The Colour Of Murder
A review of The Colour of Murder by Julian Symons – 230721
Perhaps to my shame Julian Symons is a writer I have not investigated, although I enjoyed his ‘Twixt Cup and Lip in Martin Edwards’ Christmas themed collection of short stories a while back. Symons was more than a crime writer, publishing in his lengthy career books on social and military history, biography, and literary criticism amongst other subjects. The Colour of Murder was originally published in 1957 and has been reissued as part of the excellent British Library Crime Classics series.
I romped through the book, fascinated by how Symons produced a very distinctive and memorable take on a genre that by then was creaking at the seams. Neither an inverted murder mystery nor a whodunit in the classic sense nor exactly a psychological thriller it takes features of all to produce a book as good as I have read for some time.
The book falls into three unequal parts. The first is a series of transcripts of conversations that John Wilkins has with his psychiatrist. We learn of his home life, trapped in an unhappy marriage with the frigid May, of whom his mother disapproves, his work in the Complaints Department of Palings, a London store off Oxford Street, and his growing infatuation with a librarian, Sheila. From the minor details of what is quintessential a boring, conventional life led by millions in this country, we get the sense of things building up to some kind of crisis point. By the end of the part, the halfway point of the book, we still do not know what – of course, we suspect murder – but Symons is more concerned that we get the picture of a deeply unhappy man whose fantasies are the only way that he can escape from the crushing monotony of his life.
The second part is the murder trial. As this section of the book opens, we are not sure who is on trial, although we soon find out that it is Wilkins, nor whom he is supposed to have killed. The victim, it emerges, is Sheila and the case against Wilkins seems to be a fairly open and shut. Prone to blackouts at moments of extreme crisis, Wilkins cannot account for his whereabouts at the time at which Sheila was violently assaulted and killed, despite attempts by his counsel to discredit the evidence of some witnesses as to the time they saw him and some less than helpful testimony from friends and family.
Mrs Wilkins, who like all good mothers should, refuses to accept her son’s guilt and employs a private detective, Lambie, to carry put a more diligent enquiry than the police to reconstruct his movements on the night in question. Lambie unearths a sex worker with a social conscience, one whose testimony, at the risk of her reputation and future earning potential, fills in some of the missing hours and gives confirmation that the blood found on his jacket came from a cut he sustained whilst opening a can of beans. However, the evidence of a prostitute does not carry the weight that it should do.
The trial includes an early form of forensic evidence, the Benzidine test, which is able to detect the presence of the slightest traces of blood. This is confidently presented by the prosecution that it was proof positive that Wilkins’ clothing was splattered with Sheila’s blood. However, in a fascinating exchange, the defence counsel manages to demonstrate that the test was not all that it was cracked up to be. It would be some decades before DNA tests provided more definitive evidence.
The jury reaches its conclusion, but in the short epilogue, the third part, an alternative solution is put forward which to this reader, at least, seemed more convincing, but, curiously, Symons does not make much of it, just leaving it hanging in the air. Symons paints a convincing picture of a man trapped in his miserable life and who seems to be destined to be one of life’s victims, a convenient scapegoat. His one hope of escape, into the arms of Sheila, is closed when he learns that she has just become engaged to another, but it is still a surprise that it is she rather than May who is murdered.
The ending might be considered a tad unsatisfactory and there are loose ends aplenty, but I did not mind that. There were plenty of interesting characters, no little humour, a psychological case study, and an inventive twist on the crime fiction genre. You cannot ask for more than that.
