 
Choose another writer in this calendar:
by name: by birthday from the calendar.
TimeSearch |
|
John Creasey (1908-1973) |
|
Prolific English writer, who published in a 40-year career 562 full-length books under 28 pseudonyms. The quality of John Creasey's work was surprisingly good, but he was never highly ranked by critics – with the exception of his 21 police procedural stories, depicting police officer Gideon from Scotland Yard, and written under the pseudonym J. J. Marric. Gideon's Day (1955) was made into a film in 1958; the director was John Ford. The novel followed Gideon's Scotland Yard team pursuing several cases simultaneously. Creasey also published plays, short stories, and juvenile books. His other most popular series characters included Roger West, another Scotland Yard officer, and "The Toff." "The wrath of Gideon was remarkable to see and a majestic thing to hear. Among other things, it transformed Gideon himself. From a massive, slow-moving, pale man with a quiet voice and unassuming, almost modest manner, he became as a raging lion, cheeks reddening and voice bellowing. Such times did not come often; but as Gideon was a Superintendent at New Scotland Yard, whenever it did, it made many people uneasy, and set them searching their conscience for evidence of things undone or badly done." (Gideon's Day by J. J. Marric, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955, p. 7) Much of the author's work is now out of print, but his influence has been acknowledged by several of the leading English mystery writers. In 1987 H.R.F. Keating selected Gideon's Week (1956) as one of the 100 best crime and mystery books ever published. "Trite but true," says Gideon in the beginning of the story, and Keating continues: "You could apply that label to the whole book. And it is not as derogatory as you might think. There is a certain triteness, yes, but there is also a great deal of simple, detailed truth. And it has a powerful cumulative effect." (Crime & Mystery: The 100 Best Books by H.R.F. Keating, New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc, 1996, pp. 117-118) John Creasey was born in Southfields, Surrey, to a
working-class family. He was the seventh of nine children of Ruth and
Joseph Creasey, a poor coach maker and carpenter. At the age of two, Creasey
contracted polio; it was not until the age of six, when he could walk. Creasey was educated at Fulhan
Elementary School and Sloane School, both in London. At the age of ten,
he began submitting poems to magazines and at the age of twelve he
started to write stories. Creasey's schoolmaster assured him that he
could be a professional writer after reading a writing exercise, in
which he had invented an imaginary conversation between Marshal Foch
and Kaiser Wilhelm.
From 1923 to 1935 he worked in various clerical, factory, and sales
jobs while trying to establish himself as a writer. A lot of the time
Creasy was unemployed. The Men Who Died Laughing, Creasey's first thriller, came back from the publisher almost immediately. Three months later he completed a school novel, Our Glorious Term, with the same result. The Captain of the Fifth, his third book, was also turned down, as well as The Mysterious Mr Rocco, Mystery at Mamby House, The Flying Turk, and Dazzle and the Red Bombers.
"The boiling internal frustrations of those years pressure-cooked his
creative energies to the point that he has since become, quite simply,
the most prolific writer in the history of writing." (The Durable Desperadoes by William Vivian Butler, with a preface by Anthony Lejeune, [London]: Macmillan, 1973, p. 137) By 1925, Creasey had received 743 rejection slips, and then made his breakthrough in the field of commercial fiction. Creasey's first book came out in 1930 and the first crime novel, Seven Times Seven, a story of a gang of crooks, two years later. Upon quitting his job as a grocer's clerk in 1935, Creasey became a full-time writer. He married Margaret Elizabeth Cooke; they had one son. Under her name (Margaret Cooke; M.E. Cooke) Creasey wrote 14 romantic novels, beginning with For Love's Sake (1934). In 1937 alone, twenty-nine of his books were published. Creasey's earliest series featured 'Department Z' in counterspionage stories, beginning with The Death Miser
(1933) and Redhead (1934). The Department leader Gordon Craigie with his heroic agents guarded the nation's
interests. The stories included First Came a Murder (1934), Carriers of Death (1937) and The Peril Ahead (1946). The gentleman-adventurer the Hon. Richard "The Toff" Rollison was introduced in Introducing the Toff (1938). When Leslie Charteris's Simon Templar alias The Saint worked alone, this aristocratic adventurer had a manservant called Jolly. "Cracksmen and worse hated it most when the Toff worked on his own. On those occasions he adopted measures to attain his ends which would certainly have not been approved by the majesty of the law, but they were undoubtedly effective." (Introducing the Toff, [Place of publication not identified]: Chivers Press, 1998, p. 10; first published by John Long Ltd, 1938) Other characters in these stories were the Toff's titled aunt and Inspector Grayce of Scotland Yard. The Toff series continued for four decades. Using the names Ken Ranger, William K. Reilly, and Tex Riley (Two Gun Girl, 1938; Gunshot Mesa, 1939; Death Canyon, 1941, etc.), Creasey published westerns in the 1930s and 1940s. Most of his knowledge of America Creasey had acquired from books and films, but later he traveld in the Unites States and made his home in Arizona. Except westerns, Creasey usually set his stories in the vicinity of London. One of the exceptions was a short story about a Chinese boy who falls in love with a Japanese girl in Tibet. Novels written as Anthony Morton featured the reformed jewel thief John "The Baron" Mannering, who pursues a new career as London antique dealer, amateur sleuth, and a secret agent in the service of British Intelligence. Mannering was introduced in Meet the Baron (1937; U.S. title: The Blue Mask), modelled perhaps after E. W. Hornung's Raffles and Maurice Leblanc's Arsene Lupin. A television series based on Mannering's character was made in the mid-1960s under the title "The Baron," starring Steve Forest, Sue Lloyd, and Colin Gordon. Creasey
once suggested that he could be
shut
up in a glass-box and compose there a whole book. His
extraordinary productivity brought him
wealth that he had not anticipated when he had decided to devote himself to writing. Creasey
had a forty-two room manor and a Rolls-Royce, he traveled widely, but even after attaining success, he still
continued writing six thousand words a day. Normally Creasey wrote in longhand on specially ruled paper. Usually it took ten days before he had completed the first draft, but he could pour out two books in a week and still spend half a day playing cricket. Before sending the text to the publisher, it was revised several times. Creasey employed an Inland Revenue official to read the manuscript with a critical eye and put his comments in the margin. The manuscript and the criticism went then to a second reader, a housewife, who was a part-time magazine editor. After these preliminaries Creasey finished the final version. Reportedly Creasey was able to put on paper 7,000-10,000 words a day with a special typewriter, which was equipped with three extra keys. This invention enabled him to finish a book within six to nine days. "Occasionally I find that a new plot is becoming a
little vague because I am concentrating on too many at once," he once
said in an interview. ('The Man of More Than 400 Mysteries' by Herbert Brean, Life, 27 April, 1962) Following the slaughtering of his fifth book by Dorothy L. Sayers, Creasey
decided to use personal critics. "This is a thriller with all its gorgeous
absurdities full blown . . . if the author cannot think of the right
word, anything approximate in sound will do." (The Remarkable Case of Dorothy L. Sayers by Catherine Kenney, Kent, Ohio, and London, England: Kent State University Press, 1990, p. 37) Years later Creasey admitted that Sayers had been correct in
her judgement. "I often wish I had met her to tell her so." (Ibid., p. 37) Creasey lived in 1938 in the village of Ashe in Hampshire, taking his pseudonym Gordon Ashe from the village. The hero of the Ashe novels was Patrick
Dawlish, patterned after the well-known character of Bulldog Drummond. Dawlish served in MI5 during WW II and
organized resistance against the Nazis in occupied Europe. His adventures continued from The Speaker (1939) to the mid-1970s. After retirement Dawlish worked as a kind of unpaid
private eye and eventually was appointed a Deputy Assistant Commissioner for Crime at Scotland Yard. In the 1940s Creasey wrote spy stories under the name of Norman Deane. Withered Man (1940) was told through the eyes of a Nazi Secret Service agent. Another spy fiction character was Dr. Palfrey, the leader of an allied Secret Service, who was introduced in Traitor's Doom (1942). A real life character, General Draza Mihailovich, a Yugoslav guerrilla leader, featured in The Valley of Fear (1943) as General Mihail. Creasey created Gideon series as J. J. Marric. He derived the pseudonym from his own initial, J(ohn), and that of his wife J(ean), and that from his sons' first names, Mar(tin) and Ric(hard). All novels in the series were published by Hodder and Stoughton. John Ford, who was a friend of suspense novels, filmed Gideon's Day in the fall of 1957. Jack Hawkins played the chief inspector George Gideon. Anna Lee, a blacklisted actress, was his wife Kate, who warns her daughter "never marry a policeman." T.E.B. Clarke wrote the screenplay which often tongue-in-cheek describes an average day in Gideon's life. The chief inspector starts his day badly wit a traffic ticket. It continues with the death of a disregarded colleague, the case an escaped and murderous madman, and the cracking of a robbery ring. And Gideon's daughter wants to betroth a young constable. The film was released in the United States as a second feature in black-and-white prints, cut by a third to only fifty-four minutes and retitled Gideon of Scotland Yard. Frederick A. Young's pastel photography was seen in 1994 in a Ford retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Gideon is married which makes him an unusual character among the separated, widowed, or lonely inspectors of police procedural novels. He lives with his family in a two storey house on Harrington Street, Fulham, on the "classy" side. There is a small front garden, neat and attractive, with a postage stamp lawn. Kate is getting heavy-breasted and thick at the waist, but she is still graceful. She has a passion for tidiness, her kitchen is spotless. Gideon doesn't share his work problems with her and under her calm temperament Kate obviously feels herself neglected. However, at the end of Gideon's Day, when the inspector comes at home late in the evening, he tells her of his day. "He began to undress, and to talk as he did so, only vaguely understanding that it was a long time since he had talked about the day's work with Kate. It was as if the years had been bridged, so that they were together again. He did not think of that in so many words; he just felt that it was good to be home." (Ibid., p. 192) Due to childhood polio, Creasey was rejected for service in WWII. In 1941 Creasey married Evelyn Jean Fudge. After the war Creasey actively pursued his political ideal of "one world," occasionally using as his mouthpiece his characters, mostly Dr. Palfrey, who stood on the front line against global threats in such works as The Flood (1956), The Terror: The Return of Dr. Palfrey (1962), and The Famine (1967). Creasey was a main force behind the founding of the British Crime Writers Association in 1953. On 5 November a dozen crime writers attended a meeting arranged by Creasey at the National Liberal Club and agreed to found an association "to raise the prestige and fortunes of mystery, detective story and crime writing and writers generally." Creasey became the first chairman. In 1969, he received the Grand Master Award of the MWA. Creasey lent his name to a
short fiction periodical, John Creasey Mystery Magazine, had
his own literary agency, and soft-cover publishing house. Two
of his sons, Martin and Richard,
became series characters in his books. "Creasey's faults were in a way
also his strengths," the writer Bruce F. Murphy said, "since the writing is never noticeably good, his more ridiculous and escapist stories may hold the attention longer." (The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery by Bruce F. Murphy, New York: St. Martin's Minotaur, 1999, pp. 115-116) Outside his study, Creasey lived a very social life. Already at the age of twelve he spoke for the Liberal Party at street corners. Creasey was an anti-communist, he opposed monopolies and prophetically believed in the idea of united Europe. He was a public supporter of National Savings for which he was awarded the MBE in 1946. Despite Creasey's high profile, which he kept up by being a correspondent to local newspapers, he ran unsuccessfully for Parliament several times. Putting aside party interest, he went on world tour with his wife Evelyn and sons during the 1951 election. Nevertheless, he was re-elected president of the local Liberal Assocition. In 1956 he turned his back to Liberals. "I left the party over Suez, not simply because I disagreed with condemnation of Anthony Eden, but because Suez seemed the final proof that it was morally indefensible for decisions affecting the lives of every one of us to be made by one party." 'John Creasey: Man of Mystery' by Ian Millsted, Journal of Liberal History 57, Issue 57, Winter 2007-08, p. 44) In January 1966 Creasey founded the All-Party Alliance movement; the
pressure group urged voters to choose the best candidate regardless of
party. Creasey beat the Liberal candidate in his final and most
successful campaign in 1968, taking 13.2 per cent of the votes. His
political thoughts Creasey explained in Good, God and Man: An Outline of the Philosophy of SELF-ISM (1967) and Evolution to Democracy (1969). In Vote for the Toff
(1971) Hon. Richard Rollison runs as an Independent candidate in a
by-election on a political unity ticket. Creasey himself enters story
as Jack Withers, head of the All-Party Alliance. Creasey was married four times. His third wife, Jeanne Williams, was
a popular American writer of romances, juvenile books, and historical
novels. Creasey spent his later years
living alternately in England near Salisbury, Wiltshire, on land once
given to Sir John Botenham by King John, and in Tucson, Arizona. During
WWII the 40-room manor house in Salisbury had served as British
headquarters for a number of U.S. generals. Creasey died on June 9,
1973. A month before his death Creasey married
Diana Hamilton Farrell, his nurse. At least twenty new titles came out posthumously. According to a story, Creasey's neighbour, a London police
inspector, challenged the author once with "Why don't you show us as we
are?" Next year Creasey published his first Gideon book. Creasey has
been considered "perhaps the most important contributor to the British
police procedural". (The Social History of Crime and Punishment in America: An Encyclopedia, edited by Wilbur R. Miller, Los; London; New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2012, p. 1025) His own
favorite was neither Gideon nor "The Toff" but Roger West of Scotland
Yard, who had the nickname "Handsome." Most of his cases were set in London. Creasey wrote Roger West books under
his own name. They appeared between 1942-1978, starting from Inspector West Takes Charge (1942), published by Stanley Paul. The final novel in the series was A Sharp Rise in Crime. Among Creasey's other characters are Sexton Blake, Bruce Murdoch, Dr. Emmanuel Cellini, and Superintendent Folly. (Other pseudonyms not previoulsy mentioned: Henry St. John Cooper, Elise Fecamps, Robert Caine Frazer, Patrick Gill, Michael Halliday, Charles Hogarth, Brian Hope, Colin Hughes, Kyle Hunt, Abel Mann, Peter Manton, James Marsden, Richard Martin, Rodney Mattheson, Anthony Morton, Jeremy York.) For further reading: John Creasey - Fact of Fiction? A Candid Commentary in Third Person, With a Bibliography by John Creasey and Robert E. Briney (1968); The Durable Desperadoes: A Critical Study of Some Enduring Heroes by William Vivian Butler (1973); John Creasey: Master of Mystery, London: Hodder & Stoughton (c1975); 'Creasey, John' by Melvyn Barnes, in Twentieth-Century Mystery and Crime Writers, edited by John M. Reilly (1985); The Police Procedural by George N. Dove (1982); 'Gideon's Week by John Creasey (1956),' in Crime & Mystery: The 100 Best Books by H.R.F. Keating (1987); 'John Creasey' by Marvin S. Lachman, British Mystery Writers, 1920-1939, edited by Bernard Bernstock and Thomas F. Stanley (1989); 'Creasey, John,' in The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery by Bruce F. Murphy (1999); 'John Creasey' by Rosemary M. Canfield-Reisman, in 100 Masters of Mystery and Detective Fiction, edited by Fiona Kelleghan (2001); 'John Creasey: Man of Mystery' by Ian Millsted, Journal of Liberal History 57 (Winter 2007-08); 'The police procedural,' in Key Concepts in Crime Fiction by Heather Worthington (2011); 'Creasey, John (1908-1973),' in Historical Dictionary of British Spy Fiction by Alan Burton (2016); 'A Celebration of John Creasey’s Writing' by Pedro Blas González, New English Review (July 2023). Gideon novels (as J.J. Marric):
|
