Fiction sleuths back on the trail ...

Press, 11 June 1982, Page 18

Fiction sleuths back on the trail ...

Devotees of Sherlock Holmes will be delighted to learn that the famous crime solver is back in business — in the pages of a fascinating new book by Julian Symons in which the author recreates not only Holmes but many other popular fictional detectives.

By

KEITH BRACE,

literary

editor, Birmingham “Post”

The British, who tend to see themselves as mildmannered lovers of. dogs and roses, are often seen by the outside world as cunning diplomats, fiendishly clever secret agents and' private detectives of great ingenuity. Whether the reputation of Britain’s secret agents and private detectives is due to their actual achievements or to the powerful influence of the immensely popular books that feature them will be for future cultural historians to decide. Certainly, the popular literature has had a world-wide fame. The detective novels of the late Agatha Christie are international best-sellers. Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes is known throughout the world, one of the rare literary creations, such as Robinson Crusoe, Tarzan and Donald Duck, which are immediately i-ecognisable in all cultures. Most detective novels on railway bookstalls in numerous countries are translations from English — British or American. For perhaps only Georges Simenon has created, in Inspector Maigret, a character to rival the finest creations of crime novelists of Britain and the United States of America. Sb vivid are . these characters that they have tended to live outside their books as if they really existed. Holmes and other detectives are consulted by their governments ini time of crisis. It may be that the fantasy that wants to believe them still alive derives from the comfort felt in dangerous times if a man as brilliant as Sherlock Holmes really were savingihis country from the agents of a hostile power. What they- might have done had they really lived is imagined with great wit and persuasiveness in a recent book,“The Great Detectives,” by the distinguished British detective story writer and critic, Julian Symons, who displays an: encyclopaedic knowledge of the authors and stories from which he draws his information. An important element in his book’s success is the brilliant illustrations of Tom Adams, who recaptures the Ibok and feel of the periods concerned.

"The Great Detectives are creatures of myth, and deserve the capital letters I have given them,” writes Mr Symons: “They belong to the world of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza or that of King Arthur and the Round Table, and are not to be circumscribed by dates or trapped in the silken web of fact." Mr Symons has, therefore, blended the “facts” given by their creators with inventions of his own. Thus, an elderly Sherlock Holmes is encountered with his bees on the Sussex Downs, in southern England, where his creator, Conan Doyle, left him living in retirement. A young girl pretends to be a newspaper reporter — Holmes quickly deduces that she is not — to interest him in a personal problem. It is the classic opening to a Holmes case-— a distraught young woman, usually rather masculine and unmarriageable, enlisting his help to find someone who has disappeared — in this case a man who turns out to be the girl’s fiance. Holmes’ quickly tracks

down the missing man, exposes him as a trickster, and tries to comfort the girl.. Like many Holmes stories, it is not about violence or criminality, but about deception, betrayal of confidence and corruption of the conscience. In a charming ending, Julian Symons hints that the girl is the young Miss Marple who grew up, unmarried, to become one of Agatha Chris- . tie’s most popular detectives. Miss Marple’s story is told, as far as he knows it, by the vicar of the quiet village in which she lives and works and where she is “not altogther trusted” by the village folk, presumably because of her secretive way of life. Through the vicar’s account, Julian Symons recalls the succession, of sinister . murders that have disturbed the peace of the countryside through Miss Marple’s career as a detective. Sinister undertones in the peaceful English countryside have been a recurring literary theme from-Thomas Hardy to the

contemporary novelist, Susan Hill. For the account of the immensely large American detective, Nero Wolfe, Mr Symons “interviews” Wolfe’s close working associate, Archie Goodwin, to learn what he. can of the mysterious detective who preferred to do most of his deductive work from behind his desk. It is interesting that Mr Symons himself deduces, from both the Nero Wolfe books and the Ellery Queen books — superior examples of American detective fiction — that in both cases the detectives are of European origin and hanker after their old country, as if acute deductive powers could not be a native American gift. Mr Symons similarly recreates .the worlds of Maigret and Hercule Poirot, the real Frenchman .with his relentlessly pragmatic attitude to his' work and his cherished wife at home in the apartment, and .the stage

Frenchman — though he is actually a Belgian — with his iiamboyant, romantic methods of deduction. Symons’s most brilliant piece is the "interview” he describes with an ageing Los Angeles “private eye” who is not Philip Marlowe but who served as a model for Raymond Chandler in creating his stern, severely moral Old Roman of a detective. Chandler is the only one of the authors concerned — with the possible exception of Simenon — whose work is now treated as “serious” literature; his literary reputation grows year by year. This is a superb pastiche of Chandler’s style and attitudes, which does credit to Chandler as well as to Symons. The book itself is a handsome tribute to a popular stream of Anglo-Ameri-can-French literature which is often more memorable than the main stream of socalled serious fiction. London Press Service.