Thirteen Guests

A master of mysteries J. Fargeon was a skilled writer and ranked with the best of his time. Highest praises for Poisoned Pen Press for reviving this wonderful mystery. If you’re a fan of Agatha Christie I encourage you not to miss this book. Strong, intriguing characters, you’ll want to know more about each one as the story unfolds. A cleverly written plot that will keep you working at trying to figure out who the murderer is. The ending will surprise and please you. I highly recommend this book to mystery lovers.

In Thirteen Guests, first published in 1936, disillusioned John Foss suffers a fall from a railway train when alighting in a small Suffolk town and, thanks to an exquisitely beautiful but mysterious young widow, gets spirited to a grand country house, Bragley Court, to recover. There, Foss finds himself in the midst of a weekend stag-hunting party, one of 13 guests. He finds, in addition to the alluring widow Nadine Leveridge, an affable baron with a wandering eye as host, the baron’s high-strung daughter, two cynics — a painter and a gossip columnist, a conceited lady detective novelist, the shady Mr. Chater and his nervous wife, a jumped-up sausage magnate and his wife and unappealing daughter, and several other fleshed-out characters.

In author J. Farjeon’s deft hands, what could have been a stagnant variation on the country-house murder turns instead into a suspenseful murder mystery and a wonderful character study. Thirteen Guests may be my first Joseph Jefferson Farjeon novel, but it won’t be my last. Farjeon, although nearly forgotten these days, was so popular in his heyday as a playwright and novelist that no less a luminary than Dorothy L. Sayers called him “quite unsurpassed for creepy skill in mysterious adventures.” While Thirteen Guests isn’t particularly creepy, readers will find it an expertly crafted example of a Golden Age crime novel. And that ending! Magnificent!

British Library’s Poisoned Pen Press has been steadily bringing back Golden Age crime classics, such as this one by J. (Joseph Jefferson) Farjeon. Some of the reprintings have been a delight, for example, reintroducing John Bude and his The Lake District Murder and The Sussex Downs Murder to modern audiences. Some were not really worth reviving. (I mean, of course, The Notting Hill Mystery, written Charles Warren Adams under the pen name Charles Felix. While The Notting Hill Mystery (1865) is the first detective novel, predating both Émile Gaboriau’s L'affaire Lerouge (1866) and Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868), its value today is mostly for academics and history buffs.) With Thirteen Guests, Poisoned Pen Press has provided a real gift to readers who weren’t even born yet when the novel was still in print. Here’s hoping that they will reprint the dozens of novels Farjeon penned. After this wonderful introduction to Farjeon, I can’t wait to read the next one!

In the interest of full disclosure, I received this book from NetGalley and Poisoned Pen Press in exchange for an honest review.

J Jefferson Farjeon is one of the great unsung authors of the Golden Age of Mystery. Thirteen Guests is a thrilling mystery that is wittily written and possesses a complex puzzle. It is wonderful to see this novel, first published in 1936, made available to a new generation of mystery lovers.

The country house mystery was a staple during the golden age of mystery. The limited number of suspects and the isolated setting encouraged readers to match wits with the writer and endeavor to solve the mystery before the solution was revealed. These novels were immensely popular.

Farjeon's Thirteen Guests is an exemplary country house mystery. The characters are a fascinating variety. Amongst these are an actress seeking to rekindle her career, a politician with a secret, the sausage magnate and his family, an amiable cricketer, a pompous and self-important mystery writer, a gossip columnist known for his acerbic wit, an artist, and a beautiful and compelling widow. Added to these, by pure accident is John Foss, a young man whose injury leads him to be brought to Bragley Court - bringing the number of guests to an unlucky 13. Yet the bad luck is said to befall the thirteenth, in this case Mr Chaters, a disreputable, oily fellow far too interested in the personal lives of the residents of Bragley Court and their guests.

A stunning sequence of events follows. A painting is vandalized. A dog is killed. An unknown man is found dead at the bottom of a nearby quarry, and Mr Chaters' horse returns riderless. What ties these events together? Accidents or murder? And will more deaths follow? Detective Inspector Kendall is summoned to unravel the sequence of events and solve the case. Many of the guests harbor secrets, but are they relevant to the case?

As I read, I paid attention and expected the unexpected. Still, Farjeon managed to surprise me. Individual actions can be like dominos, triggering unpredictable consequences. I enjoyed Thirteen Guests and I am certain that other fans of classic British mystery will as well.

5/5

Thirteen Guests is available for preorder and will be released September 1, 2015

I received a copy of Thirteen Guests from the publisher and netgalley.com in exchange for an honest review.

--Crittermom