I wasn’t going to post on Tuesdays in December, but then Moonstone Press committed to republishing the crime and detective fiction of James Ronald, of whom I have been quite the fan for a few years now. And then they were generous enough to send me a copy of the first volume of tales, and, frankly, try and stop me writing about it.

Of the five stories herein, I’ve already written one up, and so can split the remaining four — one of which I’ve only read in edited form — over the month. The titles are:

1. ‘The Green Ghost Murder’ (1931)
2. ‘Too Many Motives’ (1930)
3. ‘Find the Lady’ (1930)
4. Six Were to Die [n] (1932)
5. ‘Blind Man’s Bluff’ (1929)

One of the delights of this series of reprints is that editor Chris Verner has clearly gone to great lengths to track down the many obscure titles, published under multiple names, in Ronald’s oeuvre — and to provide us, too, with the complete texts of works that have all too frequently only been made available in bowdlerised form…and sometimes as multiple different bowdlerisations. It also allows a few misconceptions to be laid to rest: for instance, I have definitely previously read that ‘The Green Ghost Murder’ (1930) was a novel, whereas in fact it’s a swift and entertaining story of maybe 10,000 words…explaining why I could never track it down as an individual title.

We start, then, with Eunice Britling, sexagenarian twin sister of police surgeon Dr. Daniel Britling, at home alone when she hears the window in another room being opened by someone clearly affecting a clandestine entrance. How this unfurls — concerning “a humble member of a vast organisation…like a giant octopus, that is spreading its tentacles throughout the country” — gives a sense of the balancing of sinister and playful that betokens Ronald’s writing, and sets us up on our mystery with the aforementioned Dr. Britling: the repeated, eerie appearance of the Green Ghost, a figure of local lore that has started appearing in the neighbourhood, scaring all and sundry.

The mystery behind the ghost is apparent to the reader, and to Britling, fairly quickly, and Ronald does well not to generate false confoundment where none exists. What rather muddies the waters, however, is the commission of a murder by the ghost — the stabbing of a bookie while he read in his garden, seated in a deckchair. The man’s cook saw the ghost climb over the surrounding garden wall and approach her employer…and, well, you can fill in the details for yourself. A constable is summoned, a knife discovered in the dead man’s back…so why has the ghost escalated from mere phantom buffoonery to all-out homicide?

Ronald typically has a good eye for the context of his stories, not least from the view of the press of the time — doubtless informed by the time the author spent working for various Glasgow newspapers in his youth. Here he does a strong job of presenting the sensation of the ghost’s appearance as a boon for a newspaper industry that is just beginning to become the ravening, unscrupulous beast that is depressingly familiar to modern readers:

The giant presses at the World Building swallowed miles of white paper, chewed it, then spat it out in the form of thousands of copies of the newspaper. Thousands of copies? Hundreds of thousands!

In the main, the Morning World’s story was a truthful, if highly-colourful, account of the events of the previous evening, or as nearly truthful as that bright and efficient newspaper was ever permitted by its editor to be.

In true pulp fiction style, the answers when then come are divined by our sleuth more than detected, and rely on a coincidence or two as well as information that the reader did not possess, but the skein is amusingly-structured and the sniff of an impossible crime hanging around proceedings makes it a little more interesting than it otherwise might be (it’s not an impossible crime, just to be clear, but a few tweaks might make it look like one). We also, predictably, get a little hand-wavey where the details of some tangential matters are concerned — how (rot13 for minor spoilers) gur tubfg nccneragyl rzretrf sebz gur tebhaq is never revealed — but, well, this is writing for the pulps, so what do you expect?

Britling is an interesting protagonist, too: refusing to give an interview to a newspaper about his sideline in solving crimes because “if I allowed you to tell your readers how much cleverer than the police I am, do you suppose the police would allow me to ‘nose’ about the scene of a murder ever again? … I should lose my hobby”. Interesting, too, especially given the pulps’ fondness for men of action, that Britling is as old as he is and as physically so unprepossessing: “He was short and slim, and his large head made his body look more tadpole than human” — indeed, there’s something of Anthony Berkeley’s equally timid Ambrose Chitterwick in Britling’s DNA, making him feel like a character who exceeds the expected bounds of the medium in which he is appearing:

It had been said by more than one Scotland Yard official that his large head was due to conceit, but other less prejudiced officials had been known to admit that when Daniel put his enterprising finger into the pie of criminal detection he almost invariably pulled out the plum that the detective in charge had groped for in vain.

Were I not already convinced of Ronald’s talents, it’s turns of phrase like that which make the future exploration of his work so appealing!

A good introduction, then, to the work of an author who I’ve said for some time deserves more attention. Chris Verner’s excellent introduction does much to shed light on the man and his life, and the promised future volumes mentioned in the back of this one are wonderful news that gives me much to look forward to. Thanks to Moonstone Press not just for this book, but for taking a chance on this author in the first place and offering him some prominence — here’s hoping 2024 finally sees the rise of James Ronald’s stock among classic crime fans!