The Paper Chase

The Paper Chase

First published in 1956

© Estate of Julian Symons; House of Stratus 1956-2011

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.

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

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.

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

“What do you feel about boys?”

“I like them,” Charles Applegate replied. He blushed. The reply seemed ambiguous, and he tried to clarify it. “I like girls too.” His blush deepened.

“We are coeducational, of course.” Curly, white hair fluffed up charmingly round Mr Pont’s shining pink skull. His face was pink too, the skin beautifully clear, the expression cherubic. “And what is your attitude towards religion?”

“I keep an open mind,” Applegate said cautiously.

“Splendid. How valuable it is, the open mind. We try to inculcate into all our pupils…” Applegate waited expectantly, but Mr Pont left the sentence, as it were, hanging. “Food,” he said suddenly.

“What’s that?”

“We use the Brooker-Timla Health Guide. I expect you know it.”

“No. But I’m sure that will be all right.”

“Qualifications we have already dealt with.” Mr Pont drew a grubby sheet of paper from his pocket and ticked off items with a pencil stub. “Free expression, you understand, we insist on. Freedom is our rule, within the rule of law. Who said that now, John Stuart Mill? Or was it my wife? Janine is a very remarkable woman. Sheets, pillowcases, rehabilitation of the maladjusted in a new cultural environment, impact of the self upon the non-self. Yes, we seem to have covered everything. We look forward to seeing you next term at Bramley.”

Applegate gulped. “Money.”

Mr Pont’s rosebud mouth pursed itself, his expression became for a moment less cherubic than pettish.

“Money is not everything. We must all be prepared to make sacrifices for our ideals. A teacher in…” He abandoned this sentence too, and went into details. The sacrifice demanded was greater than Applegate had expected, but finally he agreed to Pont’s terms. It was true, as Pont said, that he was not an experienced teacher. He consoled himself also with the thought that he did not intend to adopt teaching as a career.

Three years before his interview with Mr Pont, Charles Applegate was suddenly removed from his placid life as an Oxford undergraduate when his father came home one day to his desirable modern residence at Sanderstead, took a revolver from his pocket, shot his wife through the heart and then placed the revolver in his own mouth and pulled the trigger. Mr Applegate, a respectable accountant, had been moved to this impetuous action by the existence of a gap of several thousand pounds between the actual and theoretical bank balance of Bruce, Morgan and Applegate, a firm of industrial engineers in which he held the position of secretary. Within every really respectable man a gambler lurks, desiring excess and ruin. Mr Applegate’s excess had been conventional and not very interesting. He had played the stock market, and had been a persistent bear in what proved an intolerably bullish time. Hence the unbridgeable gap, the revolver shots, and Charles Applegate’s removal from the still waters of the University into the whirlpool of life.

Applegate senior had been essentially a serious man. He was a churchwarden, said grace on Sundays, and had once addressed the local Rotary Club. After his parents’ death Applegate junior, their only child, became determinedly casual in his habits and relationships. He cut himself free as far as possible from all entanglements, financial and emotional alike. He refused the job on a provincial newspaper found for him by his Uncle Roger, and wrote a short note to a very nice girl at Sanderstead who had considered herself more or less engaged to him, saying that he thought there was no point in seeing her again. The very nice girl, the daughter of a bank manager, was justifiably annoyed because he had anticipated the almost exactly similar letter which she had intended to write to him. In matters of the heart it is always wise to act promptly.

Applegate also wrote a detective story. It was called
Where Dons Delight,
and was a story of University life. The book probably owed its success to the fact that the dons who were its principal characters were not, like the dons in many detective stories, merely mean, envious and cunning. Applegate’s dons were lustful, perverse and violent. One concealed behind a false book-front labelled
The Lives of the Christian Martyrs
a pornographic library that would have been the envy of Lord Houghton; another imagined himself a vampire bat at the full moon and developed a considerable skill as a cat-burglar so that he was able to appear, with home-made membranic wings terrifyingly outspread, at the windows of selected bedrooms. The real villain was a don who was killing off his students with doses of a newly developed drug, in an attempt to prove that their brainpower was temporarily increased.

Where Dons Delight was well received in England.
“Grips like cement,”
said one well-known reviewer.
“Get stuck into it.”
It was in the United States, however, that the book had its real success, for there many critics praised it as an outspoken, although no doubt exaggerated, attack on the standards of modern English education.

Applegate published this book under the pseudonym of Henry James. He had taken a job at Bramley because he hoped to set his second detective story in a progressive school.