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| William O'Farrell in his late thirties |
How many crime writers publish their first novel when pushing forty? PD James was 42. Raymond Chandler had passed fifty. Dashiell Hammett was 35. So perhaps pushing forty isn't so exceptional. Life makes its exactions on one, to be sure.
In any event, author William O'Farrell, as he called himself, was a few days shy of 38 when his debut crime novel, Repeat Performance, was published in November 1942. The originality--an actor embroiled in a murder gets to live the last year of his life over--and genuine quality of the novel won it considerable favorable notice from reviewers and in 1947 it was, somewhat altered, made into a film starring Louis Hayward and Joan Leslie.
O'Farrell, who had not published a crime novel (or any novel) since Repeat Performance, the year after the release of the film version of his debut novel suddenly published two more of them. It was the beginning of his relatively brief highly productive period as a crime novelist. Between 1948 and 1956 he published a dozen crime novels, two under a pseudonym, William Grew.
In the remaining six years of his life he produced only two more crime novels, both paperback originals, the later one posthumously published. However, between 1955 and 1964 he had eighteen short stories published in crime fiction magazines. Fifteen crime novels and eighteen short stories make for a significant crime writing career, but William O'Farrell was rapidly forgotten after his death in the English-speaking world, though his gritty crime fiction retained some popularity in France for a time. (Some of his writing, with its vicious sociopathic killers and theme of "doubling," is reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith.)
Paperback publisher IPL reprinted Repeat Performance in 1987, but there was no follow-up to that. (That pb edition is now itself collectible, to say nothing of the hardcover first edition.) Finally Stark House reissued Repeat Performance in 2021 and the following year Flicker Alley reissued a restored edition of the film. Now four years later Stark House is reissuing two O'Farrell suspense novels, The Devil His Due (1955) and, a William Grew, Doubles in Death. I was asked to write an introduction for this volume and in doing so I turned up quite a bit of detail on the author's interesting life.
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| O'Farrell at age 17 |
William O'Farrell was born William Buchanan Farrell in St. Louis in 1904. Why he added the "O" to his name is a bit of a mystery, but as the Farrells were of Irish Catholic origin, presumably the "O" may have been adhered to the name at some earlier point.
William's father Henry was a proudly self-made railroad executive and his mother the daughter of a men's clothier. (His father's father had been a tailor, so his parents had something in common.) The family moved to Pittsburgh in 1917 when William was 12, his father having been appointed president of the Pittsburgh and West Virginia Railroad.
William was the youngest of four children, having two older brothers and a sister. He was the odd one out in the wealthy family, leaving prep school in 1921 at the age of sixteen to work as a newsboy at the Pittsburgh Post. The next year at the age of seventeen he took off to travel around Europe, presumably with the financial assistance of an indulgent father.
In 1923 William returned to attend Cornell University (a bargain with his father?), but he dropped out to attend the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City for two years. Yes, first he wanted to be a newsman, now he wanted to be an actor. He was a handsome, rangy, wavy-haired youth, over six feet tall and about 180 pounds.
This takes us to 1927, when twenty-two-year-old William, now sporting a fashionable pencil-thin moustache, decided to join the merchant marine. The year before his father, now in his sixties, had retired from the railroad business and moved to sunny Santa Monica, California with his two unmarried elder sons and his married daughter and her family, where they entered the burgeoning real estate brokerage business in the Golden State. William listed his father's fancy Mediterranean revival home as his place of residence, but he once again had gone his own way.
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| O'Farrell at age 22, looking quite actorly he might almost have shot Abraham Lincoln |
Two years later in 1929 he joined the marines and found himself in Haiti, a perpetually beleaguered country under American occupation between 1915 and 1934. In the early 1930s he returned to the United States, settling with his widowed mother and his two unmarried elder brothers (the married sister, Eulalie, lived down the road in her own mansion) and ostensibly writing for radio and moving pictures, though the only evidence I have found for this is a notice in the Los Angeles Evening Citizen News stating that "William Buchanan Farrell, writer of 12273 San Vicente Boulevard, was under orders to pay a fine or serve ten days following a conviction on a drunk driving charge" in the Beverley Hills Court.
His publicity photo (see top of article) for Repeat Performance, presumably taken when he was around 37, shows a worn, raffishly-handsome, Clark Gableish figure prematurely aged, one suspects, from drinking and smoking.
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| Farrell in his late twenties (?) looking rather more worn in the face |
By the late 1930s, William O'Farrell, as he now called himself, had begun submitting short stories to the women's slicks and he finally hit paydirt with the publication of "Smart Dog" in Collier's in April 1941. He published two more slick stories the next year in Collier's and The American Magazine and then came Repeat Performance.
Two years earlier in 1940, William at age 35 had wed a previously divorced, 34-year-old physician's secretary, Carol Page Royce, and finally left the Farrell family nest for good, though the marriage foundered, probably by the end of the decade, and produced no children. Apparently he served in the merchant navy during World War Two, which may explain why there was no quick follow-up to Repeat Performance.
Perhaps the filming of the novel served as a kick in the butt for the fledgling novelist. In any event O'Farrell enjoyed a successful writing career in the late Forties and throughout the Fifties and into the early Sixties, culminating in his writing some scripts of television series, including Perry Mason and Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
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| Valeria Golino and Thierry Lhermitte looking rather retro noirish in Dernier ete a Tanger |
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| James Congdon (still with us) and Bette Davis as the dog-walker doorman and the rich widow in Out There, Darkness |
Additionally O'Farrell's novel Doubles in Death in 1960 served, under the title "The Twisted Image," as the premier episode on the suspense anthology Thriller, hosted by horror icon Boris Karloff. O'Farrell's short story "Over There, Darkness," an indictment of the casual cruelty of the selfish leisured rich which won an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America in 1959, was adapted, under the slightly improved title "Out There, Darkness," as an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents with Bette Davis in the lead role.
A decade earlier O'Farrell's The Edge of Violence was filmed as an episode of the suspense anthology series Suspense. As late as 1987 his novel The Devil His Due was made into the French film Dernier ete a Tanger (Last Summer in Tangier)
Despite his accomplishments William O'Farrell died obscurely in 1962, at the rather premature age of 57. One suspects the author was very hard on himself, packing two lifetimes into one. Happily nearly sixty-five years after the death of this wayfaring vagabond of writer, his works are getting new leases on life. Repeat performances, you might say.
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