The Progress of a Crime Read online

  The Progress of a Crime © 1960 by The Estate of Julian Symons

  “The Tigers of Subtopia” © 1965, 1982 by The Estate of Julian Symons

  Introduction © 2020, 2021 by Martin Edwards

  Cover and internal design © 2021 by Sourcebooks

  Front cover image © The British Library Board

  Sourcebooks, Poisoned Pen Press, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks, in association with the British Library

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  The Progress of a Crime was originally published in 1960 by Collins, London, England.

  “The Tigers of Subtopia” was originally published as “The Tiger’s Stripe” in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in March 1965. It was renamed and appeared as the title story in The Tigers of Subtopia and Other Stories, published in 1982 by Macmillan, London, England.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Symons, Julian, author.

  Title: The progress of a crime / Julian Symons ; with an introduction by Martin Edwards.

  Description: Naperville, Illinois : Poisoned Pen Press, [2020] | Series: British Library Crime Classics

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020037533 (print) | LCCN 2020037534 (ebook) | (trade paperback) | (epub)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6037.Y5 P76 2020 (print) | LCC PR6037.Y5 (ebook) | DDC 823/.914--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037533

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  The Progress of a Crime

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  The Tigers of Subtopia

  Back Cover

  Introduction

  The Progress of a Crime, published in 1960, was one of the most successful crime novels of its era. With economy and skill, Julian Symons blends his ingredients: a crime based on a real-life case; ruthless police methods; an insider’s view of the newspaper world; and courtroom drama. Crisp dialogue, vivid characterisation, and a sharp eye for the ironic flavour his narrative. The result is a book which, as the Evening Standard’s reviewer said, “has the cool, accurate vision of the best documentary.” It is in many ways a very British book, yet its quality impressed the Mystery Writers of America, who gave it the prestigious Edgar Allan Poe Award for the year’s best novel. To this day it remains a good read. More than that, it gives us interesting insight into life in the English provinces sixty years ago.

  The lead character is a young journalist, Hugh Bennett. At the start of the story, naivete is one of his defining features, evidenced not just by his passionate devotion to the work of his namesake Arnold Bennett (Symons was not a fan) but also by many of his attitudes: “It seemed to him almost morally wrong that anybody over the age of thirty should experience sexual desire.” Hugh happens to be present at a bonfire on Guy Fawkes Night, when a local resident known as “the Squire of Far Wether” is killed after an altercation with several youths. The consequences of this tragedy are life-changing for Hugh, as well as for other characters. Over the course of the story, he begins to grow up.

  In a note published after his death in John J. Walsdorf’s admirable bibliography of his work, Symons—who was often highly self-critical of his own writing—said that this “is one of the half-dozen books of mine that I regard as really successful.” As in some of his other novels, he found inspiration in a real-life case: “commonplace enough, even in the London of the Fifties, but interesting to me because it took place in Clapham, where I was born and brought up. A quarrel broke out between several boys on a bus, they fought, and one of them was stabbed by another. The stabbed boy died, but which of the others had killed him? Partly on the evidence of one of the boys, partly through a very convincing eyewitness, a boy was arrested, tried, found guilty, served a life sentence—in practice, ten years in prison. It now seems almost certain that the positive eyewitness was mistaken, and that the boy convicted was innocent.”

  Symons’s observations were evidently written in the late Eighties and, not surprisingly, his recollections, although accurate on key points, were as fallible on matters of detail as eyewitness evidence. The crime he was talking about was the murder of John Beckley in 1953, and the killing occurred after Beckley and a friend were dragged off a bus on which they’d tried to escape from a fight with a rival gang of Teddy Boys. The eyewitness observed the attack from the front seat on the top deck. The murder weapon was never found. Six young men were tried for murder, and four were acquitted, although they were found guilty of lesser crimes. The jury was unable to agree on a verdict concerning the other two defendants, and ultimately one was acquitted and convicted of common assault.

  And then there was one: Michael John Davies. Amidst a blaze of publicity, he was retried, convicted, and sentenced to death. He was reprieved by the Home Secretary and ultimately served seven years in prison. He died in 1992 (the same year as Symons), and in 2018, his case was investigated in the BBC One series Murder, Mystery and My Family. Two barristers looked into the case and emphasised their concerns about witness statements taken by a Detective Constable Kenneth Drury, who eventually rose through the ranks to become Commander of the Flying Squad, only to be convicted of corruption in 1977. The question was whether Drury’s involvement was in itself enough to taint the conviction as unsound, and in the programme, a retired judge opined that it was not. However, there remain strong reasons to believe that Symons’s instinct about the case was correct, and that the murder conviction was a miscarriage of justice.

  In any event, as Symons said, “Life is not fiction but the raw material of fiction. I shifted the locale of the crime, changed many details, and decided to show the whole thing through the medium of a young reporter on a provincial paper. This proved difficult, because although I have worked for many papers as reviewer, I have never worked in a newspaper office.”

  His solution was to arrange to spend a few weeks in the office of a morning newspaper in Bristol, undertaking the sort of jobs that come the way
of a young reporter, “going to Magistrates’ Courts, a Valuation Court, and so on. I didn’t actually write any stories.” He added that this hands-on experience “had the odd corollary that one of the reporters on the Bristol paper was moved to write crime stories, the first of which was published in the UK and the U.S., under the name of Anthony Dekker.” (Dekker’s output as a crime novelist was, however, modest, comprising a lurid thriller, Temptation in a Private Zoo, and a novel, Divers Diamonds, published under the same imprint as this book originally, Collins Crime Club.)

  How many crime writers, then or now, would go to quite the same lengths as Symons in the interest of researching their novel? His meticulous approach paid off, as the book won the Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1961. The other nominees were Peter Curtis for The Devil’s Own, Herbert Brean for The Traces of Brillhart, and Geoffrey Household for Watcher in the Shadows. In Britain, the novel was also a runner-up to Lionel Davidson’s The Night of Wenceslas for the CWA Gold Dagger.

  The British Library’s decision to include as a bonus Symons’s “The Tigers of Subtopia” gives me particular pleasure, since I chose this short story to represent his work in Mysterious Pleasures, an anthology celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the formation of the Crime Writers’ Association, of which he was a founder member in 1953 and former chairman. The story first appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1965. Three years later Symons adapted it for ITV, and the screen version provided an early lead role for Geoffrey Palmer as Bradley Fawcett. Subsequently, it became the lead story in The Tigers of Subtopia and Other Stories, a collection which Symons published in 1982. Like The Progress of a Crime, it’s not a detective puzzle in the Golden Age vein, but it offers a picture of petty crime and social mores in the Sixties, painted with Symons’s customary authority and characteristic detachment.

  Martin Edwards

  The Progress of a Crime

  1

  Hugh Bennett had lunch that day as usual in Giuseppe’s, which was the only good place to eat near the office. Good, that is, and cheap. The wages that the Gazette paid its staff made the second consideration important. He was half-way through his spaghetti when Clare Cavendish came in with Michael Baker. Clare looked at the menu with distaste.

  “The same old stuff. Spaghetti, ravioli, fruit salad. I’m so sick of it.”

  Michael Baker, whom nobody ever called Mike, fingered his bow tie. “Getting you down, dear?”

  “And it’s so bad for my figure.” Clare’s face had a sulky prettiness, spoiled by a bad complexion, but her figure was excellent, tall and slim. She crumbled a piece of bread in her fingers as she talked in petulant spurts. “Went out to see some ghastly old creature in Bradley this morning. Ninety-eight to-day. Three-quarters deaf, almost blind, crippled with arthritis. Said she hoped to live another ten years, there was so much to live for. Christ.” Clare had made several bread pellets, which she formed into the letter C.

  “It really is too much,” Michael said, in his slightly fluting voice. “I don’t know what old Lane’s up to lately. I mean, either I’m the dramatic critic or I can handle police courts and that stuff. I’ve had the dreariest morning, stealing bicycles and indecent exposure, hardly a paragraph in the lot. Old Prothero was rather funny, though, with one chap…” He wove spaghetti dexterously round his fork and told them exactly how funny old Prothero, the magistrate, had been.

  Hugh Bennett sat and ate and listened. He was twenty-two years old, and had been on the Gazette for eighteen months, which was quite long enough to understand that Clare and Michael did not mean exactly what they said. They knew perfectly well that on a local paper like the Gazette the dramatic critic must double and even treble up on other jobs, and that the writer of the woman’s page must expect to be sent out on human interest stories. They griped because they wanted to go to London, to work on one of the nationals. But did those who griped ever get there? Now Michael was astride his high aesthetic horse.

  “I do think Tynan’s a bit much, don’t you? On again about Brecht last week, hardly a word to say about the new plays, got rid of them in half a dozen lines. I mean, I really should think readers are getting a bit sick of it.”

  Clare was not interested in Tynan, but she had some very positive views about women columnists, and spent some time in telling them about the shortcomings of Veronica Papworth and Anne Scott-James. It was very much like twenty other lunches they had had together, with the smell of pipe-dream perhaps stronger than usual. As they walked back to the office, Clare asked, “What are you doing this afternoon, Hugh?”

  “Diary. Valuation court at Far Wether.”

  “Poor you.”

  “Far Wether,” Michael said. “Let me think. Something happened a couple of weeks ago at Far Wether. Madge Gilroy sent in a story about it. Some sort of Teddy-boy row, might be worth looking up since you’ve got to go out there.”

  Hugh nodded his thanks. He did not want to go out to Far Wether, and when they got back to the office, he said hopefully to Lane, “Anything interesting come in?”

  Lane grinned at him, exposing a few yellow fangs. He was a hard-bitten provincial newspaper veteran in his early fifties, the sort of man who sits in his shirt-sleeves all day and has sandwiches and a glass of milk sent in to the office for lunch. Clare and Michael treated Lane as a joke, but to Hugh he was still a slightly awesome figure, a man who had, as he was fond of saying, printer’s ink in his veins instead of blood.

  “It’s the valuation court for you, Hughie boy. Good training.”

  “For what?”

  “For attending more valuation courts,” Michael said.

  “Elizabeth Eglington is opening a new store in Bank Street,” Lane said to him. “Go and see her, try to get her to talk about her screen ambitions, what she thinks of our great city, does she like the new traffic roundabout in the square. She may fall for your manly charm.”

  Michael looked offended. Hugh went over and turned the pages of the back issues. He found the story tucked away on page six among the “News From the Districts” in a fortnight-old paper.

  HOOLIGANISM AT FAR WETHER DANCE

  A group of youths caused trouble last Saturday at a fund-raising dance for the Far Wether Cricket Club held in the Parish Hall. It is said that they came to the village on motor-bikes, threw bottles on the dance floor and pestered several girls who did not want to dance with them. Mr. James Corby, a local resident, who was M.C. at the dance, said: “I did not like their looks when they came in, but of course our dances are open to anybody who buys a ticket. When they got out of hand I asked them to leave, and after a little persuasion they did so.” Other local residents said that Mr. Corby had thrown out bodily the two worst members of the gang. As they drove away one of them shouted, “We’ll be back.” Mr. Corby, however, is confident that there will be no further trouble.

  He finished reading the story and asked, “Do you want me this evening?”

  Lane was in the process of lighting a small cigar. He looked at Bennett above the smoke.

  “It’s Guy Fawkes Night and you want to let off your golden rain, is that it?”

  “I thought I’d see if there was any follow-up on this.”

  Lane read the story and used a four-letter word. Clare showed no sign of having heard it, but the corners of her mouth turned down a little more disdainfully, even, than usual. Lane slapped the paper and repeated the word. “But if you’re going to stay out in Far Wether, I’ll tell you what you can do. They have a real do there on November the fifth, don’t burn Guy Fawkes in effigy but burn Squire Oldmeadow instead. Ever heard of him?” Hugh Bennett shook his head. “He was one of the bad old squires in the good old days, ground down the serfs and raped their daughters and that sort of caper. There’s a legend that some local hero named Francis Drake up and killed the wicked squire because Squire had wronged his sister.”

  “I don’t believe it. You’ve made it all up.”

/>   “Want to brush up on your local history, my lad.” Lane had got the cigar going well. Smoke dimmed the outline of his grizzled head. “They burn the old squire out in Far Wether. Fact. Do a piece on it.”

  That was how it began.

  2

  Far Wether was nearly twelve miles to the south-west of the city, too near for complete independence yet too far to count as a suburb. It was in an area usually covered by Madge Gilroy, who lived in the district and worked for the Gazette part-time. It was because Madge had influenza that Hugh Bennett found himself travelling out in a bus through Felting and High Oaks, and reading Anna of the Five Towns on the way. Arnold Bennett was the writer that Hugh most admired, envying his unfussy directness, his brisk humanitarianism, his eager appetite for life. He seemed a proof that a novelist’s virtues can also be those of a journalist, and Hugh Bennett often felt warmed by the fact that he shared a surname with Arnold. A slight euphoria stayed with him as he entered the newish square redbrick council offices on the edge of the village, in which the court was being held.

  Attendance at a valuation court is perhaps the dullest of the many dull jobs a young provincial journalist can have. A magistrate’s court may have its saving pawky humour, a local council meeting its brief delicious flare of excitement as opposed personalities meet head-on, but the tedium of a valuation court is invariable. On this grey November afternoon the court was concerned chiefly with an appeal against his rating valuation made by a man who lived in a row of semi-detached houses just outside Far Wether. This particular house, unlike its fellows, had a garage, and so was rated at £32 a year, whereas they were rated at £29. Its owner appealed on the ground that if he had owned a car (which in fact he did not) he could not have used the garage because the only access to it was by a lane at the back of his house, and this lane was too narrow to permit the passage of a car.

  But was this in fact the case? The council’s surveyor produced plans, the house-owner disputed them, the surveyor agreed that the lane might perhaps not be wide enough to accommodate a car. Was this surrender? By no means. Triumphantly, the surveyor suggested that it would be perfectly possible to take a bubble car or a scooter along the lane. Vain for the house-owner to protest that he had no wish to buy a bubble car, and considered scooters extremely unsafe. Two-thirds of his case was adjudged lost and, after a discussion lasting an hour and a half, his rating was reduced from £32 to £31 a year.