1953, J. Jefferson Farjeon, The Double Crime, First Edition

Description

J. Jefferson Farjeon

The Double Crime

Published by The Crime Club, Collins, London in 1953

First Edition, First Printing

Original Hard Binding with Dust Jacket.

Pages 192

19cm x 13cm

J. Jefferson Farjeon
Joseph Jefferson Farjeon (1883 – 1955) was an English crime and mystery novelist, playwright and screenwriter. The grandson of the American actor Joseph Jefferson, his brothers were Herbert, a dramatist and scholar, and Harry, who became a composer. His sister Eleanor became a renowned children’s author. One of Farjeon’s best known works was a play, Number 17, which was made into a number of 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 on “ingenious and entertaining plots and characterization.” 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.”