A Late Christmas Number: Mystery in White (1937), by Jefferson Farjeon

No, it's not the Orient Express....

"It snowed all day and all night.  On the 22nd it was still snowing.  Snowballs flew, snowmen grew.  Sceptical children regained their belief in fairyland, and sour adults felt like Santa Claus, buying more presents than they had ever intended.  In the evening the voice of the announcer, traveling through endless white ether, informed the millions that more snow was coming....

More snow came.  It floated down from its limitless source like a vast extinguisher.  Sweepers, eager for their harvest, waited in vain for the snow to stop.  People wondered whether it ever would stop."

--Jefferson Farjeon, Mystery in White (1937)

A classic English mystery setting

People stranded in a country house cut off from the outside world by snow, with murderous events afoot.  It's a classic and beloved Golden Age murder mystery scenario and it's one Jefferson Farjeon used in his 1937 thriller Mystery in White.  To top it all off, the tale takes place over Christmas eve and Christmas day.

As the splendid dust jacket reveals, a train is involved too, albeit briefly.  Like Agatha Christie's Orient Express, this train gets stalled by snow.  Five passengers--a clerk, a chorus girl, an elderly paranormal investigator and a genteel brother and sister--make their way off the train with their luggage to find a connection at a nearby station. 

The wayfarers get lost in the snow, of course, but providentially they come upon a large country house, front door unlocked.  No one seems to be in the house (though what was that noise in the attic?!), but fires are set and the table is properly laid for tea (though what's that bread knife doing on the floor?!).

Was the bread knife used on something
besides bread?!

In short, we, the readers, are encountering a favorite Jefferson Farjeon thriller scenario: stranded people encountering mystery and murder in an isolated building (this pattern goes all the way back to the author's 1920s mystery play No. 17, later filmed by Alfred Hitchcock; see also such novels as Sinister Inn and The Windmill Mystery). Queer noises occur, strangers--some perhaps malevolent--wander in and out, mysterious circumstances pile up like the snow drifts outside the house.  By adding Christmas to the mix, Farjeon has made a cozily creepy crime confection for our delectation. It's not over-taxing for the brain, but it's quite enjoyable nonetheless.

Dorothy L. Sayers
 declared Jefferson Farjeon
"quite unsurpassed for creepy skill
 in mysterious adventures"

"Jefferson Farjeon is quite unsurpassed for creepy skill in mysterious adventures," Dorothy L. Sayers once proclaimed of one of her favorite mystery writers, gifting Farjeon's publishers on both sides of the Atlantic with a pleasing blurb for years to come.  Other critics who shared Sayers' esteem for Farjeon were the American author and playwright Paul Wilstach ("Jefferson Farjeon writes corkers....He inevitably gives delight") and the American critic and scholar William Lyon Phelps ("Jefferson Farjeon is one of my favorite providers of murder.  He knows how to give distinction...by an excellent literary style").

English thriller tales from the 1920s and 1930s generally have a bad reputation today, frequently being condemned for their exhibitions of racism and xenophobia.  Certainly this is true of much of the work of the egregious Sydney Horler, say, or the more talented but still sometimes admittedly quite objectionable H. C. McNeile ("Sapper").

Some Golden Age crime thrillers by Sapper
have a rather unpleasant edge

H. C. McNeile ("Sapper")
creator of Bulldog Drummond

Yet Jefferson Farjeon's thrillers tend to be more gentle and whimsical (even as the body count rises).  Farjeon himself by all accounts was a mild and kindhearted man, a brother of children's author Eleanor Farjeon and a son of Benjamin Farjeon (1838-1903)--a popular Victorian author who venerated Charles Dickens--and himself a vegetarian and pacifist (his Cold War apocalyptic sci-fi novel, Death of a World, is a passionate protest against the post-WW2 arms race).  Surely not unexpectedly, his thrillers reflect his family background and personality.

Jefferson Farjeon
a kindler, gentler English thriller writer

In Mystery in White, Farjeon presents his chorus girl and clerk with empathy (in one chapter a Walter Mitty-like fantasy sequence representing the fever-dream of the clerk is quite amusingly done), though in this one the genteel brother and sister play more active roles.  Events get quite tangled, but all finally is revealed (though not really deduced).  The dilatory police eventually do show up near the end of the novel, but in another resemblance to Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None England's finest don't get things quite right. 

Mystery in White (1937) shares a certain affinity
with The Mousetrap (1952)

In addition to And Then There Were None, Mystery in White also somewhat resembles the celebrated Christie play The Mousetrap, though it must be admitted that it's neither as clever nor as sinister.  But Christie fans (and all "cozy" English mystery fans) should enjoy this representative Farjeon tale.  It's not his best, but it makes a nice holiday Golden Age mystery treat.

For more on Jefferson Farjeon, see http://thepassingtramp.blogspot.com/2011/11/another-pass-by-jefferson-farjeon-1883.html and http://thepassingtramp.blogspot.com/2011/11/passing-tramp.html

My ex-library copy of Mystery in White
(obviously nearly read to death)

Ronald Knox, his Detective Fiction Decalogue and "The Four Tragedies of Memworth" (1928), by Lord Ernest Hamilton

Father Ronald Knox: Best known in mystery genre history
for the ten rules (the "decalogue") that he laid down
for the writing of detective fiction

In Father Ronald Knox's celebrated Golden Age detective fiction "decalogue" the Catholic priest and author of mystery tales propounded ten rules for writing in the genre.  One of the more famous (or infamous) of his rules is number five:

"No Chinaman must figure in the story.  Why this should be so I do not know, unless we can find a reason for it in our western habit of assuming  that the Celestial is over-equipped in the matter of brains, and under-equipped in the matter of morals.  I only offer it as a fact of observation that, if you are turning over the pages of a book and come across some mention of 'the slit-like eyes of Chin Loo', you had best put it down at once; it is bad.  The only exception which occurs to my mind--there are probably others--is Lord Ernest Hamilton's 'Four Tragedies of Memworth.' "

Ronald Knox's droll humor is not always appreciated by his critics

Father Knox has been rapped over the knuckles, figuratively speaking, for formulating this rule, by critics who have failed to understand that Knox in his droll fashion was attempting to make a serious point: that the mystery thriller or shocker tale and the detective novel were two very different things. Knox himself distinguished between the two mystery forms earlier in his decalogue:

"A detective story must have as its main interest the unraveling of a mystery; a mystery whose elements are clearly presented to the reader at an early stage in the proceedings, and whose nature is such as to arouse curiosity, a curiosity which is gratified at the end.

And here, for my own part, I would draw a very clear line of demarcation between detective stories and 'shockers.'  Shockers are not in the true sense mystery stories at all; they do not arouse a human instinct of curiosity....

We know at once that the woman is an adventuress, probably a quite innocent adventuress who is being compelled by a threat of blackmail to subserve the purposes of villains; that there is a gang of international crooks at work, determined to put an end to the peace of Europe by giving away English state secrets to an unknown foreign power.  We are certain beforehand that the motives of the villains will be entirely inhuman, the actions of the hero and heroine rash to the verge of idiocy; that the complications to which we are introduced at the beginning will not be explained at the end, because by that time the reader will have forgotten all about them, and probably the author as well.  All this is not a detective story."

In advocating banishing the "Chinaman" from the true detective novel, Ronald Knox had in mind the silly and offensive racist caricatures most prominently associated with the novels of Sax Rohmer (creator of the "fiendish Oriental mastermind," Dr. Fu Manchu), but also figuring in numerous other English and American mystery thrillers throughout the 1920s and 1930s, including some by thriller king Edgar Wallace, the bestselling novelist in England in the 1920s and early 1930s.

Fright film star Boris Karloff as Dr. Fu Manchu,
in The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932),
one of the most notorious thriller genre films of the 1930s

Though most associated with the Fu Manchu novels
of Sax Rohmer, the sinister "Chinaman" figured in
numerous other Golden Age thrillers as well

Father Knox's Chinaman rule has been much discussed over the decades, but, interestingly, little or perhaps even no mention has been made of Knox's clearly stated exception to the Chinaman rule: Lord Ernest Hamilton's 1928 mystery novel, The Four Tragedies of Memworth.  What is this novel and why is its prominent Asian character an acceptable violation of Knox's rule?  All will be revealed by the Passing Tramp in Parts Two and Three of this review essay! (for more on Ronald Knox, see ronaldknoxsociety.com/index.html )

Special note from the Passing Tramp: It's been a month now with this blog and it has had nearly 4000 visits, from around the world.  Thanks very much for those visits.  I hope my posts have been of interest and I will try to keep it that way.