Overview
Ellery Queen Presents Julian Symons’ How to Trap a Crook, and 12 Other Mysteries is a collection of crime and mystery short stories by the British writer Julian Symons (1912–1994). It appeared as one of the “Ellery Queen Presents” single-author anthologies, a series issued in association with Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and its publisher, Davis Publications, in which the editorial persona “Ellery Queen”—principally Frederic Dannay, who selected and introduced the material—gathered short fiction by an individual author who had contributed to the magazine. As the title indicates, the volume brings together thirteen stories: the title piece, “How to Trap a Crook,” together with twelve others.
The format is characteristic of these Ellery Queen–branded collections, which functioned both as showcases for accomplished practitioners of the short mystery and as an extension of the magazine’s long-running program of promoting the crime short story as a serious literary form. The stories collected in such volumes were typically drawn from work the author had published in periodicals, and each collection carried the imprimatur of the Queen editorial voice.
The Author
Julian Symons was one of the most versatile and respected figures in twentieth-century British crime writing. Beginning his literary career as a poet and editor in the 1930s—he founded and edited the poetry magazine Twentieth Century Verse—he went on to become a novelist, biographer, social historian, and, above all, a critic and historian of crime fiction. He is especially remembered for Bloody Murder (1972; published in the United States as Mortal Consequences), a landmark critical history of the detective story and crime novel that traced the genre’s development from the tale of pure detection toward the psychological crime novel, a form Symons himself championed and practiced.
As a novelist, Symons produced a substantial body of crime fiction noted for its interest in character, motive, and social observation rather than mere puzzle-solving, reflecting his conviction that the crime novel could be a vehicle for serious writing. He was an active member of the British crime-writing community, served as a president of the Detection Club and of the Crime Writers’ Association, and received major honors within the field, including the accolade of Grand Master from the Mystery Writers of America. Alongside his novels he was a prolific writer of short stories, many of which appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and similar outlets, and it is from this vein of shorter fiction that a collection of this kind is drawn.
The Collection
The book assembles thirteen short mysteries, headed by “How to Trap a Crook,” which gives the volume its title. As with the other “Ellery Queen Presents” anthologies devoted to a single author, the selection functions as a representative gathering of Symons’s short crime fiction, offering readers a concentrated sample of his work in the shorter form. Symons’s short stories are consistent with the qualities that marked his novels and his criticism: an emphasis on human motive and irony, an interest in the ways ordinary people are drawn into crime, and a craftsman’s attention to the compression and twist that the short story demands.
Significance
The volume belongs to a notable publishing tradition in which Ellery Queen, as editor and anthologist, helped to define and preserve the canon of the modern crime short story. By devoting a collection to Julian Symons, the series recognized him not only as a critic and historian of the genre but as an accomplished contributor to it in his own right. For readers, such collections serve as accessible introductions to an author’s shorter work and as records of the ongoing relationship between individual crime writers and the magazine culture—centered on Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine—that sustained the short mystery through the second half of the twentieth century.
