J. Jefferson Farjeon’s most precious literary gift, his ability to conjure up atmospheric and compelling scenarios, was never more vividly displayed than in Seven Dead. It is a challenge to think of any opening situation in a crime novel more extraordinary than that which Ted Lyte discovers after climbing through a back window of Haven House. Ted is a petty thief and pickpocket who plucks up the courage to try his hand at housebreaking. One of the windows of the apparently deserted house is shuttered, and its door is closed, with a key in the lock. When he turns the key, he is greeted by a sight as shocking as it is bizarre.
Seven dead people, six men and one woman, are in the shuttered room, “revealed with a cruel starkness by the unnatural artificial light”. Two of the men are dressed like sailors; the solitary female corpse is wearing a man’s clothes: “She might have been attractive once. She was not attractive now.” As Detective Inspector Kendall observes, “This has Madame Tussaud’s beaten. I expect they’d like it for their Chamber of Horrors.” As Kendall says, the seven people are “emaciated, filthily clothed, ill assorted, and with nothing on any of them to identify any one of them”. The mystery deepens when a crumpled piece of paper is found, bearing an enigmatic message: With apologies from the Suicide Club. An even more cryptic clue is written in pencil on the other side of the sheet. And on the wall of the dining room hangs a picture of a pretty young girl—but a bullet has been put through her heart.
Kendall has been taken to the scene by Ted Lyte, in the company of a young man called Thomas Hazeldean whom Ted encountered during his terrified flight from Haven House. Kendall previously appeared in Farjeon’s Thirteen Guests—another title in the British Library’s series of Crime Classics—and Hazeldean contrasts him with the type of Great Detective so popular in the fiction of the time: “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.”
Kendall was, then, conceived as a relatively realistic police detective, rather as Farjeon’s contemporary Freeman Wills Crofts conceived his series cop, Inspector Joseph French. But Farjeon was much less interested than Crofts in chronicling the minutiae of painstaking police procedure. His imagination was more vivid and romantic, and Seven Dead is by no means a conventional story of a police investigation. Much of the story focuses on Hazeldean’s own search for the truth. This young fellow, a journalist and a yachtsman, is driven by his fascination with the girl in the picture. She is now a young woman, Dora Fenner, a member of the family which owns Haven House, and it seems that she has, for reasons unknown, fled across the Channel to Boulogne. On impulse, Hazeldean sails for France in the hope of finding her and solving the mystery.
Intriguingly, this concept of a sleuth who becomes obsessed with a painting of a young and beautiful member of the opposite sex resurfaced—just three years after Seven Dead was published—in a much more famous story, Laura by Vera Caspary, which in 1944 was adapted into a notable film noir. The two stories could scarcely be more different, but the coincidence is striking.
Seven Dead appeared at a time when Farjeon was at the peak of his popularity, but inevitably his reputation faded with the passage of time, and has only revived following the republication of titles such as Mystery in White, Thirteen Guests and The Z Murders in the Crime Classics series. One of the pleasures associated with my role as Series Consultant to the British Library has been the chance to talk to family members and others associated with the literary estates of writers of the past, and these discussions have expanded my knowledge and understanding of the lives and work of authors who certainly deserve to be remembered.
Joseph Jefferson Farjeon (1883–1955) is a case in point. His estate is now in the care of Edward Vandyck, who has kindly shared with me a memoir written by Alison Coate, who had a lifelong friendship with the Farjeon family, and in particular Joe Farjeon and his daughter Joan. Alison describes Farjeon—whose father, Benjamin, was himself a successful writer—as acutely sensitive, gentle, and unselfish, but also as a chronic worrier who was deeply troubled by the hatred he felt for his father’s fiery outbursts of temper. Joe was a capable sportsman in his schooldays, with a particular love of cricket that is reflected in Seven Dead by the presence of a cricket ball in Haven House—yet another of the mysterious clues to the puzzle.
Prompted by his father, Joe Farjeon took up acting, but he soon realised that his nervous temperament was ill-suited to a career on the stage. He fell in love with an American girl, Frances Antoinette (“Fan”) Wood, and they married in 1910; Joan was born three years later. He was deemed physically unfit for service in the First World War, and struggled to earn a living as a journalist before trying his hand at fiction and writing plays. He turned the corner as a result of the success of No. 17, a play that was filmed twice; he also later novelised it.
“Yet even at the height of his success”, Alison Coates wrote, “Joe’s fear of not being able to earn enough drove him on. He was rarely far from his typewriter.” He became a prolific novelist, but kept striving to ensure that his standards never slipped, and was meticulous in checking his work for errors. His professionalism meant that his fiction was generally a cut above that of many of his peers, who were more willing to sacrifice quality in the pursuit of quantity. And, though his books were for many years out of print, there is an eternal appeal about the gift of storytelling, a gift which Joe Farjeon possessed in full measure—as this unorthodox mystery illustrates in the liveliest fashion.
Martin Edwards