Barriers of Silliness

J.I.M. Stewart

• The Great Detectives: Seven Original Investigations by Julian Symons
  Orbis, 143 pp, £7.95, October 1981, ISBN 0 85613 362 0
• Critical Observations by Julian Symons
  Faber, 213 pp, £9.95, October 1981, ISBN 0 571 11688 4
• As I walked down New Grub Street: Memories of a Writing Life by Walter Allen
  Heinemann, 276 pp, £8.95, November 1981, ISBN 0 434 01829 5

The first of Julian Symons’s ‘original investigations’, entitled ‘How a hermit was disturbed in his retirement’, is an apocryphal Sherlock Holmes story in which the great detective is lured away from his bee-keeping activities (Holmes has ‘developed a cage of a new type that can be slipped between two combs in the brood chamber’) by a distressed young woman posing, rather pointlessly, as a local journalist. This fails to deceive Holmes for a moment – for has she not sent him a handwritten letter from a private address? – and the real occasion of her visit turns out to be anxiety over her recently-acquired fiancé, who has unaccountably disappeared for some weeks and so may well be dead. It takes Holmes a couple of days to show that he is still alive and not at all likely to prove an agreeable husband. This is decidedly no three-pipe problem. Mr Symons’s plot is of a modest near-transparency from the start – a fact cunningly enhancing an authentic Conan Doyle effect in a story exhibiting throughout a striking and amusing command of pastiche.