Look, it took me a long time to appreciate the intelligence of the inverted mystery, in which we know who committed the crime and have to watch both them struggle over it and their eventual discoverer working out the threads of the case. But the important thing is that I got there in the end.
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A second anthology of impossible crimes from the British Library Crime Classics range, As If by Magic [ss] (2025) is another genre-spanning collection from editor and Detection Club President Martin Edwards that does much to highlight the depth and breadth of classic crime and detective fiction.
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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.
On 18th August 2025, The Invisible Event will have been running for ten years. And while I’m not a big one for introspection — I read books, I write about those books, some people read what I’ve written, rinse, repeat — a decade feels like a notable achievement and so some introspection is going to be had, for today at least.
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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.
I picked my ten favourite crime and detective novels published in the 1930s a little while ago for my online book club, but I only do a Ten Favourite… list every four months or so and thus am only just getting round to writing it up now. I am so late to the party that it might as well never have happened, but I ironed a shirt specially so, dammit, I’m going to dance. Or something.
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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.
There were, I think, few people more excited than me when it was announced that Moonstone Press would be republishing the complete mystery fiction of James Ronald. I’ve been adding to my existing posts with quick reviews of the novellas and short stories included in earlier volumes, but fifth volume The Dark Angel (1930) marks the first time that I’m reading a new-to-me James Ronald novel, one that I would in all probability have had no opportunity to experience but for the excellent collaboration of Moonstone and Chris Verner. And a selfless old lady receiving a demand to pay £5,000 (£400,000 in today’s money) is exactly the sort of pulpy setup Ronald could doubtless spin to entertaining ends.
Not such a little Little Fiction this week, as I revisit the novella Six Were to Die (1932), which I’ve read before in edited form.
Continue readingI’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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The Invisible Event 