Thirteen Guests is a country house mystery story, firmly in the tradition of the Golden Age of Murder between the two world wars. For decades, detective fiction written during that period has been associated with a handful of “Crime Queens”—Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham—and the worthy achievements of several of their male contemporaries have tended to be overlooked. One of Sayers’ own favourite crime writers was, in fact, J. Jefferson Farjeon; she much admired his “creepy skill”. He published this book in 1936, the year before A Mystery in White, which has been enjoyed afresh by thousands of twenty-first-century readers following its reissue in the British Library’s series of Crime Classics.
The story begins at the “gravelly” railway station of Flensham, where an accident introduces John Foss to a lovely widow called Nadine Leveridge. Nadine takes it upon herself to invite Foss, a young man who has reached a crisis point in his life, along to Bragley Court to recuperate. This is the home of Lord Aveling, an ambitious Conservative politician, who is about to host a week-end social gathering. Assorted fellow guests include a county cricketer, a novelist, a society painter, a gossip columnist, a Liberal MP, and a retired “sausage king”. Aveling had planned on a party of a dozen people; Foss is the thirteenth guest.
Foss is not superstitious, and in any event, as the cricketer tells him: “The bad luck would come…to the thirteenth guest who passes in through that door.” Last to arrive at Bragley Court are an enigmatic couple called the Chaters, and it is the husband who proves to be the thirteenth guest. Farjeon soon ratchets up the tension with a sequence of strange incidents in which the violence escalates. A painting is damaged; a dog is killed; a stranger’s body is found in a quarry; finally, one of the thirteen guests meets an untimely end.
Country house murder mysteries were a staple of Golden Age detective fiction. E.C. Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case set the pattern, and was followed by Lord Gorell’s now forgotten In the Night, and Agatha Christie’s unforgettable The Mysterious Affair at Styles. The Red House Mystery, by A.A. Milne (yes, the man who later created Winnie-the-Pooh) poked fun at the form, while the iconoclastic Anthony Berkeley played an ironic game with it in The Layton Court Mystery. Yet country house murder mysteries not only survived, but flourished, continuing to be written and published in almost industrial quantities. The reading public of the 1920s and 30s loved them, and it is easy to understand why.
The “closed circle” of murder suspects to be found at a country house party provides readers of a whodunit with a chance to pit their wits against the author. The portrayal of conflict and tensions in a small community has a powerful and enduring appeal, and over the past three-quarters of a century crime novelists have shown much ingenuity in creating “closed circle” mysteries. Think of relatively recent books as different as P.D. James’ final novel about Adam Dalgliesh, The Private Patient, a book firmly within the genre’s traditions, and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
James and Larsson shared a strong interest in human behaviour and motivation. Characters in Golden Age mystery were, if conventional wisdom is to be believed, invariably “made of cardboard”, but this criticism is itself both clichéd and misleading. Whilst plenty of Golden Age novelists focused solely on the puzzle element of their stories, others showed a genuine interest in exploring character. J. Jefferson Farjeon belonged to the latter group; he depicts the suspects with a zest that remains appealing to this day.
Joseph Jefferson Farjeon (1883–1955) came from a literary family. His father Benjamin, his sister Eleanor, and his brother Herbert were accomplished writers, while his grandfather was a noted American actor, and Thomas Jefferson an ancestor. The Master Criminal, Farjeon’s first novel, appeared in 1924, and he proceeded to publish dozens of books, mostly under his own name, but occasionally using the pseudonym of Anthony Swift. No. 17, a play as well as a novel, was filmed twice, the second time by Alfred Hitchcock. Mountain Mystery, published in 1935, and Death of a World, written in the aftermath of World War II, saw Farjeon venturing into speculative fiction, and even in more down-to-earth thrillers, like Thirteen Guests, he seized every opportunity to indulge his romantic streak. Shortly before he died, a story he had written in the Thirties for radio broadcast, “Murder over Draughts”, was adapted for TV, prompting The Times to gaze into its crystal ball: “how eminently natural it seems to turn to the television for a story. Perhaps these experiments will tempt some modern authors to write stories directly for television.”
Farjeon’s work, then, enjoyed sustained commercial success during his lifetime, and made a contribution to the popular culture of the day. He honed his skills as a writer, so that although he never lost a taste for melodrama, he learned how to marry it with engaging characterisation and deft plotting. Perhaps, like many popular novelists, he wrote too much, but his detective fiction certainly does not deserve the neglect into which it had fallen before the success of Mystery in White. Thirteen Guests earns its place in the British Library’s Crime Classics series as another novel that displays Farjeon’s “creepy skill” and provides lively entertainment as well as a teasingly constructed mystery.
Martin Edwards