Great Detectives: Seven Original Investigations, by Julian Symons, with illustrations by Tom Adams (Abrams, 144 pp., $16.95). Julian Symons, the English crime novelist, mystery reviewer, and author of a survey of crime fiction called Mortal Consequences, has now written a highly entertaining pendant to his earlier study of the sanguinary genre: a coffee-table book dealing with, shall we say, some hitherto- undiscovered aspects of the lives and careers of Sherlock Holmes, Nero Wolfe, Inspector Maigret, Ellery Queen, Miss Marple, HerculePoirot, and Philip Marlowe. Great Detectives: Seven Original Investigations is notable for its varied approach and generally unforced ingenuity; it contains, among other things, interviews with an aging Archie Goodwin and the real-life model (or so Mr. Symons claims) for Philip Marlowe, two “unpublished” adventures of Holmes and Maigret, and a chapter which advances the hypothesis that there were really two Ellery Queens, the original one having quietly retired in 1936. Mr. Symons’s talents as a pasticheur are formidable, though he is a bit stronger on Holmes-in-retirement and Maigret-in-translation than on the hard-boiled Americanese suitable to his Goodwin and Marlowe interviews. Tom Adams, who illustrated the book, has done a superbly evocative job throughout; his portrait of Nero Wolfe and the famous three-foot globe on page 42, for example, could easily have been a life study were such a thing possible. (I always thought Philip Marlowe looked just like Humphrey Bogart, but Mr. Adams has his own ideas—very convincing ones, I might add—on the subject.) One minor problem: the text and notes occasionally refer to certain novels by their British titles, which may be confusing to American readers. The whole thing can easily be straightened out by referring to Mr. Symons’s helpful bibliography, however; otherwise, all is bliss. Indeed, Great Detectives: Seven Original Investigations is probably the most amusing book of its kind since Dilys Winn’s clever anthology, Murder Ink. Surely a sequel is in the offing; after all, Mr. Symons has yet to give us the lowdown on Lew Archer, Father Brown, Dr. Gideon Fell, Gervase Fen, Steve Carella, Dave Brandstetter, and—well, perhaps even Blackford Oakes. That would do for a second volume.
TERRY TEACHOUT
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