A second foray into the first volume of the criminous work of James Ronald, which is being reprinted by Moonstone Press — much to my immense excitement.
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I have a particular fascination with the Knox Decalogue, the list of ‘rules’ for the writing of good detective fiction as complied by Ronald Knox in 1929. It fascinates me for many reasons, not least the way it has been misrepresented down the years and its clear-sighted common sense taken as narrowness by many people who fail to appreciate the genre understanding contained within.
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Let those who lament the — vastly overstated — train fixation of Freeman Wills Crofts take note: Tokyo Express (1958) by Seichō Matsumoto contains so much red-hot timetabling action that I half expected it to be written by someone called Bradshaw. And it’s fitting perhaps that such a small, quiet crime — a double suicide on a gloomy beach — should result in a quiet and low-key investigation, but for me there needs to be a little more to show for all the hours spent looking at the precise movements of trains, ferries, and more. The essential culmination of this is clever, but the route we take to get there could have used a few faster, twistier sections of track.
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.
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Maybe it’s the changing of the seasons, but I am really struggling to maintain interest in a lot of what I’m reading at present. Latest victim is Murder in Blue (1937), the debut novel of Clifford Witting, whose first half flew by in a whirlwind of delightful wit and intriguing possibilities…only for me to have to drag my way through the final 60 pages to a conclusion I’d lost interest in long before. And yet this sounds like exactly my sort of thing: plenty of clever false leads, lots of intelligent speculation, an apparently simple murder made devilishly complex by Witting’s undeniable intelligence of design (c.f. Let X be the Murderer (1947)). So, wherefore the capitulation? Let’s investigate…
Christmas creeps ever-closer, and every year I promise myself I’ll read and review some festive mysteries…then I forget and review them in springtime instead. But The Christmas Appeal (2023) by Janice Hallett…that’s positively screaming for a December review. So let’s look at it in November.
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Published approximately a year ago, this translation of Un Assassin, Ça Va Ça Vient (1981) as Death on Bastille Day kept eluding my attention if only because I was holding out for a paperback edition. The vagaries of publishing have restricted it to Kindle only, however, and so I come to this story of a man in two places at the same time — dancing in front of some witnesses, while committing a murder in front of another — rather belatedly. And while I’m grateful for the opportunity to have read it, as with all translated works, I can’t help but feel that it would make an excellent short story, lacking as it does sufficient intrigue to support its far from excessive length.
Bodies from the Library 6 (2023) represents another delightful foray into the neglected and forgotten stories from many of the luminaries of the Golden Age, as editor Tony Medawar puts his enviable genre awareness to wonderful use bringing yet more gems to public attention.
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An Englishman, an Irishman, and a Scotsman meet at university, where they form a club with the intention of talking about unsolved crimes. Several years later, in the manner of these undertakings in fiction, they stumble upon a fresh case and decide to take it on…only to realise that they’re mixed up in something Much Bigger Than They Imagined. Fortunately, Hugh Marsden is the ward of legendary Scotland Yard man Sir Arthur Sinclair (ret’d.) and they’re able to enlist that great personage in their predicament. Less fortunately, Sinclair has been ill for some years now, and his powers appear to be on the wane. And danger circles ever-closer…
Pirates! Sunken ships! Mysterious treasure! A race to unscramble a message from beyond the grave! I promise you that The Secret of Phantom Lake (1973) by William Arden, the nineteenth title in the Three Investigators series, contains all these things. So why the hell is there a cowboy on the front cover?
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