FFB: The Man Whose Dreams Came True - Julian Symons

Confession #87: I am not a fan of Julian Symons. Years ago when I was a teenager my treasured copy of Murder Ink introduced me to hundreds of mystery writers I was eager to sample. In that seminal anthology and history of crime fiction I learned of Julian Symons’ unique suspense novel The 31st of February. This was the first Symons “mystery” I read and only because of Dilys Winn’s rave calling it one of the best books with an unforgettable surprise ending. Well, it bored me more than my algebra class. I was only 15 so maybe the gravitas of a man being mentally tortured and hounded by someone who knows he killed his wife was beyond my experience. But shouldn’t the telling at least engage any reader? I’ve also read The Three Pipe Problem (too arch in its humor for my teenage mind), The Kentish Manor Murders (sequel to the previous book, snobby and pompous and tiresome), and The Blackheath Poisonings of which I remember nothing. I’ve tried a handful of others over the past couple of years and never finished them. Why on earth then did I specifically reserve two little read Julian Symons books from the Chicago Public Library?

Confession #88: it was for a silly idea I had. Review a slew of books with titles that begin The Man Who… Symons wrote three of them, one right after the other back in the 1960s. I read one excellent book by Dolores Hitchens (The Man Who Cried All the Way Home) and posted that a few days ago. Now here’s the second in my series of “Man Who…” reviews. And was I ever surprised! This book may single-handedly have changed my mind about Julian Symons.

The Man Whose Dreams Came True (1968) is an inverted detective novel with an anti-hero in the Patricia Highsmith mode. We know from the very first chapter that Anthony Scott-Williams is a cad. He dreams of a life in Venice, Italy while working as a researcher and secretary for an old General who is compiling a memoir that grows ever longer and may probably never see publication. Tony has several different identities. He willfully steals from his employer to supplement his gambling addiction, manipulates his friends and associates, lies and cheats to get what he wants and does it all with good humor and charm. Tony is bound to get mixed up with the wrong people as he continues to exploit the women and men he meets in his life of leisure. His girlfriend turns out to be a con artist but does he learn his lesson with her? No, he tries again with an older woman and his life turns upside down.

At first there is admiration for Tony’s hutzpah and a longing to see him taken down a notch. We briefly watch Tony in action trying to exploit a young woman he thinks is a rich heiress but when it all backfires he is more than a little angry. But when he next plies his charm on another wealthy woman, Genevieve Foster, he surprises himself by falling in love with her. Mrs. Foster has a plan, however, that includes a crime Tony has never dreamed of committing. This time he thinks his life will finally change for the better and he’s willing to anything for Jenny -- including murder her husband.

Like his own creation Symons seems to be playing the reader and exploiting his emotions with twists and layers of irony. First the novelist presents us with a likeable cad, then reveals him as a foolish and rash young man with an anger problem, and then ultimately as a victim of someone much more malicious and self-serving than himself. The shifts are all done with astonishing skill.

The one aspect that is unsurprising is that Tony has had a rather miserable life. We learn about his drunken father who beat him as a child, his ineffectual mother whose love was not enough to protect him from abuse, and his eventual descent into a life of crime. Free from maudlin sentimentality this history is told as cold and distant as an idealistically unbiased journalist. And yet the narrative elicits an affinity for the young man and a hope for a better future. The reader may join Tony in desiring a happily ever after ending no matter what he has to do in order to achieve his dreams.

When the tables are turned and Tony becomes a victim of an obvious frame-up, carried out in a heartlessly malicious manner, it only strengthens the reader’s desire for positive change in Tony’s life. He finds himself on trial for the murder of a man he never met. No amount of explaining to either the police or his wise team of public defender lawyers can muster much sympathy, even when he is forced to confess that he was conspiring to kill someone entirely different than the person he is charged with murdering! All the while the reader knows Tony is telling the truth and is eager for his lawyers to find the evidence that will prove Tony’s innocence. We find ourself rooting for this thoroughly unscrupulous and selfish man who was going to kill but never fulfilled his plans.

A bit past the halfway mark a private detective enters the story. He has been hired by a mysterious benefactor who has Tony’s best interests at heart. Dimmock works for Second to None Agency has been put on this case because the owner Clarence Newhouse trusts his most reliable and senior agent to do the kind of determined work he well known for. While other agents at Second to None may be fiddling with expense accounts and wasting time in pubs drinking away last week’s paycheck Dimmock is always on the case. As Symons describes him: “If Dimmock was asked to find a missing woman last seen in Birmingham he would go on doggedly looking until he found her or was called off the trail.”

The scenes with Dimmock are filled with a humanity and quiet dignity. The man is suffering from a cold while performing his job, the result of spending too much time chasing after witnesses during wet and rainy weather while dressed inappropriately. Sneezing and wiping his nose at nearly every home he visits Dimmock displays a skill in saying the right things to ward off anger and bring out the best in the witnesses who were guarded when questioned by police. With a down-to earth nature, an unapologetic manner, and despite his aggravating cold, Dimmock gets the various people on the list of witnesses for the prosecution to admit to facts that the police were not offered. He turns up crucial observations and perceptions that led him to finding damning physical evidence of Mrs. Foster’s guilt. Dimmock is the real hero of the novel and was my favorite character.

In the end for all its humanity, for all the shifts in sympathy we have for Tony, and even with the surprise of a nifty detective novel in miniature in the chapters that feature Dimmock The Man Whose Dreams Came True proves to be a darkly ironic piece of noir fiction. Can there really be a happily-ever-after for Tony? With a vicious attack on his character, with his ultimate admission of plotting to kill someone completely different than the victim of the murder trial, with that brazen and brave confession as his only defense can Tony receive redemption? He should be on the road to reform and ought to be rewarded with something other than the much desired acquittal. Perhaps a cruel Fate will intrude as happened when he met Mrs. Foster. The fourth section of the novel is titled “How the Dreams Came True” and in it Symons delivers a nasty punch to the gut. Despite all his dreams, despite all his good fortune after the trial, we get a finale that perhaps was the only possible ending for Tony.

QUOTES: “Tony understood that if there had been no threats it was a good thing for him, it meant that he had no reason to worry about the money. This meant also that it didn’t always pay to bring out the truth. Would it be right to say that truth was one thing and justice another?”

“Newton’s hand fell like an accolade on Dimmock’s shoulder as he said that they would need him also in court. That was an exciting prospect, but Dimmock afterward thought of the hour he had spent in those chambers, rather than the session in court, as the crowning point of his career. He had the prescription made up. And although it had no effect upon his cold he treasured the piece of paper to the end of his life.”

The Kentish Manor Murders – Julian Symons

Here’s a great example of not judging a book by its title. Turns out The Kentish Manor Murders (1988) is not at all a country house detective novel. It’s the title of a manuscript that is supposedly the work of Arthur Conan Doyle -- his last Sherlock Holmes novel, in fact, and written in the author's own hand. The manuscript has turned up in the hands of a private collector who is looking for authentication before offering the manuscript up for sale. Sheridan Haynes (who previously appeared in Symons’ novel A Three-Pipe Problem), renowned for his TV portrayal of Sherlock Holmes, is approached about helping to authenticate the manuscript. But complications ensue as Haynes makes his way to Copenhagen where he will be performing one of his famous readings from the Canon to The Silver Blazes, a Danish group of Holmes enthusiasts.

This has all the makings for an intriguing bibliomystery. But Symons adds a series of subplots early on in the book that unnecessarily complicate the story. We start in Castle Baskerville, the heavily secured isolated estate of millionaire eccentric, hypochrondiac, and celebrated Sherlockian Warren Waymark. He wants Haynes to perform one of his Conan Doyle reader's theater performance pieces for a private audience of one. Haynes is not up to the task as he is getting ready for his Copenhagen visit for a much larger audience in a real theater. Haynes is also immediately suspicious that Waymark might be an impostor. The millionaire is kept in a dimly lit room, he wears sunglasses indoors claiming to be sensitive to all light, and he speaks in a gravelly indistinct voice. His meeting with Waymark seems to be carefully orchestrated and Waymark does seem to know his Canon very well, but the interview feels completely wrong to Haynes.

We think Haynes is going to start checking into the possibility that Waymark was done away with and his invitation to the Castle is linked to the discovery of the manuscript. But no sooner are we invested in this plot hook thinking we are in the hands of a master concocting a devious Sherlockian pastiche, Symons pulls the rug out from under us and sends us in another direction -- literally and figuratively. Suddenly we are off to Denmark and then the Netherlands for a series of random incidents. Bombarded with plot twists and new characters that seem unrelated to the introductory story of Haynes and Waymark the reader is frustrated and confused and eager to return to the more interesting puzzles first presented at Castle Baskerville.

Like all thrillers of this era with an international flavor we also get subplots galore. And they of course include drug dealing, black market activities, and a variety of shifty underworld characters in a variety of seedy bars and nightclubs. There will be a signifying event (already hinted at in the very Edgar Wallace style “Prologue”) that ties the subplots to the main plot but these complications seemed burdensome and padded. Several extraneous incidents could have been dispensed with as they had nothing to do with the real story.

A superior distasteful tone pervades the book, too. Homophobic remarks, xenophobic comments bordering on bigotry, whiny intolerance for the “march of time” expressed in Haynes’ disdain for the proliferation of fast food restaurants and tourist traps that have ruined Amsterdam. I guess this passes for humor with some people. I found it snobbish and patronizing and not a little prejudicial. The book is set in 1988 and yet there is not one mention of the brown cafes where marijuana is legally sold but there is ample talk of sinister, underhanded drug dealing. For someone who is trying to paint a "seedy" portrait of Amsterdam I wonder why Symons skips over the Zeedijk and Warmoesstraat and all the sex trade those areas are known for. It didn’t ring true at all as 1980s Amsterdam.

Overall, this book has a schizoid identity: one third bibliomystery, one third international thriller, one third detective novel with a murder mystery crammed into the last 40 pages. It's not a bad book by any means, but for my tastes it couldn’t decide what it wanted to be. The story becomes overcrowded with plot complexities that seemed arbitrary. I preferred the first book with Sheridan Haynes -- A Three-Pipe Problem (1975), more focused, livelier and wittier -- than this second jumbled affair.

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Reading Challenge update: Silver Age Bingo Card, space R2 - "Book with a place in the title"

Humdrum Summer Surprise

Two days ago I received my copy of Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery by fellow blogger and vintage mystery scholar Curt Evans.  It's an in-depth study of three unjustly denigrated Golden Age detective novelists - Cecil Street (who wrote under the pseudonyms John Rhode and Miles Burton), Alfred W. Stewart (who wrote as J.J. Connington ) and Freeman Wills Crofts.  It's a true labor of love for Curt who spent the last ten years of his life researching, writing and trying to sell the book to a daring publisher.  Finally it paid off.

The "humdrums" is a derogatory term created by mystery writer and critic Julian Symons in his 1972 study of crime fiction Mortal Consequences (published in the UK as  Bloody Murder). He lumped together several "dull" and "unimaginative" writers of detective novels mostly from the late 1920s - 1930s and derided them for boring characters, flat writing and tepid plots.  As Curt (and many of us vintage mystery bloggers) will tell you -- nothing could be further from the truth.

A close reading of these three men's books will reveal exactly the opposite. Rhode was ingenious in coming up with bizarre murder methods and, when he put his mind to it, concocted ingenious plots with fine examples of logical and scientific detective work. Similarly, Connington was good with tricky plots and in his early books at least displayed an offbeat sense of humor.  Crofts was the genius of the alibi and the timetable and he loved to write detective stories about trains, boats and ships at sea.  In Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery Curt discusses in detail the best books by these writers and proves Symons to be biased and snobbish in his dismissal of them as "dull" writers.

And now you can own a copy!  It's published by McFarland & Company, a publisher of mostly academic non-fiction books, and can be purchased directly at their website.  They offer an oversized paperback edition or an eBook version. Or you can try amazon. Since it comes from an independent academic press the price is a bit steep at $49.95. Unfortunately, the book is not offered at any discount prices online. But for those who are truly interested in learning more about these three writers and their fertile imaginations I say it's worth every penny.