The Players And The Game Read online

  Copyright & Information

  The Players and the Game

  First published in 1972

  © Estate of Julian Symons; House of Stratus 1972-2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of Julian Symons to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2011 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  EAN ISBN Edition

  1842329286 9781842329283 Print

  0755129628 9780755129621 Kindle

  0755129687 9780755129683 Epub

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  www.houseofstratus.com

  About the Author

  Julian Symons was born in 1912 in London. He was the younger brother, and later biographer, of the writer A.J.A. Symons.

  Aged twenty five, he founded a poetry magazine which he edited for a short time, before turning to crime writing. This was not to be his only interest, however, as in his eighty-two years he produced an enormously varied body of work. Social and military history, biography and criticism were all subjects he touched upon with remarkable success, and held a distinguished reputation in each field. Nonetheless, it is primarily for his crime writing that he is remembered. His novels were consistently highly individual and expertly crafted, raising him above other crime writers of his day.

  Symons commenced World War II as a recognised conscientious objector, but nevertheless ended up serving in the Royal Armoured Corps from 1942 until 1944, when he was invalided out. A period as an advertising copywriter followed, but was soon abandoned in favour of full time writing. Many prizes came his way as a result, including two Edgar Awards and in 1982 he received the accolade of being named as Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America – an honour accorded to only three other English writers before him: Graham Greene, Eric Ambler and Daphne Du Maurier. Symons then succeeded Agatha Christie as the president of Britain’s Detection Club, a position he held from 1976 to 1985, and in 1990 he was awarded the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the British Crime Writers for his lifetime’s achievement in crime fiction.

  He published over thirty crime novels and story collections between 1945 and 1994; with the works combining different elements of the classic detective story and modern crime novel, but with a clear leaning toward the latter, especially situations where ordinary people get drawn into extraordinary series of events – a trait he shared with Eric Ambler. He also wrote two modern-day Sherlock Holmes pastiches. In A Three Pipe Problem the detective was ‘...a television actor, Sheridan Hayes, who wears the mask of Sherlock Holmes and assumes his character’. Several of Julian Symons’ works have been filmed for television.

  Julian Symons died in 1994.

  Introduction

  The French call a typewriter une machine á ècrire. It is a description that could well be applied to Julian Symons, except the writing he produced had nothing about it smelling of the mechanical. The greater part of his life was devoted to putting pen to paper. Appearing in 1938, his first book was a volume of poetry, Confusions About X. In 1996, after his death, there came his final crime novel, A Sort of Virtue (written even though he knew he was under sentence from an inoperable cancer) beautifully embodying the painful come-by lesson that it is possible to achieve at least a degree of good in life.

  His crime fiction put him most noticeably into the public eye, but he wrote in many forms: biographies, a memorable piece of autobiography (Notes from Another Country), poetry, social history, literary criticism coupled with year-on-year reviewing and two volumes of military history, and one string thread runs through it all. Everywhere there is a hatred of hypocrisy, hatred even when it aroused the delighted fascination with which he chronicled the siren schemes of that notorious jingoist swindler, Horatio Bottomley, both in his biography of the man and fictionally in The Paper Chase and The Killing of Francie Lake.

  That hatred, however, was not a spew but a well-spring. It lay behind what he wrote and gave it force, yet it was always tempered by a need to speak the truth. Whether he was writing about people as fiction or as fact, if he had a low opinion of them he simply told the truth as he saw it, no more and no less.

  This adherence to truth fills his novels with images of the mask. Often it is the mask of hypocrisy. When, as in Death’s Darkest Face or Something Like a Love Affair, he chose to use a plot of dazzling legerdemain, the masks of cunning are startlingly ripped away.

  The masks he ripped off most effectively were perhaps those which people put on their true faces when sex was in the air or under the exterior. ‘Lift the stone, and sex crawls out from under,’ says a character in that relentless hunt for truth, The Progress of a Crime, a book that achieved the rare feat for a British author, winning Symons the US Edgar Allen Poe Award.

  Julian was indeed something of a pioneer in the fifties and sixties bringing into the almost sexless world of the detective story the truths of sexual situations. ‘To exclude realism of description and language from the crime novel’ he writes in Critical Occasions, ‘is almost to prevent its practitioners from attempting any serious work.’ And then the need to unmask deep-hidden secrecies of every sort was almost as necessary at the end of his crime-writing life as it had been at the beginning. Not for nothing was his last book subtitled A Political Thriller.

  H R F Keating

  London, 2001

  Note

  This story has similarities to some of the cases mentioned in the text, in particular the Moors Murders and the American Lonely Hearts Murders. The similarities are deliberate, but they extend only to details. The book is not a documentary, and no theory about any actual murder case should be read into what is emphatically a work of fiction.

  Chapter One

  Start of a Journal

  March

  Count Dracula meets Bonnie Parker. What will they do together? The vampire you’d hate to love, sinister and debonair, sinks those eye-teeth into Bonnie’s succulent throat. The Strangest Couple Ever To Star Together bring to your screens the Weirdest Story of the Century.

  That’s a heading you’ll never see. And it’s not the way I meant to start this journal. Excitement got the better of me.

  I want to put it down coherently. Of course Bonnie is not Bonnie Parker any more than I’m Dracula, that’s part of the Game. The point is that I’ve never met anybody before who could play the Game, or even understand what it meant. There was a TV programme once where they interviewed people coming out after seeing horror films, and asked why they liked them. Some people made a joke of it, nobody answered honestly, but then one chap said: ‘I like it when the monster gets the girl.’ That’s me, I thought, that’s me. I like it too. But I’ve never met anybody else who would admit that. People are so cowardly. Who do they think they’re kidding? Answer: themselves.

  ‘Thirty Years of Horror Films’, that was the exhibition’s title. You can imagine it drew me. And it wasn’t a disappointment, even though it was just a lot of stills in an art gallery. But what stil
ls. Bela Lugosi in Dracula, cloaked and spotlighted against a wall, and then in Murders in the Rue Morgue, one of my favourites. Bela kidnaps women in that one, and then experiments on them with the help of a gorilla. It’s all to prove some theory of evolution, but you don’t have to worry about that. Lots of other things too. Some modern stuff, almost all rubbish, but there were Chaney and Karloff, a good still from Frankenstein with a girl who’d fainted, and Dracula’s Daughter. I didn’t like that much. They were all women. I thought she should have gone for men.

  Anyway, I was looking at the Frankenstein still when I realised someone was standing next to me. It was Bonnie. She was staring intensely at the girl, I think it was Mae Clarke, lying head down on a bed, helpless. I hardly ever speak to girls, but there was something, what, receptive I suppose you might say, about her. I said something about it being a good still. She just nodded, but a couple of minutes later we were together in front of another picture. I asked if she liked horror films.

  ‘They’re all right, some of them, some are just silly. I thought there’d be something from Bonnie and Clyde.’

  ‘That’s not horror.’

  ‘Yes, but I thought, you know, that shooting scene. All the blood.’ She looked at me sideways, and I thought, this is someone I can talk to. So I did. We went out and had coffee, and I talked while she listened. Mostly about my Theory of Behaviour as Games. I’d never talked properly to anybody about it before.

  The idea about the Theory of Behaviour is that we all copy what we see. In the early sixties, for instance, lots of the young were imitating the Beatles, dress, long hair and so on. We all think we’re original, though we’re really copies. Everybody pretends. Clerks imagine they’re famous footballers, or pretend they are managing director, sometimes both. Of course it’s all a fantasy, there aren’t many famous footballers, and for every managing director there are a hundred or a thousand people who have to take orders. We’re all playing games. The point is, you get more fun out of life if you admit this. You can let your fantasy run free, and that’s exciting.

  I hope this makes sense. It does to me, but at the moment I’m writing in a state of what you might call euphoria. Anyway, at this point I took a risk. I leaned over the table and said, ‘Do you know who I am? I’m Bela Lugosi.’

  She just stared at me, and my heart sank. I thought she regarded me as just a nut. But I went on. ‘And you know who you are? Faye Dunaway.’

  She shook her head and said, ‘I’m not.’ I was ready to get up and go. But she was inspired. ‘I’m Bonnie Parker.’

  ‘And me?’

  ‘You’re Dracula.’

  And of course she was absolutely right. Dracula and Bonnie are much more exciting than Bela and Faye. And this book is to be about Dracula and Bonnie, just them. Nothing else. I’ve not put anything down here for a couple of weeks, because I wanted to get my feelings straight before writing anything else.

  I think I’ve got it clear now. What it comes to is that Count Dracula and Bonnie Parker together pack a real explosive force of fantasy, games fantasy. Already I’ve said things to Bonnie that I’ve never said to anybody. Or Dracula said them to her. I told her about the excitement of that first moment when the sharp teeth sink in. The first pinprick. Then the colour of blood, real ruby red. The sight of it running in a slow stream. And Bonnie understood; it was something we shared. That’s never happened before, not to Dracula. He and Bonnie shared something.

  Whoa. Time to call a halt.

  Let me make it clear. Dracula understands it, Bonnie does too. There has not been, will not be, any question of sex between them. Dracula’s played a different game, a sex game, with other people, but here sex just does not come into it. You could go farther. I don’t come into it, or if I do it’s only as referee in the Game. What does the referee do but blow his whistle when the rules have been infringed? It’s Dracula and Bonnie who play the Game, and they know they’re only playing. How can they be anything else, when their reality doesn’t exist outside the screen, outside their conversations? Nothing they think or say counts. In their imaginary reality they have a perfect relationship.

  I’m very euphoric.

  Chapter Two

  Buying a House

  ‘The lounge.’ Mr Darling the estate agent dipped his head a little, reverentially. The bald spot in the centre of his carefully brushed hair showed. The four of them looked at an empty room.

  ‘Terrific.’ Paul Vane strode towards the french window, opened it, stood gulping in air as though his life depended on it.

  Mr Darling played a trump card. ‘Beyond the garden the grammar school playing fields. No prospect of building there.’ He was a smallish man of about forty, neat and precise, one of the smoothly agreeable rather than the barkingly aggressive kind of estate agent.

  ‘A nice room,’ Alice said without conviction. She looked towards her daughter. Jennifer shrugged.

  ‘It’s like any other suburban house. If that’s what you want.’

  Paul did not say to his stepdaughter that Rawley was a town, not a suburb. They went on looking at the house. Alice concentrated on practical details, fitting in her furniture, carpets, curtains, clothing it with character. Paul praised the quietness of the road, and said how marvellously solid these Edwardian houses were. Mr Darling prattled on about the convenience of shops and schools (foolish, Alice thought, when Jennifer was obviously too old for school), about tradesmen who delivered. When she murmured that they would think about it, he made it clear that with a house like this, in a road as desirable as this one, they shouldn’t think too long.

  In company the Vanes were, as other people said, a couple who obviously got on well. You could hardly imagine them quarrelling. It was true that they never quarrelled, but this was because when they were alone they avoided any delicate or controversial subject. That night, after they had returned to London and Jennifer had gone off, as she blankly said, to meet somebody, they talked in their Chalk Farm maisonette about the Rawley house. The conversation was up to a point typically evasive.

  ‘I can’t imagine why you said we’d think about it instead of settling straight away.’ Paul flung himself to the floor rather than sat on it, put his head against her legs, grinned with conscious boyishness. ‘What’s up, honey, did you hate the house?’

  ‘It’s an ordinary house. I suppose it could be nice.

  ‘You’d make it perfect. You’ve got the touch.’

  ‘It will take you longer to get to work. Jennifer too.’ The offices of Timbals Plastics, in which Paul was personnel director, were in Westminster. Jennifer had a secretarial job in Mayfair with some film distributors. ‘She’s made it plain enough that she doesn’t like it.’

  ‘She’ll fly the coop any day now, get a flat of her own.’

  ‘I wish I knew who the friends are she goes out to meet. Why doesn’t she bring them back here?’

  ‘Because the young are young and we’re middle-aged, and never the twain shall meet. Not that anyone would ever think you are forty-two.’ She knew that Paul wanted her to say that he looked thirty-five instead of forty, but she refused to coddle his vanity like that. Anyway, it wasn’t true any more. He had kept his figure, but his hair was thinning and his face was lined. He had been wonderfully handsome, and she had always loved handsome men. She regarded herself as a practical woman, and her liking for masculine good looks as a sentimental weakness, but it still remained. Her first husband, Anthony, had looked like Rupert Brooke. He was ten years older than she, an air force pilot whose plane had crashed in the Alps when she was eight months pregnant with Jennifer. As for Paul, he now looked what he was, a man of forty. Did you call somebody of that age handsome any more? ‘Here it’s a fairly crummy maisonette, there you’ve got green fields. So what’s against it?’

  ‘I don’t see why we have to live in Rawley at all.’

  ‘We’ve been into that.’ He got up and started to walk about. He could never be still for long. ‘Look, the chief factory’s at Rawley, half th
e executives live there, Bob Lowson is there–’

  ‘So you have to live there too?’

  ‘Oh my God.’ He smacked his forehead in mock despair. ‘You know Bob said he couldn’t imagine why we stayed in London, how good it would be to have us as neighbours.’

  ‘And what Bob Lowson says you do?’

  ‘It’s not like that. You’re being unfair, honey.’

  She knew that she was being unfair. Bob Lowson was the managing director, and his words were meant as an act of friendship. Paul looked at her with the wounded little boy stare that had once melted her heart. Now it seemed to her an irritating affectation. She abandoned Lowson, and spoke out of this irritation.

  ‘I just don’t want anything to happen again.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Like Monica.’

  ‘That was ages ago. You’re not holding that against me.’

  ‘I don’t hold anything against you. I just have a feeling about Rawley. It looks a pretty ghastly place to me. And I think it’s bad luck for us.’

  ‘It isn’t like you to talk about luck.’

  ‘I tell you, Paul, if anything else happened like Monica I should leave you.’

  She hardly ever said such things, partly because they broke the unspoken rule that they were not people who let their feelings show, and partly because she knew the extravagance of Paul’s reactions, but still she was not prepared for him to go down on his knees and weep, and swear that if she left him he would kill himself. Mixed up with this there were promises, and some stuff she did not understand about people gunning for him in the office. After ten minutes of this she agreed that tomorrow he would pay a deposit on Bay Trees, which was the name of the house.