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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