Disagreement rampages in me when Mr Symons offer to explain why we read stories about crime. He finds first a psychological basis, invoking a psychoanalyst called Geraldine Pederson-Krag, whose potted views, as well as whose name, might have come out of Peter Simple. 'The murder represents parental intercourse, the victim is the parent, and the clues are symbolic representations of mysterious nocturnal sounds, stains, incomprehensible adult jokes.' Whew!...

His overt theme is that the detective story has been virtually replaced by the crime novel —agreed —and that 'the detective story is an inferior thing to the crime novel' —disagreed. One would think he had never read, let alone ritten, a detective story himself from the way he goes on about its artificiality, its narrowness, its necessarily shallow characterisation, its failure to offer anything but a puzzle followed by a solution. I cannot answer all his charges here, but I might just suggest that, in this kind of writing, as in science fiction, characterisation of any depth is likely to impede plot and action, and that the best examples offer not only an ingenious puzzle, but atmosphere, suspense, and a fast-moving story as well.