Seven Dead (1939) by J. Jefferson Farjeon

Last year, Martin Edward reported on his blog, Do You Write Under Your Own Name, that there were some exciting reprints forthcoming in the Crime Classics imprint of the British Library in 2020, which will include a pair of once obscure, long out-of-print locked room mysteries – namely John Bude's Death Knows No Calendar (1942) and Peter Shaffer's The Woman in the Wardrobe (1951). So, in anticipation of these impending reissues, I picked a British Library title from the highlands of my to-be-read pile.

I've read less than a handful of J. Jefferson Farjeon's novels, but the superbly realized child narrator from Holiday Express (1935) and the gentle, snowy magic of Mystery in White (1937) indicated he was a less than conventional mystery novelist. Even the more traditionally presentable The Third Victim (1941) ended on an unconventional note with a solution hearkening back to the days of 19th century sensationalist fiction. And the only truly conservative aspect of Seven Dead (1939) is its continuation of that tradition.

Seven Dead has a strong, memorable opening with a hungry thief, named Ted Lyte, who's nervously graduating from "petty pilfering and pickpocketing" to housebreaking.

Lyte comes across a lonely place, Haven House, with an open gate, shuttered windows and half-dressed in dilapidated vines. So he grabs his courage together and finds a way into the house, where he helps himself to the silverware and food in the pantry, but, when he entered the shuttered room, he vacated the premise "as if he had been fired out of it from a cannon" – only to be apprehended outside. But the shocked man is unable to utter a word. When the police decides to inspect the burgled house, they make a horrifying discovery.

The shuttered drawing-room resembled a Chamber of Horrors with seven bodies strewn across the room, six men and one woman, who are "emaciated, filthily clothed" and "nothing on any of them to identify any one of them." As if they had gone through a Hellish ordeal. The shutters weren't merely bolted, they were nailed shut. A bullet hole disfigured a picture of a young girl hanging in the dining room and on the mantelpiece stands a slender silver vase with "an old cricket ball," green-yellow with age, on top. Most tantalizing clue is a crumpled piece of paper bearing the message "with apologies from the Suicide Club" and a cryptically penciled note scribbled on the other side of the paper.

One hell of a way to start a hard-to-define crime story! What follows is a two-pronged investigation by the protagonists, Detective Inspector Kendall and Tom Hazeldean.

Tom Hazeldean is a freelance reporter and yachtsman, who helped to apprehend Lyte, but his "romantic disposition" makes him want to meet the girl in the picture, Dora Fenner, who's the niece of the owner of Haven House, John Fenner – who has taken Dora to Boulogne. Hazeldean sets sail to France to find Dora and finds himself in the middle, what some have called, a romantic thriller with suspicious servants and silk merchant who seems to follow him around. Back in England, Detective Inspector Kendall conducts an investigation more in line with Freeman Wills Crofts as he reconstructs how, and why, the picture was fired upon, tracking down tire tracks and scrutinizing footprints. This is the only piece of genuine detective work in the story.

Just like Mystery in White, I think Seven Dead is too gentle to be a thriller (in spite of the body-count) and too light on detection to be a proper detective story, which you can only solve, if you happen to be a clairvoyant. And to a purist, like myself, that's an unpardonable sin. And then came that sublime ending! A conclusion that more than made up for any shortcomings the story has as either a detective or thriller story. If there's anything to complain about, it's that story has been told the wrong way round.

Seven Dead should have started out with that disastrous tragedy and expending those fascinating diary entries to fill the middle portion of the story, because who wouldn't want to read a detailed account of people battling an army of penguins? The last quarter should have told of the return to England, culminating in wholesale murder, ending with the discovery of the bodies and perhaps a newspaper clipping – reporting on the gruesome, inexplicable crime discovered at Haven House. I think this would have turned the story in a timeless classic and a lovely inversion of a famous detective novel published around the same time. Alas, the road not taken...

Farjeon was not your average, Golden Age mystery novelist, but a writer who spun fanciful yarns of wonder and imagination, which just so happen to take the shape and form of the detective and thriller story. Seven Dead is a fine example of how impossible it's to pigeon-hole Farjeon and his work. So he comes highly recommended to mystery readers who are looking for something a little different in their vintage crime fiction.

And if anyone from the British Library happens to stumble across this review, you should consider reprinting the splendid and highly original Holiday Express. If there's one obscure, long out-of-print novel by Farjeon deserving to be reprinted it's Holiday Express.

A Winter Wonderland

"I told you these were shadows of the things that have been... that they are what they are, do not blame me."

- Ghost of Christmas Past (Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, 1843)

One of the most remarkable resurgence from obscurity has to be the small-scale renaissance of J. Jefferson Farjeon's fanciful crime-fiction (e.g. Holiday Express, 1935), which can be traced back to a 2012 blog-post from genre historian and critic, Curt Evans – who spoke warmly about Mystery in White (1937). A wondrous and wintry crime novel that became "a festive sleeper hit" when it was reprinted by the British Library in 2014. Everyone was astonished when the book, out of nowhere, sold over 60,000 copies!

So, I'm kind of late with my review of the book, but still well ahead of this years' festive season and you can expect two or three further reviews of Christmas mysteries in the coming months. But first things first!

Mystery in White is a rattling yarn of Mitchellian crime and wonder, which embarked on its fantastical journey when the "half a dozen inmates of a third-class compartment on the 11.37 from Euston" found themselves stranded on a snowbound train. The seemingly never-ending snowfall blocked the railway tracks, back and forth, turning the unofficial halt into a permanent one. However, this extreme Christmas Eve blizzard does not worry Mr. Hopkins, "the elderly bore," who experienced a month-long tempest in the Yukon town of Dawson, but he's the only one in the compartment who "pooh-poohed the whole thing as insignificant" – as most of them wished they were somewhere else.

The young woman next to the bore is a beautiful chorus girl, named Jessie Noyes, who is on her way to Manchester for an important audition. Robert Thomson is a tall, pale and unhealthy looking youth, which is "due partly to the atmosphere of the basement office in which he worked," but the clerk also has a rising temperature. David and Lydia are brother and sister en route to a Christmas party, which they probably have to miss due to the complete whiteout outside of their railway compartment.

Finally, there's the fascinating personality of Mr. Edward Maltby, of the Royal Psychical Society, who has an appointment to interview the ghostly residue of Charles I of England – reputedly stored inside the walls of an old house in Naseby. Maltby believes that "the past is ineradicable," stored away, which can be revealed and replayed like a gramophone record. And he proved to be an interesting detective-like character in the tradition of William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki, the Ghost Finder (1910) and John Bell from A Master of Mysteries (1898) by L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace.  

Malty is also the one who set the train of events in motion when he out of the compartment, "into the all-embracing snow," in an attempt to reach a different line.

Not long after his departure, Jessie, Robert, David and Lydia decide to follow in the footsteps of the psychic investigator, but Mr. Hopkins, the eternal bore, frowns at the notion of venturing out in the snow. So he stays puts. But "the four adventures" are determined to track across "the motionless white scene" of the "strange fairyland" outside, which is fraught with more dangers than they initially anticipated. Luckily, they manage to survive a renewed blizzard, a small avalanche and a pitfall, but they manage to penetrate "the curtain of whirling white" and the reach the threshold of a lonesome house – where a welcoming log fire is roaring in the hearth, tea has been laid and a kettle of water is boiling. There is, however, one problem: nobody appears to be home! In fact, the place seems to be completely abandoned.

On a quick side note, the lonely house, in combination with the holiday theme, reminded me of Bill Pronzini's "No Room at the Inn," which can be found in the short story collection Carpenter and Quincannon: Professional Detective Services (1998). It makes for an interesting comparison.

Anyway, the marooned party from the train slowly ease into their role as comfortable trespassers, because having two wounded (or sick) members is as good an excuse as any, but they begin to realize that something is not quite alright – such as noises and sounds coming from behind a locked door of an attic room. A room that is later found to be unlocked and empty! Soon, they find Maltby on the doorstep and a man, who calls himself "Smith," with a Cockney accent and a suspicious act, accompanies him. Smith claims he knows nothing about a snowbound train, but is in the possession of a train ticket.

An obvious lie that might be easily explained by news that’s brought to the stranded party by the half frozen bore, Mr. Hopkins: the body of a man, strangled to death, was found in an adjoining compartment not long after their departure. So is the murderer one of them and is there a possible connection between the murder and the empty house?

I could go on to describe the subsequent events, but, after a quarter or so of the book, it turns into the kind of story you really should read for yourself, because the overall plot is not easily pigeonholed. Mystery in White can hardly be described as a traditional whodunit with a logically constructed plot or a thriller with breathtaking scenes of suspense. The story is far too gentle to be a thriller and the explanation really disqualifies it from being a whodunit. However, the plot does borrow components from these types of stories: Maltby makes a series of deductions based on several items he found in the house and stages an excellent dénouement, in which he brings an old portrait to life to explain a long-forgotten murder that happened there on Christmas Eve of 1917.

There was also a nice touch about "the official version," described in the next to last chapter of the book, in which the reader is told about the police's official, but incorrect, view of the case and its explanation. So you can have a chuckle at their expense.

I really liked these particular scenes, however, they did not make for the sort of detective story that was typical of the 1930s. I labeled the book earlier as a Mitchellian crime fantasy, but I suppose a Poean tale of mystery and imagination would be a better description. One that only allows you to take it one chapter at a time, but even after eighty years, the book still feels like a breath of cold, fresh air in the genre. Something that's genuinely out of the ordinary, strange and original, but can still be enjoyed and appreciated by such fervent classicist as yours truly. I guess the best way to view the book is as our genre’s version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol (1843).

But enough of my blabbering. Mystery in White is a good, likeable and imaginative Christmas tale, which happened to have a criminal element. It's good to know the book not only found its way back into print, but also enjoyed some success. Well, I guess I'll leave it that and try to find something more traditional for the next review. So stay tuned!

Crooked House

"It's no use crying over spilt evils. It's better to mop them up laughing."
- Eleanor Farjeon

The family of Benjamin Farjeon, a prolific novelist from the Victorian period, came from humble stock, but all of the children from his household were able to carve a name for themselves in several cultural genres – such as literature, theatre and music.

Harry Farjeon was a magician, composer and teacher. Herbert Farjeon was an important figure in British theatre and a stage critic. Eleanor Farjeon was an author of children's author who has a book-prize named in her honor. But the one who is of interest to us is their brother and a once famous fiction writer, J. Jefferson Farjeon.

J. Jefferson Farjeon proved himself as fertile a writer as their father and reportedly a personal favorite of Dorothy L. Sayers, praising him as being "quite unsurpassed for creepy skill in mysterious writing," but his work and reputation has languished in obscurity for decades. Recently, there seems to have been a change, as he appears to be undergoing a personal renaissance, reminiscent of Gladys Mitchell's rise from literary oblivion during the previous decade – going from one of the most obscure names in the genre to having nearly all of her books reissued by various publishers. I think I can pinpoint where and when Farjeon's began to reemerge from the mists of time.

On November 22, 2011, Curt Evans published his first blog-post on "The Passing Tramp," which was a reference to "one of the era's unlikeliest series detectives," Ben the Tramp, who appeared in eight of Farjeon's roughly eighty novels. Evans also seems to have been the first person on the internet to have reviewed or simply talked about Farjeon. It might just have been a coincidence, but the Poisoned Pen Press reprinted Mystery in White (1937) in 2014 and the book sold over sixty thousand copies – making it a smash hit that surprised everyone.

As a result of this unexpected success, three additional titles were reissued, The House Opposite (1931), The Z Murders (1932) and Thirteen Guests (1936), with more of them on the way.

Personally, my only exposure to Farjeon's work came from reading the splendid, original and very amusing Holiday Express (1935), which deserves to be reprinted, but I sort of forgot about his books that were on my to-be-read pile after that – both of them old pocket editions from Collins White Circle. So I had to decide between The Third Victim (1941) and Prelude to Crime (1948), which was decided in favor of the former. I found the synopsis of the book to be very appealing.

The Third Victim tells of George Lyster's return to his ancestral home after having spend twenty-six years of his life in Australia, but what he finds is a place as faded as his quarter-of-a-century old memories of the place

When he walked out of the gates of Broadland Hall twenty-six years before, they "had been well kept and imposing," but now the rusty, corroded iron made "the two dignified cavaliers who had stood for centuries on the gate posts" look unimposing and the place impressed him as being "shockingly neglected." A once large staff that was needed to run the estate had been decimated and reduced to only three persons: a gloomy, fretful butler, named Dyke, who appears to be under the thumb of the antagonistic housekeeper, Mrs. Peto. And there is a gardener who "believes in skeletons and headless men and such nonsense."

Worryingly, this bunch of characters have been looking after Lyster's invalid mother, Dowager Lady Lyster, who suffered a crippling and paralyzing stroke, which left her unable to speak and can only communicate by the feeble movements of her hands – twitching her left or right hand to answer yes or no questions. Only normal person she got see in a long time is a now middle-aged woman from the neighborhood, Evelyn Eames, who Lyster remembers as "that long-legged kid" from all those years ago and wonders why she is not bringing up a family of her own. 

Sad state of the place reminds Lyster of a time "when there was less dust around" and "when the house was fuller," as well as friendlier, but from the family solicitor, Mr. William Lotham, he learns there's clinging more to the estate than simple neglect.

The reason for Lyster's return to England was the sudden death of his brother, who broke his neck in a fall from the high gallery into the hallway below, but Lotham informed him the tragedy occurred only an hour before Sir Maitland altered his will – which practically left everything to his brother who was still down under at the time. He was also surprised to learn there was a legacy for an adopted daughter, Ursula, which was to be held in trust for ten years and if she married a certain Ralph Murray her share would revert to Lyster.

Fourteen years ago, Sir Maitland had adopted foundling twins, a pair of eight-year-olds, named John and Ursula, but the boy tragically died two years later when he fell from the high gallery. It was "in precisely the same way" as his adopted father would perish twelve years later. Lyster concludes "there’s not only dust in this house," but poison as well and swears to clear it out – so one can breath again.

Lyster engages the services of Detective Kendall and Sergeant Wade, once attached to Scotland Yard and now operate as "the private detectives in the kingdom," who came to Broadland Hall in disguise for a discreet enquiry. Kendall plays the role of an history enthusiast, "Headley Swayne," who comes to Broadland Hall to gather material for his book, The Historic Homes of Britain. Wade has to be contend with playing a second butler to the place. It’s an arrangement described as a bit of a comedy, but, stylistically, it has an interesting affect on the story and characters: the infusion of a bunch of normal and sane people in the formerly dark, neglected and decaying home begins to have a similar effect on the place as airing a house that had been boarded up for years.

Past shadows are slowly being shooed away and slowly they are getting closer to identifying the murderous entity lurking in the home, which may be one of the books two sole weaknesses.

The first of these two weaknesses is the clueing, which is really nothing more than foreshadowing. It nods in the direction where the explanation can be found, but nothing more than that and you can only really guess the murderer's identity. Secondly, the identity of the murderer who serves here as a jack-in-the-box surprise, but I think the murderer belonged to both a different genre and period of time. I thought The Third Victim was not unlike one Annie Haynes' nineteenth century-style detective novels with an ending that could have been lifted from the pages of an Edgar Allan Poe story. It could make for a splendid and fun period story, but I was hoping the ending would have been a continuation of the first three quarters of the story, which constituted the best parts of the book – both story-and plot-wise. Stylistically, the ending struck a bit of a false note, because it moved along the lines of a British country house mystery before ending up in Poe country.

However, I can easily imagine this will be less of a problem to readers who are warned there's a sharp twist in the road towards the end of the story. So you can thank me for going ahead and warning you about it.

Finally, I have to note that The Third Victim struck me as an indoor version of Ivans' De bosgeest (The Forest Spirit, 1926). 

Well, I'll be back with something definitely classical for the next blog-post. I should probably also try to write a rambling blog-post again or finally re-write and update this list. But that's something for the future.

A Series of Unfortunate Events

"In my twelve years on this spinning ball we call Earth, I've seen a lot things normal people never see. I've seen lunch boxes stripped of everything except fruit. I've seen counterfeit homework networks that operated in five counties, and I've seen truckloads of candy taken from babies."
- Fletcher Moon (Half-Moon Investigations, 2006).

When Curt Evans, under the moniker of The Passing Tramp, set off on his solitary expedition to roam the derelict legacies of the neglected mystery writer of the past one of the first dilapidated careers he wandered pass was that of J. Jefferson Farjeon – a copious writer from the Golden Era who fell by the wayside. I will refrain from summarizing his excellent introduction to Farjeon, but suffice to say, I felt compelled to check out these remnants for myself.

One title in particular caught my perusing eye, Holiday Express (1935), which Evans provided with this capsule synopsis:

“In this train mystery thriller the protagonist is a wonderfully-characterized child, an ingenuous young boy, and the book is written as if he himself had written it.”

And (later on in the comment section):

“Holiday Express is really cute, by the way. It comes complete with misspellings! Farjeon does a brilliant job of assuming the mindset of his young protagonist.”

If you've been keeping tabs on this blog, you might have bumped into the high opinion I have of Gosho Aoyama’s Case Closed (a.k.a. Detective Conan) series or picked up a few lines from my soliloquy praising Craig Rice's Home Sweet Homicide (1944) in the comment sections, which makes it, hopefully, unnecessary to explain why this book ended up with a train ticket to my bookshelves as its final destination.

The Holiday Express, whose compartments are as jam-packed with gargoyles as the famed Orient Express that stranded in the pages of one of Agatha Christie's most famous whodunits, departs for Tom, a fair-haired boy no older than twelve, as the start of an uneventful seaside holiday with his parents and sister, but the characters he meets aboard the train toppled any plans he might have had for sand castles or reading the latest Edgar Wallace thriller after swimming. First of all, there's a girl, named Joan, whom Tom refers to in his narrative as The Love Interest, who seems to have garnered the unwanted attention of her strange assortment of fellow travelers – which comprises of a fat man, a guy with a scar across his face and a chap with a monkey.

Tom and Joan's adventure begins innocently enough, as the former tramps up and down the train, slipping in and out of compartments and bumping into the key players along the way, but when he tries to return a bag that Joan dropped on the platform it gets pinched from him and its rightful owner kidnapped! So what does a boy of barely twelve do in such a situation? Tell his parents or inform the ticket collector? Nope. Tom bails from a moving train into a dark tunnel and begins chasing the kidnappers with only his D.I. (Detective Instinct) to go on.

It would be criminal to spoil his experiences and endurances, as he treks through the countryside, but it's an exciting and wonderful journey fraught with dangers and peculiar characters as he's determined to save Joan from the clutches of her captors – and this makes for a captivating read. Yeah. That was a horrible, forced and cringe-worthy pun. My well-meant apologies.

Anyway, what really makes this book a fun read is not necessarily that it's a dangerous joyride, full of thrills and action, but the narrative voice of the young protagonist – which is not only cute, as Curt Evans mentioned, but engaging as well. Tom tells more than just his story; he involves the reader by talking directly to them and explains, for example, why he withheld certain information or events in order to enhance the dramatic effect of the story. You almost feel like Bastian who reads about Atreyu's journey in The Never-Ending Story (1979), except there aren't any Luck Dragons or Rock Eaters to be found roaming around the tracks of the Holiday Express.

When I picked up this book, I expected to find a predecessor of Eoin Colfer's Half-Moon Investigations (2006), but found, instead, something that amounts to a missing link to many of the detective stories, adventure yarns and cartoons with teenage protagonists that I enjoyed – or at least it felt like that to me.

I love Aoyama's Detective Conan, Colfer's Fletcher Moon, Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883), Rice's Home Sweet Homicide, The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest and Mitchell's The Rising of the Moon (1945) and this novel felt like the link that connected them all together. But then again, that may be a hallucinatory by effect from the nostalgia rush I had when reading this book and penning this review. Hey, I'm a suffering chronophobiac. These nostalgic mood swings can hit you like a sledgehammer!

All in all, Farjeon did an admirable job in capturing and assuming the mindset of his boy protagonist and marooning him on a world inhabited with trouble. The ensuing game of hide-and-seek between Tom and the gang will not fail to get your undivided attention from the moment the story departs until it comes to a stop at the final terminal. In short, this book is just fun.

This review and the one preceding it were rather short and compendious, but you can put that down to the whims of that tyrant on the wall known as a clock, however, I hope to babble on endlessly again in my next review. So let the reader be warned!