Julian Symons Books

When it appeared in 1972 'Bloody Murder' was greeted as the classic study of crime fiction, a book "heartily recommended to anyone who has ever enjoyed a detective story or a crime novel" as Kingsley Amis wrote. Subsequent edition ensured that this study was kept up to date to include later authors, and a third and final revised edition was issued in 1993 in celebration of distinguished author/critic Julian Symons' 80th year. The views expressed are as candid as ever. One bestselling writer is called unreadable, another compared to writers of "strip cartoon stories". But the general tone is warmly appreciative of every sort of book within the genre.

Wealth can have its drawbacks. Case in point: The Collard and Vandervent families, who for decades have shared a large estate in the elegant London suburb of Blackheath. It's now the 1890s, and over the years, the families' near-incestuous entanglement has grown into a toxic web of lies and bitterness. While mama keeps an iron grasp on the purse strings, an unmarried daughter sucks greedily on her own disappointment, a son raises corruption to an art form, and an ethereal daughter-in-law casts come-hither glances at anything in pants. She casts them frequently at young Paul Vandervent, who responds by filling his journal with fevered love poems. And when one member after another of the extended clan falls victim to gastric misadventure--and his beloved falls under suspicion--Paul embarks on an equally feverish quest to clear her name, resolving to solve the extraordinary series of crimes popularly called The Blackheath Poisonings.

"Sutherland House Classics is proud to bring back to print Julian Symons’ The Tell-Tale Heart, an acclaimed and best-selling biography of Edgar Allan Poe, one of the most influential authors in the English language. A highly-regarded mystery and crime writer in his own right, Symons is in a unique position to understand Poe’s work and to sharply, thoroughly reveal the secrets of his life. He paints Poe as his contemporaries saw him: a man whose life was filled with tragedy and who struggled to make a living through his writing, only to emerge as a definitive voice in murder-and-madness fiction and the inventor of the detective story. More relevant than ever in our horror-obsessed times, The Tell-Tale Heart is the second volume in the Sutherland Classics series, which seeks to rediscover and reprint classic works of narrative non-fiction"-- Provided by publisher

George Orwell's account of his experience as a militiaman in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. The book describes the chaos at the Front, the futile young deaths for what became a confused cause, the antique weapons and the disappointment many British Socialists felt on arriving in Spain to help.

General Gordon, charged with defending Khartoum, was stabbed to death when the Mahdi's forces took the town by storm. Two days later, the Expeditionary force arrived to relieve Gordon, but found the town firmly in the hands of the Mahdi. In England's Pride, Julian Symons tells the story of the disastrous and tragic failure of this mission.

Mystery crime fiction written in the Golden Age of Murder The murder, a brutal stabbing, definitely took place on Guy Fawkes's (bonfire) night. It was definitely by the bonfire on the village green, and there were definitely a number of witnesses. And yet, nobody is clear on what exactly happened and what they saw. In the writhing, violent shadows, it seems as if the truth may have gone up in smoke. Julian Symons's phenomenal 1960 novel is a searing drama of wrongful accusation, twisty police procedural, and account of grim murder all rolled together. Also includes the short story "The Tigers of Subtopia."

Small-time actor, Sheridan Haynes, had a rather unhealthy preoccupation with Sherlock Holmes. So when the chance came for him to play the famous detective in a TV series, it seemed his dreams had come true. And when London was plagued by a series of unsolved murders, well it seemed only natural for him to take his role into real life. Was this a case of a laughable and misguided actor, or was Sheridan actually on to something?

Tom Adams painted the first Christie cover in 1962 for A Murder is Announced and since then his paintings have become one of the best known series of paperback covers all over the world.

Between 1946 and 1948 John Franklin Bardin produced three quite extraordinary novels, all distinguished by a hallucinatory intensity of feeling and an absorption in morbid psychology remarkable for the period. The Deadly Percheron, The Last of Philip Banter and Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly are unlike anything else in modern crime literature.For the first time all three have been gathered together in a single volume, and at long last reintroduce the work of a great and original writer.