Joseph Jefferson Farjeon was an English crime and mystery novelist, playwright and screenwriter. His father, brother and sister also made names for themselves in literature. His "Ben" novels were reissued in 2015 and 2016.
Family
Born in Hampstead, London, Farjeon was the grandson of the American actor Joseph Jefferson, after whom he was named. His parents were Jefferson's daughter Maggie and Benjamin Farjeon, 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 was a scene designer.
Career: "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 1925 play, Number 17, which was made into a number of films, including Number Seventeen 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 and provided the story for Bernard Vorhaus's The Ghost Camera. 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 of "ingenious and entertaining plots and characterization," while The New York Times, reviewing an early novel, Master Criminal, 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 an "amusing, satirical, and frequently hair-raising yarn of an author who got dangerously mixed up with his imaginary characters." A significant revival of interest in the Golden age of detective fiction had followed the 2014 success of The British Library reissue of Mystery in White: A Christmas Crime Story. There followed two further reissues 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, French, Dutch, German, Spanish, Polish and Russian. Seven Dead has been reissued by The British Library. The novel sees the return of Detective-Inspector Kendall, first seen, in the words of its central character "...in the case of the Thirteen Guests. What I liked about him was that he didn't play the violin, or have a wooden leg or anything of that sort. He just got on with it." The figure of Ben in No. 17 appeared again in seven other novels which have all been reissued under the revived Collins Crime Club imprint since 2016.
