Poet, biographer, historian, novelist, criminologist, and critic, Julian Symons, president of the Detection Club since 1976, is heir to the kingdom of crime literature previously presided over by G. K. Chesterton, E. C. Bentley, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Agatha Christie. He has argued persuasively in Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel (1972; published in the United States as Mortal Consequences: A History from the Detective Story to the Crime Novel) that crime writing has changed greatly since World War II. Author of more than twenty crime novels, three histories of the genre, two collections of detective stories, and numerous articles and reviews of crime fiction published in the London Times and elsewhere, Symons has both mapped and colonized new territories.

Born in London on 30 May 1912, Julian Gustave Symons is the youngest son of Morris Albert Symons, an immigrant probably of Jewish origin, who was a shopkeeper...