Joseph Jefferson Farjeon

Joseph Jefferson Farjeon (4 June 1883 – 6 June 1955) was an English crime and mystery novelist, playwright and screenwriter. His father, brother and sister also developed successful careers in the literary world. 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 (1853–1935) and Benjamin Farjeon (1838–1903), a Victorian novelist, who was born in Whitechapel to an impoverished immigrant family and 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 children's author. His daughter Joan Jefferson Farjeon (1913–2006) was a theatre set designer. Career: "creepy skill" Farjeon worked for ten years for Amalgamated Press in London before going freelance, working nine hours a day at his writing desk. One of Farjeon's best known works was a 1925 play, Number 17, which was adapted into several films, including Number Seventeen (1932) 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 (1932) and provided the story for Bernard Vorhaus's The Ghost Camera (1933). 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 (1924), 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 (1942) an "amusing, satirical, and frequently hair-raising yarn of an author who got dangerously mixed up with his imaginary characters."