The Players And The Game

The Players and the Game

First published in 1972

© Estate of Julian Symons; House of Stratus 1972-2011

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

This story has similarities to some of the cases mentioned in the text, in particular the Moors Murders and the American Lonely Hearts Murders. The similarities are deliberate, but they extend only to details. The book is not a documentary, and no theory about any actual murder case should be read into what is emphatically a work of fiction.

Count Dracula meets Bonnie Parker. What will they do together? The vampire you’d hate to love, sinister and debonair, sinks those eye-teeth into Bonnie’s succulent throat. The Strangest Couple Ever To Star Together bring to your screens the Weirdest Story of the Century.

That’s a heading you’ll never see. And it’s not the way I meant to start this journal. Excitement got the better of me.

I want to put it down coherently. Of course Bonnie is not Bonnie Parker any more than I’m Dracula, that’s part of the Game. The point is that I’ve never met anybody before who could play the Game, or even understand what it meant. There was a TV programme once where they interviewed people coming out after seeing horror films, and asked why they liked them. Some people made a joke of it, nobody answered honestly, but then one chap said: ‘I like it when the monster gets the girl.’ That’s me, I thought, that’s me. I like it too. But I’ve never met anybody else who would admit that. People are so cowardly. Who do they think they’re kidding? Answer: themselves.

‘Thirty Years of Horror Films’, that was the exhibition’s title. You can imagine it drew me. And it wasn’t a disappointment, even though it was just a lot of stills in an art gallery. But what stills. Bela Lugosi in
Dracula,
cloaked and spotlighted against a wall, and then in
Murders in the Rue Morgue,
one of my favourites. Bela kidnaps women in that one, and then experiments on them with the help of a gorilla. It’s all to prove some theory of evolution, but you don’t have to worry about that. Lots of other things too. Some modern stuff, almost all rubbish, but there were Chaney and Karloff, a good still from
Frankenstein
with a girl who’d fainted, and
Dracula’s Daughter.
I didn’t like that much. They were all women. I thought she should have gone for men.

Anyway, I was looking at the
Frankenstein
still when I realised someone was standing next to me. It was Bonnie. She was staring intensely at the girl, I think it was Mae Clarke, lying head down on a bed, helpless. I hardly ever speak to girls, but there was something, what, receptive I suppose you might say, about her. I said something about it being a good still. She just nodded, but a couple of minutes later we were together in front of another picture. I asked if she liked horror films.

‘They’re all right, some of them, some are just silly. I thought there’d be something from
Bonnie and Clyde
.’

‘That’s not horror.’

‘Yes, but I thought, you know, that shooting scene. All the blood.’ She looked at me sideways, and I thought, this is someone I can talk to. So I did. We went out and had coffee, and I talked while she listened. Mostly about my Theory of Behaviour as Games. I’d never talked properly to anybody about it before.

The idea about the Theory of Behaviour is that we all copy what we see. In the early sixties, for instance, lots of the young were imitating the Beatles, dress, long hair and so on. We all think we’re original, though we’re really copies. Everybody pretends. Clerks imagine they’re famous footballers, or pretend they are managing director, sometimes both. Of course it’s all a fantasy, there aren’t many famous footballers, and for every managing director there are a hundred or a thousand people who have to take orders. We’re all playing games. The point is, you get more fun out of life if you admit this. You can let your fantasy run free, and that’s exciting.

I hope this makes sense. It does to me, but at the moment I’m writing in a state of what you might call euphoria. Anyway, at this point I took a risk. I leaned over the table and said, ‘Do you know who I am? I’m Bela Lugosi.’

She just stared at me, and my heart sank. I thought she regarded me as just a nut. But I went on. ‘And you know who you are? Faye Dunaway.’

She shook her head and said, ‘I’m not.’ I was ready to get up and go. But she was inspired. ‘I’m Bonnie Parker.’

‘And me?’

‘You’re Dracula.’

And of course she was absolutely right. Dracula and Bonnie are much more exciting than Bela and Faye. And this book is to be about Dracula and Bonnie, just them. Nothing else. I’ve not put anything down here for a couple of weeks, because I wanted to get my feelings straight before writing anything else.

I think I’ve got it clear now. What it comes to is that Count Dracula and Bonnie Parker together pack a real explosive force of fantasy, games fantasy. Already I’ve said things to Bonnie that I’ve never said to anybody. Or Dracula said them to her. I told her about the excitement of that first moment when the sharp teeth sink in. The first pinprick. Then the colour of blood, real ruby red. The sight of it running in a slow stream. And Bonnie understood; it was something we shared. That’s never happened before, not to Dracula. He and Bonnie shared something.

Whoa. Time to call a halt.

Let me make it clear. Dracula understands it, Bonnie does too. There has not been, will not be, any question of sex between them. Dracula’s played a different game, a sex game, with other people, but here sex just does not come into it. You could go farther. I don’t come into it, or if I do it’s only as referee in the Game. What does the referee do but blow his whistle when the rules have been infringed? It’s Dracula and Bonnie who play the Game, and they know they’re only playing. How can they be anything else, when their reality doesn’t exist outside the screen, outside their conversations? Nothing they think or say counts. In their imaginary reality they have a perfect relationship.

I’m very euphoric.