Crazy to think that even a couple of years ago the works of James Ronald were so wildly unavailable that it seemed we’d never know exactly what, of the fair amount he wrote, was crime fiction and what came from other, equally profitable, genres. Then Chris Verner and Moonstone Press entered the arena, and Ronald’s criminous oeuvre has become readily available for sensible money. And so Murder for Cash, a.k.a The Fatal .45 (1938), a pulpy tale that comes nowhere near the level of Ronald’s best work — Murder in the Family (1936), They Can’t Hang Me (1938) — but nevertheless warrants examination by anyone curious about what this all-but-forgotten author has done to garner such attention in the modern day.

Millionaire rancher King Kennedy heads to Chicago for surgery on his failing eyes, making the mistake before he goes of cutting his estranged son Dolf out of his will and leaving his millions instead to Dolf’s cousins, the Mervyns. It’s a mistake because, contrary to all appearances, Neville, Ann, and Philip Mervyn are in fact broke, and employ a pair of killers to execute King while he is in his downtown hotel.

Murder for cash: that was Whispering Benny’s racket. It was his boast that he was prepared to dispose of any living being from the President of the United States down to the humblest derelict of the gutters. But there had to be money in it.

Hearing of his father’s death, Dolf vows to go to Chicago and find the people responsible, King’s lifelong friend ‘Sleepy’ Gus Williams tagging along for the same purpose. And when rumours of a new will begin to circulate, complications stir for the Mervyn siblings, with — for reasons too complex to go into here — several different parties all trying to track down the gun used to shoot King.

What’s especially pleasing about Murder for Cash is how intelligently the characters behave, and how the author is quick to point out the ramifications of the various actions. When Neville oversees a certain action in chapter 5, Ronald doesn’t hold back on the obvious connotations as a lesser author might; no-one withholds information from anyone else, meaning that everyone is about as up to speed as they can be at any minute, allowing for a swiftly-developing plot that winds its way through some delightful complications on the way to its conclusion.

The characters are well drawn, too, giving them each a little more life than they really deserve given how easily they fall into categories. The ornery Sleepy drives like a lunatic (“[H]e considered traffic lights a sissy idea. Back where he came from, when you got behind the steering wheel of a car it was every man for himself.”) which later feeds into the humanisation of the beautiful, soulless killer the Carnation Kid when he genuinely seems to face the end of his life in Sleepy’s automotive hands (“This was it. This was it. Oh, God, this was it…”).  Equally, see Sleepy and underworld rat Little Hymie killing time by “cheating each other at poker and thoroughly enjoying it”. There’s far more life here than any such two-fisted plot as this deserves.

An element of social commentary creeps in when an illegal immigrant is arrested for King’s murder, beaten until he confesses, and then thrown in jail. Not only does the shadow of the Spanish Civil War loom over events here, but Ronald makes it clear that the corrupted machinery of the Chicago justice system is already working against any chance of this conviction being overturned, just as intimidation of judges, bribery of police officers, and interference with juries would see anyone with influence walk free from any suspicion. Sure, this was another fixation of Tough Guy fiction at the time, but Ronald spends time making us really feel it, and then throws in a bunch of enlivening plot diversions along the way.

And interesting morality pervades affairs, too, with no-one stepping outside of their own bounds or, when coming off worse because another party bests them in the central pursuit, bearing any grudges because of this. It would be nice if more of the plot contortions surprised — Dolf and Sleepy freeing a woman from the coils of a blackmailer comes out of nowhere, but represents a nice shift in focus for two chapters — but Ronald is to be commended for keeping the energy high, the pace brisk, the prose nimble, and the characters both familiar and yet somehow new. It doesn’t have the heart of the above-mentioned titles or the weight of This Way Out (1939) but, given the almost ephemeral pulp offerings from Ronald that Moonstone have included in these excellent editions, it’s pleasing to see a man of his talents do something that reaches a little beyond the obvious with this sort of tale.

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Also included in this volume, and kudos here to Chris Verner’s studious editorial hand on this series, is the novella The Man Who Made Monsters (1935), a great inclusion since it acts as a prequel of sorts to Murder for Cash. It finds the two killers from Murder for Cash — Whispering Benny Klaff and the Carnation Kid — hot-footing it to London, where they come up against another Dolf, this time millionaire playboy Dolf Ainslie, while employed by a frozen-faced dwarf and his gigantically fat female associate to kidnap beautiful men and women for…unusual purposes.

This, as with all Ronald’s pulp writing, is fast-paced, rich in clever ideas (the central conceit is horrible to consider, and a weirdly brilliant modus operandi), packed with deplorably phonetic dialogue (“‘E’ll be rand agen in arf an hour or so, and drink another cup o’ cawfee, but ‘e won’t eat nuffin’.”) and gaudy enough to stick in the mind rather than being dismissed the instant it finishes. It’s marked out, too, by some very good action writing — the blood-soaked kidnap of one character is visceral and compelling — and a late fillip that gives our central madman rather more humanity than might otherwise be expected.

Good fun, well-judged, hard to forget; a bracing and highly entertaining little novella.