It’s fairly incredible to me that I have a copy of The Sealed Room Murder (1934), originally published by James Ronald under his Michael Crombie nom de plume, at all. Only the recent efforts of Chris Verner and Moonstone Press to bring Ronald’s criminous oeuvre back into print for sensible money have made this and others available to fans like me without endless connections and deep pockets, and I remain extremely grateful for their undertaking. The book, then, delivers largely what one has been able to come to expect from Ronald’s earlier, pulp-adjacent writing, with much thrill and little substance: fun, but not worth the sorts of money previously requested online.

I was going to launch into a summary of the plot, but the plot is pretty unexceptional and perhaps not the best place to start in commending this. A beautiful woman in peril, a staunch young man sworn to protect her, his always-to-be-overlooked friend who simply thinks that, shucks, these young kids should be given a chance and so throws himself body and soul into the problem despite not really having any core connection to it…it’s interesting just how much this sort of setup recurs in Ronald’s early career…and how much more notable his writing became when he snapped out of this sort of approach in 1936.

So far, then, so expected. What makes Ronald more interesting than the usual in this milieu — quite apart from the fact that he went on to write some of the most brilliantly compelling novels of the 1930s in the likes of Murder in the Family (1936), They Can’t Hang Me (1938), and This Way Out (1939) — is that he really does have a wonderful flare for the sort of little moments that humanise what should be fairly bland and standard fare. So while you’re pretty sure that respected judge Godfrey Winter has been killing people in order to inherit a fortune, and certainly his actions would point strongly in that direction, Ronald’s light touch with the unexpected will keep you guessing until a fairly late stage; no mean feat.

In the meantime, enjoy some bizarrely brilliant plotting in the shape of scarlet-bonce’d reporter Larry Milner approaching the under-suspicion Winter and hissing in his ear “I know your secret!” only to be swept off on a side-quest of his own as a result, or the acuity of Winter’s staff who are far from the easily-bullied simpletons of yore. There’s also a lovely moment in which Winter’s chauffeur Hemming seems to grasp the concept of egalitarianism…

“I’ve been…at your beck and call for ten years, day and night; and what’s it got me? You think you can buy a man body and soul for three quid a week — half as much as it costs you to keep just one of the horses in the stables out there.”

…and, well, you’ll have to see how that plays out. Pleasingly, too, Ronald’s characters are intelligent, able to put together pieces of a puzzle quickly and lucidly, rather than standing around agog at the sheer confounding nature of the all-too-apparent things that are happening to and around them. This happens a lot in Ronald’s work, and his ability to plot while marshalling intelligent people in clever reasoning, thus making his developments more propulsive, is one of this key attributes. That and tiny flashes of character writing (“She was like a witch. Shrivelled. Old. Ugly.”) that brace as much as they inform.

The oddest touch is that the murder of the title occurs in chapter 22 of 24, and so is a remarkably late conceit to name an entire book after. Ronald isn’t writing detection, and the answer isn’t exactly genre-blasting in its conception, but it’s fun, plays on Milner’s mind quite dramatically, and resolves itself in a way that you can’t have too many problems with. Ronald won’t jump to the head of anyone’s TBR as a result of encountering this, but if you’ve read him at his best and want to see who he was before then, you’ll very much enjoy the ride you’re taken on here.

~

Sharing this volume, indeed taking up almost half of it, is the long novella The Secret of Hunter’s Keep, a.k.a. House of Horror (1931), which Verner in his introduction tells us is “a humorous, tongue-in-cheek mixed bag of romance, murder, and enough secret passages to satisfy most readers for the rest of their lives”. Eschewing the typical rock-’em, sock-’em aspect of Ronald’s other pulp writings, this is instead a country house mystery in the pulp vein, with the Edgar Wallace-alike author Wilmer Basingstoke being stabbed while writing a book on miraculous disappearances…his body then disappearing into the many passages hidden in the country pile of the title.

This is slick, light, nonsense fun, with a few magnificent turns of phrase…

They lived in a small Sussex village thirty miles from London and fifty years from the twentieth century.

…and good scene-setting, with Hunter’s Keep an ominous, jagged beacon on the horizon as the convergence point for family members, a vicar, an off-duty policeman, and a convict recently escaped from Dartmoor prison. Hooded figures duck in and out of rooms, bodies vanish, secret switches for panels in the walls abound, and it’s all wrapped up with very little surprise, a complete lack of motive, and some literally inexplicable events in the sense that certain aspects go inexplic’d.

Ronald isn’t the firmest proponent of sexual equality (“Oh, if only I were a man! If only I could do something!”), but he writes with surprising fervour about the societal obsession with the ravages of time on women — deemed old and sexless maids at forty — and you can’t help but wonder if he’s getting the knife in when he decrees that “most of the people who consider novels for publishers are hopelessly stupid”. Mind you, I really wish he’d produced the novels “of the blood and thunder variety filled with master-crooks, and beautiful vamps and priceless emeralds and mysterious Chinamen…written after the style of Jane Austen” he hints at herein. The mind positively boggles!

So, yes; fun, inessential, a delightful palate-cleanser but nothing more.