ACD-JGS: An Appreciation of Julian Symons
ACD-JGS: An Appreciation of Julian Symons is an article written by Owen Dudley Edwards published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 6, 1995).
This article is a critical appreciation of Julian Symons, examining his literary achievements as historian, biographer, critic, and detective novelist, and exploring his intellectual affinities with Arthur Conan Doyle. It highlights Symons's influence on crime fiction, biography, and literary criticism while reflecting on his complex artistic legacy.
ACD-JGS: An Appreciation of Julian Symons
Julian Symons (1), our President, was a figure of outstanding moral, intellectual and critical force in the Arthur Conan Doyle Society and in the related activity of its members, and as one of these members it is my honour to support the noble tribute paid to his memory by Christopher Roden, our Founder. One of his very last works was his welcome to The Oxford Sherlock Holmes, a review-essay whose generosity and understanding were ample recompense for any trouble taken by the editors while the edition made its painful progress in preparation. But in offering my own attempt at a preliminary appreciation of Julian Symons, I have two additional reasons for personal gratitude. He was good enough to support certain theses about his life and work which I tentatively offered in a tribute at Tunbridge Wells on our Society's celebration of his eightieth birthday (when he also gave me his Something Like a Love Affair just published and signed 'For Owen the over-generous from Julian the grateful Tunbridge Wells May 1992'). He is not to be blamed for any errors, misreadings, or misplaced emphases which follow; and he was himself over-generous, perhaps more so than I. But my other reason is that I find his fictional and factual works perpetually sparkling with stimuli, so that if I here depart on ill-chosen tangents it is for the happy cause of an excess of inspiration from my subject.
Julian Gustave Symons, as Detective Fiction's leading historian, critic, and practitioner in our time, was the obvious choice for our President. He made no claim for his brief, pictorial biography of Conan Doyle, a substitute (he told us at Tunbridge Wells) for the major biography he once wished to write. But his own links with Conan Doyle give more remarkable perspective to his place amongst us. He was central to the detective story for forty years in his fashion as was Conan Doyle for forty years in his, in both instances as artists, as critics, and as critics as artist. The works of each constitute invaluable observatories for the histories of their own times, notably in showing their own times's views of history.
JGS would not have thought of himself as resembling ACD, and yet there were extraordinary similarities. Both were supremely English in what they described, and, apparently, in how they described it; yet neither was really English as Englishness is classically perceived. If ACD was of Catholic parentage and early education, Irish descent and Scots birth, Julian's 'father was a Russian Jewish immigrant, .. the family name was assumed and the original name uncertain' ('Introduction' to his edition of A. J. A. Symons, Essays and Biographies (London, Cassell, 1969)). Their initial careers as doctor and poet respectively had permanent if unobtrusive effects on their literary styles and structures. JGS actually began as an engineer, but ignorance prevents my assessing the literary consequences; ACD of course had a schoolboy ambition to be an engineer. Both practised their creative arts with never-failing sense of obligation to their predecessors, uniting particularly in their homage to Poe, Carlyle, and Dickens. (JGS edited Johnson; ACD preferred Boswell.) Neither remained within their respective cultures of paternal origin, Catholic and Jewish, but the priestly role of Sherlock Holmes and the epilogue given to Ike Goldblatt in Symons's The Broken Penny (1953) are but two examples of parent-culture survival and indeed celebration in their work. Both had very strong, if not always very visible, sense of humour, and both could become deeply impassioned on subjects whose choice might somewhat surprise their observers. Both were highly conscious of starting out on their carcers overshadowed by illustrious relatives acknowledged as princes of the literary profession: 'HB', John Doyle, the grandfather, or Dicky Doyle, the uncle, of Conan Doyle; A. J. A. Symons, the eldest brother of Julian Symons.
Julian was Julian Gustave (or perhaps originally Gustave Julian) and A. J. (as he later would call himself) was Alphonse James Albert, later discarding Alphonse as a name usually associated with French waiters (see Julian Symons, The Gigantic Shadow), cooks, valets and hairdressers (and Roman Catholic saints) to become Albert James Alroy. Alroy, Julian assumed, was chosen by A. J. as 'suitably patrician and possessed of a respectable literary parentage in one of Disraeli's heroes' (A. J. A. Symons — His Life and Speculations (London: Cassell, 1950), p.135) but the coincidence with Wilde's Lady Alroy, the eponymous 'Sphinx Without a Secret' of his short-short story, seems too probable, especially given A. J.'s lifelong fondness for Wilde's poem 'The Sphinx', which he would recite at full length as an alternative to Poe's 'The Raven' and 'The Bells'. Their father may have had some German background, possibly even including a University education (at Heidelberg), which his financial rise and fall prevented his according to his children. M.A. Symons was a votary of Victorian values: hence A. J.'s Albert and Julian's Gustave, presumably from the recently crowned Gustav V of Sweden, husband to Princess Victoria. Old Mr Symons indignantly insisted that a set of the works of Wilde, purchased by A. J., must be removed from the house, thus presumably instilling in A. J. his lifelong determination to write the life and edit the works of Wilde; the private life of Gustav V was evidently unknown to the father. A savage scene in The Broken Penny describes the hero's father similarly expelling from the house books acquired by his mother (Lever and Lytton).
A. J. was born in 1900, twelve years before Julian, won a name in 1934 as the most unusual biographer of his day, and was dead in 1941. His name has faded somewhat now, where with the aid of Michael Holroyd's sensational volumes that of the other inter-war biographical pioneer Lytton Strachey survives; yet Strachey as evangel of the New Biography was as worthless as A. J. A. Symons was exemplary. No fact given by Strachey may be accepted without hard evidence from elsewhere; no fact given by A. J. A. — or Julian — Symons is likely to be false to the evidence they had. I speak of A. J. as a biographer; facts about himself he embroidered, enlarged or disappeared as occasion seemed to demand. Julian's first biography, that of A. J., was frank enough about his brother's dilletante and luxurious lifestyle. Julian was probably unaware of his brother's more insalubrious adventures in the book trade, but, five years after his book, Percy Muir's memoir of A. J. in the Book Collector recalled the deceased sailing closer to sinister winds than the biography had indicated. In brief, the impression left by Muir was that occasionally A. J. could be a crook in the book trade. As author of The Quest for Corvo, pioneering the idea of pursuit of a vanished subject by describing the biographer's experiences, A. J. was also a genius. The two functions really were related: A. J. turned the forgotten Frederick Rolfe, soi-disant Baron Corvo, into a prized bibliophiliae commodity. He salted the mine, with a salt so rich that it has been profitable ever since, and Corvo is prized by collectors, pursued by critics, reworked by theses, and even performed (in his Hadrian VII) with great success in a stage version owing much of its dramatic force to The Quest for Corvo no less than to Rolfe's novel. But present-day students know much more about Rolfe than did A. J., and in one respect they look down on The Quest, for they must be schooled in critical techniques and he was a true biographer, telling of the books rather than evaluating them. Julian, in his biographies of A. J., Carlyle, Poe, and other subjects, was ready to do a critic's work, but followed his brother in making clarity and pace his watchwords, with evaluation subordinate to biographical dictates. Yet Julian went through his life knowing than neither he nor anyone else would ever write a biography combining art and fact as musically as The Quest for Corvo, which admittedly owed some success to the almost universal ignorance of its subject when it first appeared. And Julian has the best summation of that success:
- The method by which The Quest for Corvo was constructed has, after all, been emulated very little by later biographers. It is fair to say that the book was, in the best sense, a biographical tour-de-force, and that the method employed could be used successfully only by such a natural self-dramatiser and born emotional conjurer, as A. J. It would have failed under the treatment of a less serious, less fastidious, more self-indulgent hand.
Julian kept his own much more straightforward biographical methods throughout his life. He paid himself few compliments about his biographies: he would not have known, for instance, that his biography of Thomas Carlyle played a major part in determining Kenneth J. Fielding, the future Saintsbury Professor of English Literature at Edinburgh, to devote his career to editing the Carlyle letters. To have made one's secondary work the very stimulus whereby the major biographical primary source would at last be given to the world, is as glowing a testimony as we could ask to the enduring value of a literary biography. In its way it is comparable to A. J.'s with Corvo: Carlyle was known, of course, when Julian wrote, but was losing ground rapidly, all the more in that his racial and political theories brought him into uncomfortable proximity to the genesis of Nazism. Julian rescued Carlyle from obloquy and obscurity, and gave him, as we can now see, a lease on future scholarly devotion and critical appreciation. Other subjects seemed almost legacies from A. J., Poe among them, although here A. J.'s biographical essay, rescued by Julian for his edition of its siblings, looks painfully amateur by contrast to Julian's The Tell-Tale Heart, his own life of Poe. Yet we can see even in A. J. at his leanest, the inspirational force to us all, but above all to Julian:
- ... Poe was a man haunted all his days by ghosts, ghosts which we cannot quite recognize as they stand behind the thin but not transparent curtain of his works.
Again, A. J.'s rather unexpected interest in African adventurers, most permanently shown in his brief lives of H.M. Stanley and Emin Pasha, received its fuller realization when Julian turned his attention to such volumes as England's Pride, on Gordon at Khartoum, and Buller's Campaign, on the South African War. Above all, both brothers were conscious of the ironies behind the heroic cults of their subjects, and fashioned studies unveiling the weakness underlying precursor narratives singing of white strength.
The most striking influence of The Quest for Corvo, and even of the Muir sequel to Julian's A. J. A. Symons, revealed itself in Julian's detective fiction. In one case they linked with spin-off effects from his biography Horatio Bottomley (1955). Bottomley was a swindler of extraordinary charisma, demagogic genius, and forensic skill, infinitely cruder than A. J., and without an artistic corpuscle in his all too sporting blood, yet probably with a coarse touch of the magic Julian had found in A. J. as living brother and dead subject. A. J. Maundy Gregory (ultimately sentenced for selling Royal Honours), restarted A. J. A. Symons on his temporarily moribund Corvine quest, and if Gregory's style of life harmonised with A. J.'s, his fate resembled Bottomley's. Julian was supremely aware of Bottomley's endless capacity for self-enrichment by legal action, and on publication of his biography was haunted by an experience of A. J.'s after publication of Corvo's. 'He received a shock when, one day, a letter came through the post addressed to him, which seemed quite plainly to be in Rolfe's handwriting; it proved to be that of a man who had received some letters from Rolfe in childhood, and had been so struck by the beauty of their script that he set himself to copy it.' Suppose the horrific Horatio was not dead? What hell would he have in store for his all too frank biographer? The result was The Paper Chase (1956), in which a young man pursued the story of the life of the deceased 'Johnny Bogue', with the ultimate result:
- Then the man turned round, holding a towel in one hand, and saw them or perhaps he had seen them all the time. 'Mr Applegate, I presume,' he said. 'Mr Applegate and party. Make yourselves at home.'
- The man was stocky, almost fat. His thick curly hair was abundant, and it was hardly streaked with grey. The head was well shaped but jowly, and about the body too there was more than a suggestion of flabbiness. The eyes were remarkable. In colour they were a slaty blue-grey. They were large and fringed by dark, thick lashes. But the remarkable thing about them was that these beautiful eyes lacked all the warmth and friendliness that was in the man's voice. They were cold, assessing eyes, and Applegate saw them move quickly, consideringly, from him to Hedda, on to Maureen, and then back to him. Then he said the simple words that he had never expected to say, words that ended a quest.
- 'You're Johnny Bogue.'
Julian Symons wrote many better fictions than The Paper Chase, but for any biographer this is capture of the classic dénouement in a biographer's darkest place. Of course, it does not have to be dark. I greatly enjoyed contemplating the return of Arthur Conan Doyle for the improvement of my biographical study, felt an active sense of his assistance (chiefly by following principles of research and criticism laid down by him in books), and greatly annoyed innocent materialists by apparently implying I was in receipt of posthumous communication. It was suggestive in showing how irrational human responses from supposed rationalists will often prove, when assailed with alleged spirit phenomena: it is the materialists, not the Spiritualists, who are the dead giveaway. But if ACD were to appear, I looked forward to welcoming him, and indeed thanking him. On the other hand, I recall dreaming of an encounter with Burke and Hare, which was courteous but clearly intended to be a fatal conclusion to my biographical studies of them. Julian's Bogue became my Burke, presumably, for of course Bogue does seek his questor's life. Nor did that exorcise the ghost of Bottomley from Julian's fictional creative roots, for he was to revive him, again with homicidal results, in The Killing of Francie Lake (1962), this time under the wickedly obvious rebaptism 'Octavius Gaye'.
Julian's Conan Doyle interests would work themselves out artfully enough in A Three-Pipe Problem, with some small derivation of The Quest for Corvo. Rolfe, the rejected novice, recreates himself as Pope Hadrian VII, much as Sheridan Haynes, the actor in the process of rejection, recreates himself as Sherlock Holmes. Failure becomes the spur to creative identification; defeated in reality, victory comes with fantasy. Julian was to pursue that theme in several tragic fictions, culminating frequently in homicidal mania; but he would also show that Fantasy fathered Creation no less than Destruction. In a particularly sinister mingling he exhibited both in The Name of Annabel Lee, but this time with Creation and Destruction under parenthood that was all too sane. I toy with the thought that its year, 1983, followed that in which my The Quest for Sherlock Holmes was reviewed by Julian, a trifle testily in view of its incessant pursuit of supposed biographical clues, its endless pottering around: and the protagonist whose obsessive biographical quest ultimately wins catastrophe, is called Dudley Ernest Potter. Be my own childish fantasy what it may, Annabel Lee is a classic treatment of detective fiction potential in biographical antecedent. It makes some excellent critical comment on Poe, as when the gay poet George Garnish tells Dudley, 'The House of Usher rises from the ruins, it fell because of the decay of a civilization, it rises again and is that decay'. Apply that to the doomed white South in whose pretentious fantasies 'The Fall of the House of Usher' was conceived. There is a classic Sherlockian moment, when the egomaniacal super-grocer serves up his autobiography after the manner of Holmes's production of the Naval Treaty. But above all, the mystery turns with unrivalled dexterity on the poems of Annabel Lee, and of Lenore. One is permitted to see the beating of the Julian Symons tell-tale heart sending the brain its rational response from the repetitions of Annabel Lee, who here is indeed chilled in her kingdom by the sea. As for Lenore, Julian must have had as his very first encounter with Poe A. J.'s rendition of 'The Raven' with its incessant demands as to the whereabouts of that rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore. In the Corman movie Vincent Price puts the question to the Raven, who replies in Peter Lorre's voice, 'How in hell would I know?' The Name of Annabel Lee answers the question, for its context. The idea of Lenore's survival in apparent defiance of established fact and for no good purpose, is also basic to the movie, but the earliest germ of a comparable thought might very well have taken life in Julian's creative mind in his extreme youth while waiting for his brother to finish reciting the poem. When he wrote his first detective story, after all, some two decades later, it (The Immaterial Murder Case) was a send-up, though of modern rather than romantic pretentions.
This was to adapt biographical obsessions to figures from Poetry (or, if you prefer, The Imps of the Poe Verse). But A. J.'s great unwritten biography had been that of Oscar Wilde, and Julian was to employ that legacy in very different terms. He brought Wilde into his fiction, undisguised. The party to celebrate Dolly's engagement in The Detling Secret is crowned by Wilde's presence, occupying exactly a page of the novel, probably the best use of Wilde in fiction (nominal or actual, Wilde's letters excepted). A. J. had dropped his proposed biography at the time of his death (probably to resume it after the death of Lord Alfred Douglas who in fact survived him by four years), but published chapters from it on Wilde at Oxford, and on Wilde as Diner-Out. Julian brought them together in his anthology of A. J.'s biographical essays. The effect was to deepen the conviction of A. J.'s as the greatest biography of Wilde we never had, until the late Richard Ellmann's was published (again, alas, posthumously). Neither A. J. nor Ellmann would have left their biographies like that, had they survived to see them in print, but the impressionistic method is common to both works. Julian's fictional portrait is of its nature even more impressionistic, yet in The Detling Secret Julian seems to me to have outdone his brother's achievement in a sketch Ellmann would have been proud to own. It seems most apposite that he should show himself most obviously a master of biography in the art-form to which his life-apprenticeship to The Quest for Corvo most effectively bound him: the detective novel.
But the admiration, emulation, and perturbation aroused in Julian by The Quest for Corvo remained with him all his days. The doomed biographer-reduced- to-detective Jason Durling in The Criminal Comedy of the Contented Couple (1985) absurdly pursues what (with capital letter) he calls The Quest' for Cruddle, D.M. Cruddle being the obscure homosexual master of gorgeous fantasy whose ultimate betrayal of his biographer enabled Julian to mix pastiches of The Quest for Corvo and The Aspern Papers. He even says so in a stage aside a few pages later: 'Derek as he stood at the window of Jason's room, looked almost at the Venice seen by Henry James and Baron Corvo.' And Jason's decision to culminate his investigation of the murders with a fatal visit to the murderers is declared (by the omniscient narrator) in the words 'A quest begun should have an end...' It is ironic statement of a Law, comparable in its way to Brutus's oft-quoted 'There is a tide in the affairs of men...' actually spoken to advocate what proves a disastrous policy.
Death's Darkest Face uses 'quest' for its climax: 'I was surprised to find that love for my father was unaffected by learning that he had become a murderer, but with that knowledge the quest was over.' But it is not. The narrator Geoffrey Elder's posthumous editing by his friend Julian Symons, self-introduced to open and close his own story, finally concludes: The chief interest for me has been less the puzzle (which has just been solved by the "editor" in vindication of the father Elder had believed guilty] than Geoffrey's quest: a quest dominated by the search for his father and the image of that crucial coupling witnessed by him, but also an attempt on his part to recreate differently the for ever unrealisable past.' This seems to me to have what Lewis Carroll's Humpty Dumpty would have called 'portmanteau' intent: Geoffrey Elder relates not only to Julian's elder brother, but his quest is in part Julian's about that elder brother. I think he is telling us, or at least himself, that his love for A. J. survived any revelations about the elder brother's moral probity, but he would have been glad if those revelations proved untrue.
Taking one thing with another, it must have been really irritating to be confronted by books with titles usurping his fraternal legacy. In retrospect I am irritated with myself for having chosen the title I did, almost insulting in its theft of the fraternal word, and that too just after Julian had given the world his own biography of ACD, however brief. It is even less creditable that I have to confess having chosen it purely under the inspiration of A. J. as the great modern master of biography, and never having thought of Julian at the time, however much obliged to his general works and aware of his Conan Doyle. If I find the resultant self-portrait I have painted to be painfully egregious and short-sighted, I am slightly mollified by Julian's own elegant Beerbohmish fictionalised memoirs, Portraits of the Missing (1991), where he mocks his own supposed poltrooneries with a grace only Beerbohm could rival. And it is there that he describes a supposed encounter with the mother of an imaginary literary editor, the lady having invited him to dinner under the impression that he had written The Quest for Corvo, an error he tells us she shared with many of his correspondents.
How far ACD was dominated by the legacy of 'HB' is another question, but the comparison with JGS may be useful. Memories and Adventures begins with a firm account of 'HB', pointing out that modern caricature began with his work in place of the grotesques of Gilray and Rowlandson (whose work certainly showed it was but one step from the grotesque to the horrible), 'My grandfather was a gentleman, drawing gentlemen for gentlemen, and the satire lay in the wit of the picture and not in the misdrawing of faces. This sense that ACD had art in his blood we all know: but if we apply the Symons analogy it bursts out, it seems to me, in Conan Doyle's historical fiction in strength and weakness. Like HB he has to make sure he produces portraits of fidelity and wit, however marginal to his action: hence the Nelson of Rodney Stone and the Napoleon of Uncle Bernac who do so much to hold up the action; hence the Napoleon of the Gerard stories who is essential to them (either in person or in the background); hence the Walter Scott essential to get The Great Shadow moving or the Judge Jeffreys essential to bring Micah Clarke to its end. Julian learned from ACD's problem, and his own use of real live figures were fine achievements in economy, the outstanding virtue of ACD's short stories and the casualty of his novels, from time to time.
Julian thought that 'The series of Brigadier Gerard stories have a zest and liveliness that keeps them marvellously readable, and some of the other books have a feeling for period which is not much inferior to that of Scott.' He later withdrew this sentence, but it holds up. The historical fictions of both Conan Doyle and Julian Symons occasionally rekindle the fires of a past whence orthodox historians can only draw sparks. No other work makes us understand the force of Nationalism in Napoleon's Europe better than the Gerard stories. No other work captures the strengths and weaknesses of Sir Charles Russell, foremost advocate of his age, better than The Blackheath Poisonings. These examples may surprise by choosing the history of public opinion for ACD and the history of a single character for JGS, although ACD was preoccupied by character, and gave literature two immortal characters in Holmes and Watson, while JGS is above all the recorder of public opinion in his detective stories, making him one of the finest sources future historians can find to understand popular beliefs and behaviour. Maybe each succeeded best when less conscious of their own efforts. But Julian noted ACD's genius with minor characters: A Three-Pipe Problem, for instance, pays homage to Joseph Harrison in 'The Naval Treaty', by showing what is demanded of his interpreter in a TV performance.
Both were remarkably subtle writers, most obviously in the tricks their stories made them play on their readers. We put down their stories with a deeper understanding of human nature, whether by Holmes's aphorisms or from the Symons scenarii. JGS was supremely conscious of ACD as the great pioneer who had not only dominated but largely dictated the course of detective fiction since his times. Everyone was producing detectives allegedly non-Holmes which proved their descent from Holmes. Julian would be the historian of these reluctant disciples ('Sir Hugh Greene's selections from tales about the detective he calls "the rivals of Sherlock Holmes" show convincingly the superiority of the absent Sherlock'). His own mature work sought to keep the interplay of character firmly held within sociological observation. JGS has many vivid characters, but it is hard to think of them out of their stories' context, while within it they harmonise with a neatness and elegance stamping the Master.
He began with a series detective, Inspector Bland, in The Immaterial Murder Case, in A Man Called Jones, and in Bland Beginning. But he rarely had a kind word for them. Bland is an attractive but rather vague character (am I being obsessional in finding him a little like A. J.?). It may be important that Julian wondered if his father's name had been Brann, Brand, or Lander, having found evidence he was addressed as all three: 'Bland' seems a conflation. Later Symons sometimes had a minor recurrent character (rather like Eric Ambler's Colonel Haki), Detective Inspector 'Dumb' Crambo of Scotland Yard: he could easily have been developed into a standard favourite, possibly assisting sales with book-jacket allurements such as 'DUMB CRAMBO'S LATEST TRIUMPH', or 'DUMB CRAMBO'S OTHER MYSTERIES'. But this would have under-cut the Symons method, which was to disorient the reader by the absence of reliable symbols. Crambo may resolve a problem in any story, or he may simply complicate it. It is just possible that someone else took advantage of Symons's austerity. The American TV police-detective, Lieutenant Columbo (as performed by Peter Falk in a succession of self-standing episodes in the 1970s) seems to derive from Crambo in his cunning invitation to his suspects to despise him, to dismiss him as 'that dumb Columbo'. (2)
Julian's admiration for Conan Doyle was generous and sound, but as a strong modernist he overstressed ACD's traditionalism (and, as the last words of his final edition of Bloody Murder underlines, he had also underestimated his own traditionalism and anti-modernism). His views on ACD invite reading and re-reading, especially in his more casual references (frequently in his own fictions), or in his discussion of ACD's place in the history of detective stories. He made some excellent points such as his realisation that the Celtic strain may have accounted for ACD's Spiritualism and tales of 'twilight and the unseen'. But he missed his own counterparts in ACD, sometimes. He complained that 'in "The Norwood Builder" the "charred organic remains" which temporarily persuade both Holmes and Watson that Mr Jonas Oldacre is dead turn out to be rabbit bones, which should surely not have deceived a Great Detective'. Yet the rabbits are simply a satirical suggestion from Holmes as to how Watson might finish the story, a touch of deconstruction by the author, much as Julian himself did at the end of The Immaterial Murder Case or in the American (but not the British) edition of Bland Beginning which begins on an interruption of Julian in the London Library by Bland.
Julian's use of the real Wilde, ACD's use of minor aspects of Wilde in Thaddeus Sholto, make us wonder how deeply both drew on real-life persons. Julian warned against excessive attention to the ingredients at the expense of seeing the mixing and cooking processes. His murderer, Donald Breck, in The Immaterial Murder Case, seems to have been a firm portrait of his friend the Scots poet Ruthven Todd (originally intended to have been its co-author), but, like Eric Ambler's The Dark Frontier, and in some ways like A Study in Scarlet, JGS's first novel began his lifetime career in a certain genre by satirising it. Essentially the teacher in both ACD and JGS made them natural cases of what Wilde called the critic as artist, so that in each case the initial book was born from an awareness of what ailed its kind. So Breck (and when has a name been more deliciously and absurdly borrowed from Stevenson?, Breck not being a surname but an adjectival description, to distinguish Kidnapped's Allan from innumerable other Stewarts) might satirise Todd as Holmes both satirises and celebrates Joe Bell, Robert Christison, Bryan Charles Waller, Henry Irving, Murray of the Challenger and the rest.
Both writers probably took traits and mannerisms from acquaintances. I feel strongly that Lord Bellinger in 'The Second Stain' is a portrait of Gladstone, rather kind, very appreciative, not uncritical (HB strikes again?), and on at least two occasions Julian may have drawn with Lord Beaverbrook as an inspiration, once for the treacherous Sir Alfred in The Broken Penny and later, more obviously, for Lord Brackman in The Progress of a Crime. The Broken Penny (1953), Julian's undervalued thriller, anticipating themes and tensions of John Le Carré's The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, reminds us that as an ex-Trotskyite and close friend of George Orwell its author would be instinctively suspicious of tycoons combining High Toryism with bursts of enthusiasm for befriending Communist dictators (Orwell's thesis, which Anthony Blunt would illustrate, being that some ruling reactionaries under capitalism would take out insurance to slide perfectly easily into comparable points of power under Soviet rule). Julian would have accumulated a good deal of knowledge of Beaverbrook from his time as crime fiction writer for the Evening Standard. He irrevocably excluded the two resultant short-story collections, Francis Quarles Investigates and Murder! Murder!, from his list of previous crime fiction (whence he dropped, but restored, Immaterial and Jones). Having furthered his genius in detective fiction without the Great Detective (what I have ventured elsewhere to call the Holmesless Carriage), Julian may well have been forced to manufacture one in Francis Quarles. One can see Beaverbrook demanding his House Detective. Julian entered into the thing professionally enough, and it is possible to warm (luke-warm) to Quarles; Julian amused himself in introducing Murder! Murder! by what looks like a skit on Dorothy L. Sayers's prefatory note on Lord Peter Wimsey ('The Quarles family pride themselves on having settled in England before the Norman Conquest') while adding the much more Julianine touch of descent from a real, eponymous, and largely forgotten Caroline poet. But it seems clear enough that any feelings of irritation Conan Doyle may sometimes have had for Sherlock Holmes, were nothing to the distaste Julian conceived for Francis Quarles, necessarily his most widely-read work and (at least at the time of its writing) his most remunerative. And no claims can be made for Quarles as literature, where so many of Julian's novels bear very powerful claims. Hence Quarles may have added fuel to the flames in which he served up the Beaver (as the Evening Standard proprietor was known: Lord Brackman in The Progress of a Crime is 'Brack').
More neglected as a theme, but of major importance, is the question of an inspirational occasion. Our Society found one such case for ACD when we brought out the unknown story from 1882 'The Blood-Stone Tragedy', inspired by Price's druidic cremation of his child. Similarly, Julian Symons's The Progress of a Crime, surely the finest and most authoritative fictional work on the interaction of crime, the police and the media in post-war Britain, seems to have been inspired by the trial of Craig and Bentley (although without notable caricature of its protagonists: it must have been tempting to lampoon the horrific Lord Chief Justice Goddard, but very correctly the judge is portrayed as representative of the system, not of its worst excesses). Questions of moral domination among juvenile criminals, especially between twosomes, are vital to both cases, as are the ruthless methods of the police. This last feature was decidedly premature, in the eyes of Julian's shocked American publishers (who can hardly have known much of their own cops, or alternatively assumed Britain was saturated with Plods happiest among their rambler roses). Unhappily, Julian was to prove all too accurate in his prescient analyses. ACD's little etchings of police bullying, incompetence and zeal for the fastest conviction at whatever violence to the facts, were a reminder of the potential for abuse in all systems of power. If Britain was surprised by the proof of police persecution in the 1960s, ACD no less than JGS had warned them. Julian may have been alerted also by the evidence of homophobic police action in the 1950s; like ACD, he wrote and spoke with more charity, civilisation and common sense on homosexuality than almost all of his contemporaries (before gays became fashionable, or legal).
ACD and JGS were observers of the present and analysts of the past, rather than prophets of the future. But their works could prove prophetic with no ostensible implication of such an intent. The Sherlock Holmes stories are surely a very serious warning from a professional medical man that the forces of law and criminology desperately require professionalisation as rigorously as doctors. Holmes is the vital future, Lestrade the pernicious past. The Symons works, especially The 31st of February, may embody grim warning of the evil forms that such professionalisation could take unchecked. Both writers looked for applicability of their historical interests to the present. The White Company concludes with the hope of medieval courage and chivalry having every future relevance for Britain in the service of patriotism (in the story these virtues have been largely restricted to mercenary soldiering for Pedro the Cruel). Julian introduced his challenging anthology of Carlyle for Rupert Hart-Davis's Reynard Library, 'Much that Carlyle has to say, even in his later work, has a strikingly contemporaneous air: many of his observations might have been made in the nineteen-fifties, instead of a century earlier'. The one heart-cry of the enthusiastic votary was as valid as the other, although Julian might have been startled by such linkage. In fact, the youthful Conan Doyle seems to have responded very similarly to Carlyle, although as The Sign of the Four makes clear, ACD at thirty found Carlyle less original than did Julian at forty-three ('the most original British thinker of his age').
As The Oxford Sherlock Holmes sought to show, ACD made considerable, but not always explicit, use of his knowledge of Irish terrorism. Julian initially missed this, his first edition of Bloody Murder remarking, 'Doyle, for instance, although he occasionally dealt with terrorist societies, always placed their activities in some distant country'; but on reflection he dropped that from later editions. If the Ku Klux Klan in Britain is merely on shore leave in 'The Five Orange Pips', the Red Circle was so omnipresent as to require the most elaborate precautions of concealment for its victims. And Holmes finds Skibbereen an indispensable postgraduate location for fieldwork in Irish-American terrorism. But Julian himself in The Gigantic Shadow had confronted the same phenomena. Presumably its inspiration came from TV attempts to interview Brendan Behan, culminating in intoxicated ex-IRA interviewee denouncing an increasingly disconcerted TV pundit. The Gigantic Shadow inverted this by having the (sober) interviewee denounce the pundit as ex-IRA man. It's a good story, marred by the pundit's showing barely the slightest sign of his IRA nonage, and while the idea of a lost terrorist background suddenly enshrouding its supposed successful refugee has its drama when the past has been buried so well, the horrifically re-emergent former terrorist captain looming over his former subaltern loses something by failure to embed the terrorist past in its IRA homicidal mythology. The thing was that while Julian knew something of ferocious terrorist ideology in its strictly theoretical Trotskyite application, and while this may have included his own suffering under some appalling apparatchik forever accusing the backslider, it offered only limited briefing on the emotional pull of IRA revolutionary nationalism. Of all Marxisms, Trotskyism is officially the most inimical to nationalist sentiment, although its psychological harrassment may closely resemble that which habitually tells its wretched pawns that no man can do enough for Ireland. But if Julian, fortunately for himself, had little personal familiarity with the IRA, he proved all too prophetic in pointing out that ex-terrorists find ready outlet for their talents in drug-running, protection racketeering, becoming hit-men for crime barons. Julian may have missed out on the IRA past, but he saw very clearly what would be the IRA future.
He showed also what were the obvious if disregarded side-effects of personality cults, which was probably one reason why instinctively he was uneasy with the Great Detective as he was with the Great Terrorist. Our Holmes, if unrestrained by Watson, can always evolve into Moriarty. That was one reason why in its characteristic championship of undervalued detective fiction Julian's Classic Crime Omnibus chooses Edward D. Hoch, 'The Most Dangerous Man'. Julian seldom liked Sherlockian spinoffs, but this reworking of a plot from Moriarty's viewpoint made perfect sense to him-in its delicate, brief comedy and in its silent potential for tragedy. And there above all he resembled ACD. Both were masters of the comic possibilities of detective fiction, but both remained perpetually alive to the profound human tragedies that underlie the world which makes it.
(1) I have called him 'Julian' here, a practice he found distasteful in writing of living subjects as it sounds conspiratorial. But I have to use his first name to distinguish him from his brother. And he was our President — it is natural for us, if not for the general reader.
(2) Twentieth-Century Detective Fiction likes its listed authors to have a series character. Bland gets in; Crambo, with as many appearances or more, does not, though all JGS's books are listed.
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
