Benjamin Leopold Farjeon (1838-1903) was the father of children's author Eleanor Farjeon, and pianist Harry Farjeon. He was born in London and lived in Australia and New Zealand, where he edited the Otago Daily Times. He also travelled to the US, where he married Margaret Jefferson, daughter of the American actor Joseph Jefferson. He returned to London and had a successful career as a playwright and novelist, though his works are largely forgotten today. His detectives tend to be newspaper reporters, perhaps reflecting his background. His son J Jefferson Farjeon was also a detective writer.

His only series character, Robert Agnold, appears in Great Porter Square (1881) and The Mystery of M Felix (1890). Agnold is a young reporter for the London Evening Moon. He is unnamed in Great Porter Square, being referred to only as Our Reporter. The books are more like early police procedurals than anything else, containing long excerpts of criminal trials, longer statements by the suspects (one such statement is over 80 pages long), and spending a great deal of time on the lives of those directly and indirectly involved in the crimes or in the central love stories; they're really slice of life novels rather than mysteries. Farjeon includes lengthy sections of letters between main characters, letters which are epistolary info-dumps and help move the plot along but don't do much else. Farjeon was a functional, utilitarian writer but not much besides that. Neither Robert Agnold novel is particularly interesting, and the most notable thing about either of them is the amount of space which Farjeon spend in describing the lives of the poor. Farjeon's sympathies were clearly with the underclasses, rather than the upper classes or the police.

Agnold is well-regarded by both the reading public and his colleagues at the Evening Moon. He's said to have "generous instincts and sympathetic nature (which) have won for him an unusual meed of respect," and during the novels he does show a considerable amount of compassion toward the unfortunate. He involves himself voluntarily in criminal cases, and while he's working in pursuit of a story it is equally important to him that an unfairly accused man not go to jail. Agnold is not cutthroat at his job, either, being willing to withhold a hot story for three days in exchange for an accused man telling him everything. Agnold has extensive knowledge of the London slums, and is very much a reporter of the street rather than of the manor houses. He is persistent: "the woof of his nature is strong and tough, and difficulties rather inspire than depress him." But Agnold is not a particularly great detective; he questions the witnesses to a crime and its obvious suspects and draws the obvious deductions, but displays no genius for crime solving, and in fact is not ultimately responsible for solving the crimes, although his investigations are certainly vital in freeing the unjustly accused and jailing the guilty.

Bibliography

Love's Victory

Shadows on the Snow

Bread-and-Cheese And Kisses

The King of No-Land

An Island Pearl

Great Porter Square (1885)

Devlin the Barber (1888)

The Mystery of M Felix (1890)

Samuel Boyd of Catchpole Square (1899)