The recent publication of the tenth and eleventh volumes of James Ronald’s stories of crime and detection by Moonstone Press turned my mind back to the opportunity to read one of his novels that would have been out of my means due to financial or acquisitional circumstances prior to 2024.  And so Death Croons the Blues (1934), a second outing for newspaperman Julian Mendoza, into whose boarding house an inept sneak thief stumbles having just discovered a dead woman in the flat they were burgling nearby. When the victim turns out to be nightclub chanteuse Adele Valée, Mendoza’s journalistic tendencies kick into overdrive as he attempts to find the killer.

If the first third of this book doesn’t tell you much beyond what you learn in the opening handful of chapters, you won’t really mind, because Ronald has such a great feel for atmosphere — “In the vicinity of Hyde Park fog was packed as tightly as cotton-wool in a pillbox.” — and such a great talent for sweeping all the feelings into such a compact space (“A bruised butterfly is always pitiful.”) that it’s just a pleasure to spend time in his literary hands. And Mendoza is wonderful company, forging through events with the inevitability of Carter Dickson’s Sir Henry Merrivale but with a brusqueness all of his own:

“You can’t have seven years’ bad luck and be hanged at the same time,” said Julian brutally. “So, for the love of Pete, cheer up.”

Most of this is seen through Mendoza’s eyes, but Ronald’s talent with minor characters enlivens what would otherwise be fairly by-the-numbers stuff: see the police surgeon Dr. Hammond and his mendacity regarding an appendix, the skewering of Molly Cuffy’s landlady as a “virago in [a] soiled wrapper”, or the charwoman washing the floor outside ex-prizefighter ‘Tiger’ Slavin’s flat (“She cared not two pins whether he was a tenant, a visitor, the gasman, a burglar, or the Angle Gabriel…”). Hell, see the breezy way Ronald typifies the department store Walls’s if you need convincing of his abilities: in just one paragraph he brings that heaving edifice completely to scurrying, fully-realised life.

Some of the plotting is pretty clever, too, though since this leans heavily into Ronald’s pulp sensibilities you can rest assured that it’s not remotely fair play. The envelope deduction is smart, but this needed a map to be completely honest with the reader, and it might help to know that a “made up tie” is, I believe, the sort of bow tie one does not tie oneself and instead simply fixes, pre-tied, around one’s neck. There’s some especially piquant era writing, too, such as the reflection that someone could live on no money as long a their creditors believed that they would be, say, marrying into wealth at some point — I’d never really thought about this until Ronald took the time to express it so cleanly here.

It’s very much the limping, unstoppable Mendoza’s show, though: from a breathless flight across the rooftops to thumbing his nose at the niceties of declaring evidence, the man’s dedication to his profession (“New must be served hot. There is no more perishable commodity.”) is carried through right to the glorious showdown with the killer, and the likes of business magnate Hugo Brancker, who profited from the 1929 crash in surprising ways, and Lady Constance Gay, who adds a romance angle but is allowed more character than that might initially suggest, should consider themselves lucky to share the page with him. He’s one of the more interesting ‘forgotten’ creations from the Golden Age, and I would avidly snatch up at least another ten books featuring him.

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Next in this Moonstone edition is novella Angel Face (1937), another outing for Mendoza — this time taking on the beautiful London gangster Benny Cosmano, who runs a protection racket for the bookies at Fulham races:

“I can take care of myself!” cried Black. “I’ll tell you what you can do with your ‘protection’!”

He told him, and the suggestion was neither feasible nor polite.

With Cosmano’s actions drawing Mendoza’s ire, this should play out in a predictable manner, but Ronald turns the plot in a surprising direction while maintaining this inevitability. It’s red-blooded, two-fisted stuff that severely lacks the heart of Ronald’s Murder in the Family (1936), the canny plotting of They Can’t Hang Me (1938), or the heartbreak of This Way Out (1939) from the same era, but as a street-level, revenge-fuelled tale in which Mendoza’s resilience shines through this achieves what it sets out to and doesn’t hang around while doing so. I also love the casual reference to Mussolini and the Mafia, long before the Mafia became the cliché of choice of this ilk of fiction.

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Two shorter stories from Ronald’s earlier career round out this volume. The first, ‘The Other Mr. Marquis’ (1930), is a tale of possible persecution mania suffered by a middle-aged book collector, but it feels like Ronald doesn’t know what to do with this and so, with an odd blurring of the duration of the story, it sort of limps to a stop that feels a little embarrassed not to know what point it’s making. The second, ‘The Joke’ (1930), concerning 60 year-old twins who hate each other, feels like the nub of an idea that Ronald might, had he stumbled upon it later, have worked up to a novel, but here it’s a brief little thing, not hard to anticipate but difficult to mind given how quickly it passes.

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All told, this volume is another fun time. One feels that Ronald’s best work in found in the earlier volumes of this series, but fans of British pulp writing form this era, or anyone who, like me, wants to see how Ronald applied himself elsewhere precisely because of how good he was at his best, will find much here to enjoy. And full credit, too, to Jason Anscomb, whose covers for this series have been top notch.