John Robert Furneaux JordanARIBA (10 April 1905 Birmingham – 14 May 1978 Burcombe, Wiltshire) was an English architect, architectural critic and novelist. He worked as an architect from 1928 to 1961, after which he became an academic, broadcaster and lecturer, writing many books on architecture.
He wrote five crime novels under the name of Robert Player, (using his mother's maiden name) mostly set in the Victorian and Edwardian periods and published from 1945 until the late 1970s. They contain a strong element of social satire, concerning the hypocrisy and corruptions of those periods.
Family
His father (John Furneaux Jordan, 1865–1956), grandfather (Thomas Furneaux Jordan) and great-grandfather were surgeons, as were an uncle, great uncle and cousin.
His parents married in 1898; his mother Mildred (née Player) was the daughter of John Player of Edgbaston. She survived her husband.[1]
His brother was the journalist and prime ministerial press officer, Philip Jordan (1902–1951)
Robert Jordan married Eira Furneaux Jordan in 1966.
The Ingenious Mr Stone (1945): a detective story about the poisoning of the ultra-High Church headmistress of a girls' school in Devonshire
Let's Talk of Graves, of Worms, of Epitaphs (1975): ISBN0-575-01922-0. A fictional account of an Anglican clergyman who becomes Pope, loosely based on Lytton Strachey's life of Cardinal Manning
Oh, Where are Bloody Mary's Earrings? (1972): concerns a pair of earrings given as a wedding present by Philip II of Spain to Mary I of England, and the times they were stolen or copied between then and the Edwardian period
The Homicidal Colonel (1970): concerns a psychopathic colonel from the American Deep South who reinvents himself as an English country squire and later disappears back to America, there committing a series of sex murders.