The Progress of a Crime
by Julian Symons
Summary
On Guy Fawkes Night in an English provincial town, by the light of the village green bonfire, a local man is stabbed to death in front of the crowd, and a group of leather jacketed boys roars off on motorbikes. Hugh Bennett, a young reporter on the local paper, is standing close enough to see it happen, which turns out to mean nothing at all: what he saw, what he thinks he saw, and what he can honestly say he saw diverge further with every retelling, and Symons builds his novel in the widening gap.
The title announces the method. The book follows the crime's progress through every institution that handles it, and hands each one its own section of rope: the police investigation, expedient under pressure for an arrest, extracting confessions from frightened teenagers by means the reader watches; the press, Bennett's own trade, converting two arrested boys into monsters for circulation, with a Fleet Street veteran teaching him the trade's cynicism as mentorship; and the courts, where the trial runs on performance and class reflex, and the question of which boy held the knife dissolves into which boy the jury can more easily imagine holding it. Bennett's moral education, watching a story he helped write harden into other people's fate, is the book's spine.
It ends in verdicts, but not in certainty, and its final pages tally the cost with a ledger keeper's coldness.
Around two hundred and fifty pages.
Best for readers who want the crime novel as social autopsy, the whodunit dissolved into the more frightening question of how anyone is ever found guilty of anything.
Historical Context & Significance
The Progress of a Crime won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1961, recognition for the British writer who was simultaneously the genre's leading practitioner critic: Julian Symons's history of crime fiction, Bloody Murder, would become the field's standard survey, and his own novels prosecuted its argument, that the detective story should grow up into the crime novel, the puzzle yielding to psychology and society.
This book was the argument's exhibit: drawn from a real Teddy boy murder case, researched into the workings of police, press and courts, and pointedly uninterested in ingenuity for its own sake. Reviewers at the time saw new standards being set; the British Library's Crime Classics reprint returned it to circulation decades later with its reputation intact.
Symons went on to the presidency of the Detection Club and a Grand Master's honours on both sides of the Atlantic, the rare eminence built equally on writing the genre and telling it what it was.