I’m reviewing this out of order, because it’s been a busy week and so I’ve not had time to read the 180-page novella which comes next in this collection, but a 12-page short story…yeah, I’ve been able to fit that in.
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Five and a half years ago I tracked down and read an obscure novelette by long-forgotten British pulp writer James Ronald, which set me on the trail of his far-from-readily-available other works. This week, Moonstone Press published the first two in a series of reprints that will see Ronald’s entire criminous catalogue made available, and series editor Chris Verner is here to tell us all about it.
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I’ve been struggling to enjoy my reading of late, so it was something of a relief to revisit The Sittaford Mystery (1931) by Agatha Christie and find it so enjoyable. We’re probably in the lower half of Christie’s second-tier work here, but for a relatively early book it shows a lot of promise, goes about its simple story well, and doesn’t try to get too clever in doing what it does. Yes, she would go on to write much, much better works in the decade that followed, but taken on its own terms this is a good little mystery which gives a sense of how far the young Agatha had come in her career, and hints at the maven she would soon be recognised as.
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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Another year, another Bodies from the Library collection — incredibly, the sixth — and another opportunity to sit down with Tony Medawar and talk about the wonderful work he’s doing on all our behalfs.
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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…
My slow cataloguing of the Sherlock Holmes short stories from the pen of Arthur Conan Doyle progresses to the second collection, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894).
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The Invisible Event 