John Creasey

• Born: September 17, 1908
• Birthplace: Southfields, Surrey, England
• Died: June 9, 1973
• Place of death: Bodenham, Salisbury, England

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; espionage; police procedural; thriller

Principal Series: Department Z, 1933-1953; Baron John Mannering, 1937-1979; Sexton Blake, 1937-1943; The Toff, 1938-1978; Patrick Dawlish, 1939-1977; Bruce Murdoch, 1939-1972; Roger West, 1942-1978; Dr. Palfrey, 1942-1973; Liberator, 1943-1945; Martin and Richard Fane, 1951-1953; Commander George Gideon, 1955-1976; Mark Kilby, 1959-1960; Dr. Emmanuel Cellini, 1965-1976

Contribution

John Creasey is notable as the most prolific writer of mystery stories in the history of the genre. Changing from pen name to pen name and from sleuth to sleuth, Creasey mass-produced as many as two novels a week. At his death, he was credited with more than 550 crime novels, which had sold sixty million copies in twenty-six languages. Despite his great commercial success, Creasey was not highly ranked by critics, who pointed out that no matter how clever his plot outlines might be, his characters too often were pasteboard creations rather than psychologically interesting human beings, his situations geared to fast action rather than to the development of atmosphere that characterizes the best mystery novels. Sensitive to such criticisms, in some of his novels Creasey took time for fuller development of character; the Gideon series, written under the pseudonym J. J. Marric, ranks with the best of the genre.

Biography

John Creasey was born on September 17, 1908, in Southfields, Surrey, England, the seventh of nine children of Joseph Creasey, a coachmaker, and Ruth Creasey. The family was poor, and life was difficult, made more difficult for John by a bout with polio that delayed his learning to walk until he was six. John’s first encouragement in a writing career came when he was ten; impressed by a composition, a schoolmaster assured John that he could be a professional writer. Then began a long, discouraging period of fourteen years when only Creasey himself had hopes for his future. His family found his dreams laughable; after he left school at fourteen, he was fired by one employer after another, often for neglecting his work in order to write. He later commented that he collected 743 rejection slips during this time.

At last, after nine of Creasey’s novels had been turned down by publishers, his tenth was accepted. It was Seven Times Seven (1932), and it was a mystery. Its acceptance vindicated Creasey’s faith in himself, and he soon decided to depend on writing for his sole income. Clearly he could not support himself on the mystery writer’s traditional two books a year. Therefore he decided to work on a number of books at once, concealing his identity under various pseudonyms; during the rest of his life, Creasey continued to produce mysteries, as well as other books, at a feverish pace.

Creasey’s method of producing novels brought him popularity and wealth. He bought a forty-two-room manor in England and a Rolls-Royce. When he wished, he traveled, often to the United States, sometimes to other parts of the world. He was also deeply involved in politics, twice running unsuccessfully for Parliament, the second time representing a party that he had founded. Furthermore, he devoted much of his time to refugee work and famine relief.

Meanwhile, Creasey was periodically getting married and divorced. His marriage to Margaret Elizabeth Cooke lasted four years and produced a son; his second marriage, to Evelyn Jean Fudge, lasted twenty-nine years; during that time, two more children were born. There was a brief third marriage to Jeanne Williams, followed by a final marriage to Diana Hamilton Farrell a month before his death.

Although the critics were lukewarm about the quality of many of Creasey’s works, his colleagues elected him chairman of the Crime Writers’ Association, which he had founded, and of the Mystery Writers of America. In 1946, he was made a member of the Order of the British Empire. Later he was honored twice by the Mystery Writers of America, in 1962 for Gideon’s Fire (1961) and in 1969 with the Grand Master Award for his contributions to the genre of the mystery novel.

On June 9, 1973, Creasey died of congestive heart failure in Bodenham, Salisbury, England. At the time of his death, he had a backlog of books waiting to be published. The final new work by Creasey did not appear until 1979.

Analysis

It was John Creasey’s phenomenal production that led many critics to accuse him of running a mystery-novel factory, of sacrificing quality to quantity. Early in his career, Creasey admitted to turning out two books a week, with a break for cricket in midweek. Later, in response to criticism, Creasey slowed down and took more pains with revision and with character development. Even in this later period, however, Creasey averaged one book a month.

The fact that the Roger West and the Gideon mysteries can hold their own with books by writers who were less prolific than he may be explained by Creasey’s driving will and by his superb powers of organization. In an interview published in The New York Times (June 10, 1973), Creasey was asked why, having attained wealth and success, he continued driving himself to write six thousand words a day. In his reply, Creasey referred to the years of rejection, when neither his family nor the publishers to whom he submitted his works expected him to turn out salable work. Evidently a few successes were not enough for Creasey; each new sale negated that long neglect and validated his faith in his own ability.

Creasey is not unique among writers, however, in having the will to succeed. His productivity is also explained by the system that he devised, a system that he explained in various interviews. He began where all writers begin, with a rough draft, which he turned out in seven to ten days of steady effort. Then, like most writers, he put the draft aside so that he could later judge it with the eyes of a critic rather than a creator. It was at this point that Creasey differed from most other writers. While the draft of one book was cooling, he began another, and then another, and another. At any one time, he would have as many as fifteen books in process. Eventually, he hired professional readers to study his drafts, suggesting weaknesses in plotting, characterization, or style.

Creasey himself did not return to the first draft until at least six months had passed. By the time he had completed several revisions and pronounced the book ready for publication, it would have been a year since he began to write that particular book. Thus, it is unfair to accuse Creasey of simply dashing off his mysteries, at least in the last twenty-five or thirty years of his life. Instead, he mastered the art of juggling several aspects of the creative process at one time, thinking out one plot, developing another, and revising a third and a fourth, while most writers would have been pursuing a single idea.

Creasey is unusual in that one cannot trace his development by examining his books in chronological order. There are two reasons for this critical difficulty. One is that he frequently revised his books after they had initially been published, improving the style, updating details, even changing names of sleuths. Thus, it is difficult to fit many novels into a time frame. There is, however, an even greater problem. At one and the same time, Creasey would be dashing off a novel with a fast-moving plot and fairly simple characters (such as those of the Toff series) and one of the much-admired Gideon books, which depend on psychological complexity and the juggling of multiple plots, or perhaps one of the suspenseful, slowly developing Inspector Roger West books. Therefore it is as if Creasey were several different writers at the same time, as his pseudonyms suggest; if anyone but Creasey were involved, one would find it difficult to believe that one person could bring out in a single year books that seem to reflect such different stages of artistic development.

Perhaps because his productivity was so amazing, perhaps because he himself was obsessed with it, Creasey’s comments about his art generally deal with his system of composition. An intensely practical man, he considered the mystery novel an art form but was impatient with what he saw as attempts to make the art itself mysterious. Responsive to criticism, as well as to sales figures, Creasey was willing to change and to improve to please his public. Not only did he take more pains with his writing after his early books, though commercially successful, were classified as mediocre by the critics, but he also developed a character, Inspector Roger West, specifically to suit the tastes of an American public that until 1952 had not shown an interest in Creasey’s work. With Inspector West Cries Wolf (1950; published as The Creepers in the United States), Creasey captured the American market, and his Inspector West novels continue to be the Creasey books most frequently encountered in American bookstores.

Inspector West Cries Wolf

Inspector West Cries Wolf, the first book by Creasey to be published in the United States, illustrates many of the qualities of his best work. The style is generally simple. For example, the murder of an informer is described briefly: “The man behind Squinty raised his right arm; the flash of his knife showed in the headlamps’ beams. The knife fell. Even above the roar of the engine, Roger fancied that he heard Squinty scream.” Yet Creasey’s finest books have more than fast action. Inspector Roger West is a sensitive and troubled human being, whose marital difficulties are intensified by his profession. When he penetrates a character’s mind, Creasey adjusts his rhythms accordingly: “Roger thought: I’m hitting a new low; but although he admitted that to himself, he felt inwardly cold, frozen, the whisky hadn’t warmed him.” By the end of this thoughtful passage, Roger has become convinced that his comfortable, loving relationship with his wife has vanished forever.

In handling setting, too, Creasey can adjust to his subject. He handles London settings exceptionally well, whether he is describing one of the Toff’s favorite East End haunts or the seedy Rose and Crown, where Creasey lingers long enough to create the atmosphere, the reek of stale beer, the air blue with smoke. Similarly, when he sends West to the country house Morden Lodge, Creasey dwells on the contrast between the overgrown, neglected approach to the lodge and the crystal chandelier and red-carpeted stairway inside it. Not only is Creasey slowing down enough to describe his scene, but he also is suggesting the difference between exterior and interior, a distinction that applies inversely to the characters at the lodge, who at first appear attractive but finally are shown to be as ugly as evil.

Even in his least fleshed-out novels, Creasey’s situations are interesting, and his best works have fine plots. In Inspector West Cries Wolf, silent burglars are terrorizing London; Creasey’s novel twist is the fact that all the gang members have the mark of a wolf on their palms. The police are frustrated by the fact that none of those captured will talk, clearly because they are more afraid of their leader, Lobo, than of the law.

In all Creasey’s novels, the problem is stated almost immediately, and soon some elements of suspense are introduced, generally threats to a seemingly helpless person, to someone with whom the protagonist is closely involved, or perhaps to the protagonist himself. Inspector West Cries Wolf begins with a telephone call to West, who has barely fallen asleep, demanding that he return to duty because of Lobo’s gang. It is obvious that Roger’s wife, Janet, is frightened, and even though the fact that she has been threatened is not revealed for several chapters, her very real terror increases the suspense. In the second chapter of the book, a man and his wife are brutally murdered by a member of the wolf-gang, and their young son escapes only by accident. Now the danger of death is no longer theoretical. In the third chapter, West visits the scene of the crime and talks to the young orphan. The hunt is on, and with the peril to West’s informers, to his family, and to himself mounting chapter by chapter, the story proceeds. By now, if his reader has the power of imagination, Creasey has captured him.

All Creasey’s protagonists are brave and intelligent. Roger West is particularly appealing, however, because in a profession that might tend to harden a man, he continues to be sensitive. Sometimes that sensitivity is an advantage to him, as when he speaks to the young boy whose parents have just been murdered by one of Lobo’s men; at other times, it causes him difficulty, as when he understands too well Janet’s unhappiness and yet has no choice but to leave her to be protected and amused by his friend Mark Lessing while West pursues his quarry. Because he is sensitive, West is aware not only of Janet’s wayward impulses but also of his own, and when Janet’s jealousy of Margaret Paterson is inflamed, West must admit to himself that Janet’s suspicions have some validity. It is the complexity of Roger West as a character, the fact that his intelligence is used not only to capture criminals but also to analyze his own motives, that places this series so far above some of the other Creasey mysteries.

It has been pointed out that except for those involved in crime, Creasey’s characters are generally kindly and decent. In this novel, Janet West honestly wants her relationship with Roger to recover; she displays the same courage in dealing with their subtle problems as she does in facing her kidnappers. Bill Sloan, who finds himself pub-crawling with the mysterious and seductive Margaret, never contemplates being unfaithful to his absent wife. Creasey’s noncriminal characters live up to his expectations of them; thus, by the end of Inspector West Cries Wolf, compassionate neighbors have offered a home to the orphaned boy.

It is significant that at the end of a Creasey novel there is both an unmasking and punishment of the criminals—as is expected in a mystery—and a reconciliation among all the sympathetic characters. Creasey’s faith in human nature is evident in the happy ending for the orphan. It is similarly evident in the restoration of the friendship between Roger and Mark and in the reestablishment of harmony and understanding in the Wests’ marriage. Thus in Inspector West Cries Wolf, as in all Creasey’s books, evil is defeated and goodness triumphs. What marks the difference between a Roger West book and one of Creasey’s less inspired works is the seeming lack of haste. However rapidly Creasey may have turned out even his finest mysteries, in the West books at least he developed the atmosphere by paying due attention to detail and brought his characters to life by tracing the patterns of their thoughts and feelings. When to his usual imaginative plot Creasey added these qualities, he produced mystery novels that rank with the best.

Principal Series Characters:

• Baron John Mannering , an art dealer, is married to Lorna Mannering, a painter. Wealthy and polished, he moves easily among the highest levels of society, but he is kind and considerate toward the humble people who sometimes consult him because they know that they can trust him, whether for an honest valuation of a painting or for help in a perilous situation.
• The Honourable Richard “the Toff” Rollison , a wealthy man-about-town who divides his time between Mayfair and London’s East End. Tall, handsome, and polished, he is tough enough to intimidate the most vicious criminal; yet when his investigations carry him into the East End, he is often defended by those whom he has charitably helped in the past.
• Patrick Dawlish , a British detective as famous as Sherlock Holmes, who operates first as deputy assistant commissioner for crime at Scotland Yard and later independently as an unofficial investigator in cooperation with the Yard. Dawlish is a huge, polite man, handsome despite a once-broken nose, which reminds the reader that he is capable of sudden and decisive action. He is devoted to his wife, Felicity.
• Roger West , an inspector at Scotland Yard, nicknamed “Handsome,” is a large, powerful man who has two passions, his work and his family. The demands of his job have put great stress on his relationship with his wife, Janet, and at one time a divorce seems inevitable. As the series progresses, however, Janet comes to accept the situation, partly, no doubt, because their two sons, Martin and Richard, seem to thrive despite their father’s unpredictable absences and his too-predictable exhaustion when he is at home.
• Dr. Stanislaus Alexander “Sap” Palfrey , a specialist in pulmonary diseases, is a pale, round-shouldered, scholarly-looking man with a weak chin, whose real strength is not immediately apparent. He is actually the brilliant and decisive head of Z5, a secret international organization designed to defeat the forces that threaten the peace of the world. In the grimmest situations, he is almost godlike in his serenity; generally he has contingency plans, but always he has faith in the rightness of his cause.
• Commander George Gideon of Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department (CID) is the hero of John Creasey’s most admired series. Gideon is a dogged crime fighter who is often impatient with the politically motivated demands of his superiors. Although Gideon and his wife, Kate, have six children, she cannot forget the loss of a seventh, a loss she blames on Gideon’s devotion to duty, which kept him away from her at a crucial time. Gideon’s sensitivity is revealed by his understanding of her feelings, his thoughtfulness, and his unfailing interest in family concerns, no matter how pressured he may be.

Bibliography

Bird, Tom. “John Creasey Remembered.” Short Stories Magazine 1 (July, 1981): 9-12. Tribute to Creasey emphasizing his short fiction and its influence on the mystery and detective genre.

Harvey, Deryk. “The Best of John Creasey.” The Armchair Detective 7 (November, 1973): 42-43. Checklist selecting the very best examples of Creasey’s work from throughout his prolific career.

Roth, Marty. Foul and Fair Play: Reading Genre in Classic Detective Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. A post-structuralist analysis of the conventions of mystery and detective fiction. Examines 138 short stories and works from the 1840’s to the 1960’s. Briefly mentions Creasey and helps the reader place him in the broader context of the genre.

Rzepka, Charles J. Detective Fiction. Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2005. Overview of detective fiction written in English, placing Creasey’s many works in context. Bibliographic references and index.

Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2005. Contains an essay on hard-boiled fiction that mentions Creasey and provides background for understanding the writer.