rate well-written papers, closely reasoned, entertaining and enlightening, and most important of all, stimulating enough to send the reader running back to Poe himself. (p. 21)

Benny Green, "Incongruities," in The Spectator, Vol. 241, No. 7845, November 11, 1978, pp. 20-1.

[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 overseeing the publication of two new books on the same day. Taken together, they may prove a case to a wider array of jurors: Symons is far more than a maker of puzzles; he is a master of moral conundrums.

Exhibit No. 1 is The Detling Secret, a novel molded into the shape of the classic whodunit. The setting is England, the time the 1890s. Sir Arthur Detling is a crusty old Tory…. Among the burdens Sir Arthur must bear is his older daughter Dolly's determination to marry Bernard Ross, a Liberal M.P. with a mysterious past….

While artfully setting up … comic relief and the mysteries to follow, Symons provides panoramic background. The question of Irish Home Rule charges the atmosphere. Prime Minister William Gladstone tries vainly to keep Parliament in session until it wears down and disposes of the Irish problem…. Symons also conducts a guided tour of London's fin de siècle bohemia, where the names conjured with include Whistler, Turner and Beardsley. Oscar Wilde drops in on a party and charms everyone he greets.

When the first body appears, the event is almost disappointing, since so many other interesting plots have been set in motion. Symons anticipates this problem and shows how everything must converge in the murder. Then he tops himself with a second, this one occurring within the time-honored no-exit confines of a British country house. When the killer is unmasked, Symons still has enough ingenuity in reserve to put some reverse English on the disposition of the discovery.

"I have come tonight to plead for romance in the world of crime, for the locked room murder …" Thus the hero of one of the eleven stories in The Tigers of Subtopia addresses a club of criminologists in London. As it happens, Oliver Glass is starring in a West End production of one of his own detective plays. He is simultaneously planning the perfect crime in real life: the murder of his wife, to be accomplished during a brief intermission. Everyone in the theater will believe he is confined onstage, awaiting the next curtain. A perfect crime does indeed take place, but Glass is not its architect.

Such a reversal is typical of the stories in this collection, which owe as much to the tradition of O. Henry as to that of Conan Doyle. First Symons reveals a talent for the irresistible opening sentence…. Once this pace has been established, Symons races through plot complications (the old revolver stored safely in a drawer, an incriminating letter to a spouse accidentally opened and read) toward conclusions that upset the best-laid plans.

Unlike The Detling Secret, these stories are set in the present, most often in snug English suburban neighborhoods that Symons infuses with malevolence…. In the world as Symons describes it, nothing seems more natural than that people who dwell in such places should go extravagantly bananas.

Two such vigorous books from a writer 70 years old pose a mystery: Where does Symons find the energy and inspiration? Since the achievement is not a crime, Symons does not try to solve it. As it has been doing for as long as most readers can remember, his work speaks for itself.

Paul Gray, "Crime and Craftsmanship," in Time, Vol. 121, No. 7. February 14, 1983, p. 82.

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 era's domestic murderers and their homely weapons (arsenic soaked from flypaper, ground glass in the gruel) that fascinate.

Mr. Symons' "Sweet Adelaide" was based on the case of Adelaide Bartlett, a Pimlico housewife who in 1896 was reluctantly acquitted of force-feeding chloroform to her husband. The members of the Detling family, though imaginary, seem equally based in reality. Surely more than one upper-class Victorian family consisted of a thickheaded baronet, a misleadingly wispy wife, a silly son, an older daughter with a social conscience and a younger one with a yen for life among the bohemians. (p. 12)

Mr. Symons' use of period detail is both scrupulous and economical: A lesser writer would have laid on the antimacassars. He journeys through a London slum as effortlessly as he visits a country house whose butler seems to have strayed from "Cold Comfort Farm." His exposition is flawless, his conclusion convincing. For Mr. Symons, as for certain of his peers, the Victorians have offered rich pickings.

The world of "The Tigers of Subtopia: And Other Stories" is today's, and there is no joy in it. Instead there are bad marriages, bad sex and bad intentions. A woman who as a child playfully pushed her sister off a stair does penance for a lifetime: Her sister is crippled and a guiltmonger. A man shocked by a young prostitute's solicitation stalks her, knife in pocket, after his late wife is revealed to have been an adulteress. To his mind, in killing the one he will be killing the other. A father witnessing the beating of the young punk who he thinks has hurt his son is horrified—and ecstatic. Cruelty breeds cruelty, a bed is as cold as a grave, all trust is misplaced.

Big themes, these, made small by their treatment: All are cast in the mystery-story mold. First comes the situation, then the twist and finally the surprise ending. Nobody does it better than Mr. Symons, which is why "The Tigers of Subtopia" will fully satisfy fans of the short mystery story. Fans of the short story, however, will be left hungry.

On the other hand, they probably wouldn't be reading "The Tigers of Subtopia" anyway. Mr. Symons, working well within the confines of mystery fiction, brings the genre to a high polish. His craftsmanship is impeccable, and so are his manners. There's not a story here that lasts a minute too long. And one of them, "A Theme for Hyacinth," about an elderly man suckered into the murder of his young girlfriend's husband, is a killer. (p. 12, 42)

Mary Cantwell, 'Homicides, Victorian and Modern," in The New York Times Book Review, March 20, 1983, pp. 12, 42.

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 sabbatical…. Back in our own SoHo at "the House of Usher" (a sadomasochistic sex show with Annabel Lee as dominatrix), Dudley, who has shown no sign of deductive capacity so far, suddenly puts it all together. This reader stared in disbelief at the last page, thinking, "Only this and nothing more?" Julian Symons, a past master of the genre, can do better than this. The only things that seem to have caught his interest are his vivid and Juvenalian locations and background characters. Unfortunately, his social satire overshadows the perfunctory plot and zero of a hero, and all his Poe-tic references are not enough to make for suspense.

Meredith Tax, in a review of "The Name of Annabel Lee," in The New York Times Book Review, January 29, 1984, p. 22.

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 a good one—why Annabel Lee appeared and why she disappeared. But Mr. Symons has let his abundance run into irrelevancies—about the professor's former fiancée, now married to his father; about an old school friend and his trendy life and adulterous wife; about a dismal place of orgy called the House of Usher—and these, though not uninteresting, become annoying when they are discovered to have nothing to do with the problem of Annabel Lee.

A review of "The Name of Annabel Lee," in The New Yorker, Vol. LX, No. 2, February 27, 1984, p. 136.