As well as being a distinguished crime author and anthologist, Julian Symons was an extraordinarily versatile and productive writer who, in the course of a 50-year career, published books on subjects as diverse as General Gordon and the siege of Khartoum and the General Strike. In his novels of the 1950s and '60s, he added a psychological depth to traditional English crime fiction which it had rarely shown before. The Color of Murder, for example, which was first published in 1957, is a study of a man who is charged with the murder of a young woman with whom he has become obsessed. None the less, these psychological crime stories now seem rather dated and rooted in the period in which they were written.

Perhaps more rewarding for a modern reader are the two witty and erudite pastiches Symons wrote in which a small-time thespian named Sheridan Haynes, who idolizes Sherlock Holmes, gets opportunities to emulate his hero. The first of these is A Three Pipe Problem, in which Haynes, delighted by his chance to play Holmes in a TV series, becomes convinced that he can apply his talents off screen as well as on and solve the mystery behind the so-called Karate Killings, murders committed by a single chop to the neck. The book deftly mixes a genuinely puzzling crime story, complete with clues and red herrings scattered through the text, with all the fun that can be extracted from the Holmesian allusions and parallels. Symons returned to the character of Sheridan Haynes in The Kentish Manor Mysteries, a convoluted story involving murder, a wealthy Holmesian collector and a lost Conan Doyle manuscript. This is also an enjoyable read but A Three Pipe Problem is not only better but one of the finest of the many books Symons published in his long career.

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