I have to say that Julian Symons's Bloody Murder … ("heartily recommended" in these columns by Kingsley Amis when it appeared in hardback; and, in spite of what I have to say, essential reading for all crime fans) is a pernicious and dangerous piece of work. In essence this book—sub-titled 'From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: a history'—is a sustained and bitter, if unacknowledged, attack on the classical detective story, and on Dorothy Sayers in particular.

The fundamental fact is that Symons prefers the brooding, psychological, sociological modernism of Simenon and his followers to the puzzle story of the Golden Age of detective fiction; and to enforce this preference he tells all manner of fibs about the detective puzzles of the 'twenties and 'thirties—viz., that their structure forbade characterisation, that their heroes and people were of purest cardboard, that the puzzle element itself forbade...