Occupation Writer, playwright Role Novelist | Name Joseph Farjeon | |
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Born 4 June 1883 LondonUnited Kingdom Movies Number Seventeen, Two Crowded Hours, The Rasp Parents Benjamin Farjeon, Margaret Jefferson Siblings Eleanor Farjeon, Herbert Farjeon, Harry Farjeon Books Mystery in White: A Christma, Thirteen Guests: A British Lib, The Z Murders: A British Lib, The Person Called Z, Aunt Sunday Takes Co Similar People | ||
Joseph Jefferson Farjeon (4 June 1883 – 6 June 1955) was an English crime and mystery novelist, playwright and screenwriter.
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Family
Farjeon was the grandson of the American actor Joseph Jefferson, after whom he was named. 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. His daughter Joan Jefferson Farjeon (1913–2006) was a scene designer.
Creepy skill
Farjeon worked for ten years for Amalgamated Press in London before going freelance, sitting nine hours a day at his writing desk. 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).
Farjeon's crime novels were admired by Dorothy L. Sayers, who called him "unsurpassed for creepy skill in mysterious adventures." 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."
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, 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. Others appeared in German, French, and other languages.