Symons, Julian - Death's Darkest Face (1990)

A 

Detection / investigation into past and gradual revelation excellent.  Reconstruction of 1930s and 1960s and characterisation great.

Unquestionably the best Symons I’ve read so far.  It succeeds both as a crime novel and as a detective story.  The approach is similar to Dickinson’s Hindsight: the hero in the present (1960s) writes a book about his investigations into a murder that happened in his adolescence (1930s).  Geoffrey Elder’s ‘quest dominated by the search for his father … [and] to recreate differently the for ever unrealisable past’ is tied in extremely adroitly with the criminal investigation—the answer to one is the answer to the other.  The plotting is elaborate and well clued, and the ending is not only surprising, but also the logical and inevitable result of the characters involved.  A triumph.

Note that Symons himself appears as a character in the novel—Po-Mo?

Crisp and focused in the best manner of the English arty school—Blake, early Innes.

·        Double narrative: revisiting past: Hill’s Wood Beyond and Stranger House; Rendell’s Chimney-Sweeper’s Boy.  A modern sub-genre, rather than a GA one?  Has roots in such books as Mitchell’s When Last I Died, Christie’s Five Little Pigs, Queen’s The Murderer is a Fox, and works of Mary Fitt.

·        Hallmarks of Symons’s fiction: absurdism (destruction of reason after WWII); pastiche (historical or detective); naturalism (mundanity, sex, psychology, criminal underworld, working class) contrasted with protagonist’s fantasies; past / present; protagonist discovering himself; ineffectual protagonists who are miserable failures (Symons thought he was too fond of “weedy” characters); multiple solutions.

Nick Fuller.