Farjeon--his real name--is famous for writing "creepy" thrillers. His most famous was Number 17, which was turned into a fantastic film, Number Seventeen, in 1932 by Alfred Hitchcock. He comes from a very arty family: his grandfather, Joseph Jefferson, was a famous actor; his father, Benjamin Farjean, and sister, Eleanor Farjeon, were novelists; his brother, Herbert, was a playwright; and the other brother, Harry, was a composer. Our Farjeon started his writing career by getting a very nice gig at Amalgamated Press (AP Press) where he learned the ropes and then went rogue when he was about 30 years old. He cranked out 2 or 3 novels a year and all were highly regarded and successful--a great combination. If you consider the characters in this novel, it's not difficult to imagine them arising from stories his family members told him about their experiences on the stage and in publishing.
Thirteen Guests features a classic set up: an ordinary guy, John Foss, was just dumped by his girlfriend and so he gets on a train to anywhere, convinced he is going to "do something drastic" when the train gets to the "end of the line." But, fate intervenes: when the train pulls into a rustic station in the middle of nowhere, John is too wrapped up in his self-pity to notice and just snaps out of it when the train starts reversing out of the station, back to London. Since London chewed him up and spit him out, he bolts off the train, flings himself out the door, and does a stupendous pratfall onto the station platform, snapping his leg. The few people at the station all circle around him. worried, and John assures them he is fine --and then flops over in a dead faint. "Coo, 'e's gorn off!" announces the porter. Then, just when things couldn't get any worse, the most amazing older woman--a real woman, not a mere girl like the one who dumped him--orders a chauffer there to pick her up to load John into the car and off they set to the nearest doctor. This mystery woman, Nadine (very Southern Gothic sort of name and person), intends to leave him at the doctor's but he's in such a sorry state she can't bear to abandon him. So, once the doctor wraps up his leg and tells him to stay off it a few weeks (!--that wouldn't happen now, he'd be forced to do PT and get back to work) she insists he accompany her to a nearby stately home (again with the stately home) owned by Lord Aveling. Apparently the Lord is having a "do" and it promises to be amusing. Or at the very least, diverting. The fact that John hasn't been invited is no problem--everyone brings friends and relations to Aveling's shindigs. So they arrive and--ominous music--they learn that, now that John has been added, there will be thirteen guests. "You know what that means!" Nadine says to John who clearly does not. "Whoever is number 13 is going to get killed!" John assumes she's joking.
Well, eleven guests arrive and everyone is keen to learn who 12 and 13 are going to be--and which will enter the house first and who will seal their fate by entering after? Finally, a car pulls up the 50 mile long driveway (it's not that long, but it IS long--everyone comments on it) and out pop a very unpleasant looking couple, Mr. and Mrs. Chater. She looks spiteful and suspicious and he looks grasping and dangerous. And, because of a tussle with a suitcase, she enters first and he last. Yikes, bad news for him.
I now know why closed circle mysteries involve only 5 or 6 people as too many more is just too much to manage. And thirteen is IMPOSSIBLE. And on top of the 13 guests we have four residents (Lord, Lady and the adult daughter, Miss Anne, Aveling, as well as an ancient, dying grandmother, Mrs. Morris. And then there is the house staff: the voluptuous Bessie and her insanely jealous and prone to outbursts fiance, Thomas the butler, and a Chinse cook, Leng, who (to everyone's astonishment) makes standard English food really well.
John is brought into the house and arranged comfortably on a divan in a "front room." I'm not sure what a front room is, but this one has a fantastic view of the entire front and right side grounds, has a lot of books, and has three doors that are very thin so even if they are closed, one can hear everything going on in the front hall and on the stairs leading to the upstairs bedrooms. John is fed, covered with heavy blankets, loaded up with pain pills and a few shots of whiskey, and off he slips into a psychedelic delirium. (What was in those pills the doctor gave him?) The house occupants are fascinated with him and treat him as an exotic creature and one by one they stop in, bring him tidbits to eat and all sorts of drinks, books and magazines--some even sit and get to know him a bit. And then they leave him to have massive meals in the dining hall, dance to wild music, go on hunts, and sneak around at all hours playing musical chairs with their bedrooms and sleeping partners. John can only see a bit if someone forgets to close one of the sliding doors all the way, and he can only make sense of what he hears if he hasn't taken too many of those pain pills. So he isn't the most reliable narrator but he learns enought to make clear that strange things are going on in that house.
So here are the 12 guests, besides John:
Mr Chater: The guy who is certain to die and no one cares as he is a blackmailer that it turns out no one invited because he is loathesome and has dirt on half the people in the the house.
Mrs Chater: She talks to no one and vaccilates between being terrifed of her husband and hating him with a passion.
Sir James Earnshaw: An experienced MP whose political perferences are entirely determined by the most generous donor. He wants to marry Anne Aveling to get the family money and keeps trying to get alone with her in dark corners.
Zena Wilding: A middle aged stage actress who fears that she is becoming irrelevant. She unwisely married an actor named Ted Turner (who did not go on to create Turner Classics Network), a no goodnik who was actually married to someone else at the time, so their marriage is null and void. But that doesn't stop him from pestering her for money at awkward moments. She has managed to find the perfect play to relaunch her career and hopes Lord Aveling will finance it.
Leicester Pratt: An artist who paints attractive portraits for money and paints fantastic abstracts for art's sake. He has been asked to paint a portrait of Anne Aveling and so has set up his tools of the trade in the large studio, a separate building behind the house. He's decided to go bold and is painting a very arty and very unflattering portrait of her that enrages her "just a friend" boyfriend.
Edith Fermoy-Jones: a "large lady with impressive glasses" who writes silly murder mysteries. No one can stand being with her because she is a know-it-all who steers all coversations to plot points in her books. No one has read any of her books but they pretend they have to keep her from getting even more annoying.
Mr. and Mrs. Rowe: The sort of boring couple that show up to these sorts of things because someone invited them to a weekend years ago, and they just keep coming. They like to play bridge, gossip and go to bed early. Mr. Rowe is particularly worried if the meal schedule gets interupted. He's made his wealth "in the sausage business."
Ruth Rowe: Weak with big shadows under her eyes. She doesn't say much and is under the controlof her opinionated mother.
Nadine Leveride: We've already met her. She's in her late 30s (she won't give her age, but assures John that she's "much too old" for him), was married to an extremly wealthy much older man who tolerated her silliness, died, and so she's here, to her surprise, to mend her broken heart that she thought couldn't be broken.
Taverly: I don't think I ever learned his first name. He's a "strong, big" guy who loves Anne but (for reasons I'm not clear on) pretends he doesn't. I think it's one of those things where he's known the family forever and now that he and Anne are finally adults, it's obvious that they should marry and merge their wealth, but neither can be the first to suggest it in case the other laughs. He likes to talk about cricket and is good at riding horses and hunting. He also always has a cigarette on hand to give to anyone whose nerves have been shattered from finding a corpse. He refuses to dish any gossip and when asked about anyone always says, "He's all right."
Lionel Bultin: Here's an interesting character. He started his adulthood with dreams of becoming a serious journalist who would expose the rot but one day, ten years ago, he was sitting in his hideous bedsit on the verge of starvation when he made a momentous decision: no longer would he care about truth or justice but instead he would write to make piles of money. And in that instant he transformed himself into a gossip columnist: he spends all his time drifting from one social event to another, writing up juicy bits of conversations he overhears or invents. Everyone who is on the way up or down the social ladder wants to be near him, hoping he'll drop their name into one of his columns so their career gets a boost. He's completely coated his idealism with a thick shell of cynicism. He's miserable and tells everyone that anything but misery is idiocy. All he needs is to get invested in something that really matters and maybe, just maybe, that crust of cynicism will chip off and a real journalist will emerge. Here's hoping!
That's 13. I won't go into the murders or the mysteries (there's all sorts of back stories that get these people into trouble) as it involves too many people, all eavesdropping on each other by hiding behind doors and pressing glasses against walls (does that actually work?) and creeping about in dark hallways at all hours of the night (did anyone actually get any sleep during this weekend?) that results in: four dead bodies (one dead man found at the bottom of a cliff, one dead man in the woods, one dead woman at the side of a road and one dead dog found behind the studio). At one point, they just start stacking up the corpses in the studio.
Into this fiasco steps Inspector Kendall with a team of young officers whose job is to make sure no one destroys evidence or leaves the property while Kendall questions everyone and pokes around. Naturally, Ms. Fermoy-Jones has excellent suggestions on how to sleuthe, none of which interest Kendall. Indignant, she vows to create an "Inspector Kendall" (she tries to think of a last name that rhymes with "Kendall" but can't come up with one) in her next book--and it will NOT be a flattering portrait, she promises herself. Kendall is no nonsense, extremely observant, clever and, though many of the guests are feeding him false clues, Kendall trusts no one and has no qualms about using guests without their knowledge to test out his theories.
Romance, murder, comedy, and farce swirled together with fistfuls of pills and big swigs of iced whiskey and warm brandy result in: one broken engagement, two marriage proposals, one rescued marriage and three resuscitated artistic careers. It's a great story but I really wish I had drawn up a map and time table so I could have kept track of all the people sneaking around the house, the grounds, in and around the studio, in the woods, at the three nearby pubs, and at the top and bottom of a handy cliff.
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