An intriguing mystery told with humour and well-drawn characters
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| The British Library edition of Farjeon's Thirteen Guests |
The Queens of Crime, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L
Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham, are still famous for their Golden
Age novels and their books remain in print. However, many other good writers of
the detective novel from this period have now been forgotten.
One crime writer the novelist Dorothy L Sayers
particularly admired from the Golden Age was J Jefferson Farjeon, who she
praised for his ‘creepy skill.’
She may have read Thirteen Guests, when it was first published
in 1936, but few copies of the original book had remained in existence for the
modern reader to enjoy until 2015, when, happily, the novel was rescued and
republished by the British Library.
The story begins at a railway station where a young
man, John Foss, falls from a train when leaving it and injures his foot.
He is recued by an attractive widow, Nadine Leveridge,
who is on her way to a country house party. She takes the young man with her in
the car that has been sent to pick her up by her host, Lord Aveling, to try to
get medical help for him.
When they arrive at her destination, Bragley Court,
the hospitable Lord Aveling welcomes Foss and offers him the chance to stay for
the weekend while he recovers.
Lord Aveling is hosting a weekend house party for 12
people and therefore Foss is his 13th guest.
But because they arrive before two of the other
guests, Mr and Mrs Chater, it is Mr Chater who is the last to enter the house
and who becomes, technically, the 13th guest.
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| J Jefferson Farjeon worked for the Amalgamated Press before becoming a freelance writer |
During the weekend a serious of bizarre things happen.
A painting is damaged, a dog is killed, a stranger’s body is found in a quarry
on Lord Aveling’s land and then one of the guests is found dead.
Foss observes all the comings and goings during the
weekend and overhears snatches of people’s conversations as he lies, sometimes
forgotten, recuperating on a settee in a side room. He is visited from time to
time by Nadine and together they try to work out what is going on in the house,
as the relationship between them blossoms.
Farjeon does not write cardboard characters and therefore
the guests, who are also the suspects, are all interesting and depicted well.
In one scene, an artist, and a journalist, who are sharing a bedroom, give as
good as they get in an entertaining conversation with the investigating detective,
Inspector Kendall, who is by no means cast as a plodding policeman.
We learn that the Detective Inspector moves from place
to place when a district needs ‘gingering up.’ When he is introduced, he is
having some amusing exchanges with his new subordinates as they make their way
to Bragley Court to investigate.
The weekend guests include an MP, an actress, a cricketer,
and a writer of mystery novels. They all have their own secrets and
peculiarities, which Detective Inspector Kendall uncovers as he tries to get to
the truth about what has happened.
Farjeon was a crime and mystery novelist, playwright,
and screen writer. Born in 1883, he worked for ten years for Amalgamated Press
in London before going freelance. He went on to become the author of more than
60 crime and mystery novels, short story collections and plays.
He was named
after his maternal grandfather, Joseph Jefferson, who was an American actor.
His father, Benjamin Farjeon, was a successful novelist, one of his brothers
was a composer, another a drama critic and director, and his sister, Eleanor
Farjeon, wrote poems, including the words for the hymn, Morning Has Broken.
Although the plot of Thirteen Guests is far from
straight forward, Farjeon plays fair with the reader and a credible solution to
the mystery is unveiled at the end.
I enjoyed Thirteen Guests and would recommend it to
other fans of country house mysteries.
So far, not all of Farjeon’s many novels have
been republished, but I hope more of this author’s forgotten work will be rescued
and made available for contemporary crime fiction fans to relish.
