Joseph Jefferson Farjeon

Joseph Jefferson Farjeon
Born 4 June 1883
London
United Kingdom
Died 6 June 1955 (aged 72)
Hove, Sussex, UK
Occupation Writer, playwright

Joseph Jefferson Farjeon (4 June 1883 – 6 June 1955) was an English crime and mystery novelist, playwright and screenwriter.

Family

Farjeon was the grandson of the American actor Joseph Jefferson, after whom he was named.[1] His parents were Jefferson's daughter Maggie (1853–1935) and Benjamin Farjeon (1838–1903), a prolific Victorian novelist who was born in Whitechapel to an impoverished immigrant family who travelled widely before returning to England in 1868. Joseph Jefferson Farjeon's brothers were Herbert, a dramatist and scholar, and Harry, who became a composer. His sister Eleanor became a renowned children's author.[2] His daughter Joan Jefferson Farjeon (1913–2006) was a scene designer.[3]

Creepy skill

Farjeon worked for ten years for Amalgamated Press in London before going freelance, sitting nine hours a day at his writing desk.[4] One of Farjeon's best known works was a play, Number 17, which was made into a number of films, including Number Seventeen (1932) directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and joined the UK Penguin Crime series as a novel in 1939. He also wrote the screenplay for Michael Powell's My Friend the King (1932) and provided the story for Bernard Vorhaus's The Ghost Camera (1933).[5]

Farjeon's crime novels were admired by Dorothy L. Sayers, who called him "unsurpassed for creepy skill in mysterious adventures."[6] His obituarist in The Times talked on "ingenious and entertaining plots and characterization," while The New York Times, reviewing an early novel, Master Criminal (1924), states that "Mr. Farjeon displays a great deal of knowledge about story-telling... and multiplies the interest of his plot through a terse, telling style and a rigid compression." The Saturday Review of Literature called Death in the Inkwell (1942) an "amusing, satirical, and frequently hair-raising yarn of an author who got dangerously mixed up with his imaginary characters."[7]

Most of Farjeon's works had been forgotten, but the figure of Ben in Number 17 appeared again in a string of novels, including Ben on the Job (1932), reissued in 1955 and 1985. The House Opposite (1931), the first full-length original novel to feature Ben, is being reissued under the revived Collins Crime Club imprint in December 2015. The British Library reissued Mystery in White: A Christmas Crime Story in 2014,[8] and two further novels in 2015: Thirteen Guests and The Z Murders. Mystery in White is also one of at least three of his novels to have appeared in Italian translations.[9] Others appeared in German,[10] French, and other languages.

Selected works

Crime fiction

  • The Master Criminal. (London, Brentano's, 1924)
  • The Confusing Friendship. (London, Brentano's, 1924)
  • Little Things That Happen. (London, Methuen, 1925)
  • Uninvited Guests. (London, Brentano's, 1925)
  • No 17. (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1926)
  • At the Green Dragon. (London, Harrap, 1926)
  • The Crook's Shadow. (London, Harrap, 1927)
  • More Little Happenings. (London, Methuen, 1928)
  • The House of Disappearance. (New York, A. L. Burt, 1928)
  • Underground. (New York, A. L. Burt, 1928)
  • Shadows by the Sea. (London, Harrap, 1928)
  • The Appointed Date. (London, 1929)
  • The 5:18 Mystery. (1929)
  • The Person Called Z. (1930)
  • The Mystery on the Moor. (London, Collins, 1930)
  • The House Opposite. (London, Collins, 1931)
  • Murderer's Trail. (London, Collins, 1931)
  • The Z Murders. (London, Collins, 1932)
  • Trunk Call. (London, Collins, 1932)
  • Ben Sees It Through. (London, Collins, 1932)
  • Sometimes Life's Funny. (London, Collins, 1933)
  • The Mystery of the Creek. (London, Collins, 1933)
  • Dead Man's Heath. (London, Collins, 1933)
  • Old Man Mystery. (London, Collins, 1933)
  • Fancy Dress Ball. (London, Collins, 1934)
  • The Windmill Mystery. (London, Collins, 1934)
  • Sinister Inn. (London, Collins, 1934)
  • Little God Ben. (London, Collins, 1935)
  • Holiday Express. (London, Collins, 1935)
  • Thirteen Guests. (London, Collins, 1936)
  • Detective Ben. (London, Collins, 1936)
  • Dangerous Beauty. (London, Collins, 1936)
  • Holiday at Half Mast. (London, Collins, 1937)
  • Mystery in White. (1937)
  • Dark Lady. (1938)
  • End of An Author. (1938)
  • Seven Dead. (1939)
  • Exit John Horton. (1939)
  • Aunt Sunday Sees It Through. (1940)
  • Room Number Six. (1941)
  • The Third Victim. (1941)
  • Death in the Inkwell. (1942)
  • The Judge Sums Up. (1942)
  • The House of Shadows. (1943)
  • Greenmask. (1944)
  • Black Castle. (1945)
  • The Oval Table. (1946)
  • Peril in the Pyrenees. (1946)
  • Back To Victoria. (1947)
  • The Adventure at Eighty. (1948)
  • Prelude To Crime. (1948)
  • The Impossible Guest. (1949)
  • The Shadow of Thirteen. (1949)
  • The Disappearances of Uncle David. (1949)
  • Cause Unknown. (1950)
  • The House Over the Tunnel. (1951)
  • The Adventure For Nine. (1951)
  • Ben on the Job. (1952)
  • Number Nineteen. (1952)
  • The Double Crime. (1953)
  • Money Walks. (1953)
  • Castle of Fear. (1954)
  • The Caravan Adventure. (1955)

Plays

Short stories

Under the pseudonym Anthony Swift

Bibliography

References

  1. ↑ Martin Edwards's Introduction to the 2014 reissue of Mystery in White. A Christmas Crime Storey (London: British Library, [1937]).
  2. ↑ Lewis Melville, "Farjeon, Benjamin Leopold (1838–1903)", rev. William Baker. ODNB, Oxford University Press, 2004 Retrieved 21 November 2014, pay-walled.
  3. ↑ Obituary in The Independent, 14 August 2006. Retrieved 21 November 2014.
  4. ↑ Publisher's biographical note in the Penguin Crime edition of the novelized No. 17.
  5. ↑ IMDb. Retrieved 21 November 2014.
  6. ↑ Martin Edwards...
  7. ↑ gadetection site. Retrieved 21 November 2014.
  8. ↑ Martin Edwards...
  9. ↑ As Sotto la neve. Polillo Editore site (in Italian) Retrieved 21 November 2014.
  10. ↑ Drei Raben Verlag (in German) Retrieved 21 November 2014.
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