People will tell you that I don’t like the Brooks U. Banner stories of Joseph Commings. And, well, they wouldn’t be entirely wrong.
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The last time I read a book by Richard Austin Freeman, my House of Stratus edition told me it was a collection of short stories only for it to turn out to be a novel. So it’s fitting that my next encounter with Dr. John Thorndyke should reverse the situation and what is pitched on the back cover as a novel turn out to be a collection of short stories.
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First brought to my attention when one of its escapades was included in the Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime [ss] (2009), Four Square Jane (1929) by Edgar Wallace is a novel in reality comprising a series of separate adventures of our eponymous thief as she seeks to relieve the wealthy of their property in the interests of charitable endeavours.
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Having looked at Silent Nights [ss] (2015), the first collection of Christmas-themed short stories in the British Library Crime Classic collection a fortnight ago, I move on to Crimson Snow [ss] (2016), the second such collection, edited once again by Martin Edwards.
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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.
I’ve been planning this for over a year, since reviewing the British Library’s fifth collection of Christmas short stories last November. Finally, then, December will see me reviewing Christmas-themed books for perhaps the first time since starting this blog in 2015, with a second BL collection coming in the weeks ahead.
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I thought that the novel Holmes on the Range (2006) by Steve Hockensmith was the first time he wrote about crime-solving cowboy Gustav ‘Old Red’ Amlingmeyer, so imagine my surprise when I discovered that some earlier short stories had featured the character first.
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Let’s take a moment to reflect on what Tony Medawar has done in recent years for GAD fans, with Wicked Spirits (2024) being the eighth collection of lost, forgotten, and so-rare-they-doubt-their-own-existence stories by GAD luminaries Medawar has edited under the …from the Library label. Whether we get any more after this or not, and I sincerely hope we do, it’s a wonderful body of work, and only the tip of an iceberg of effort he has been putting in for decades now.
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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.
I’ve written before about the impact the long-defunct Orion Crime Masterworks series had on my discovery of classic-era crime and detective fiction, and a recent pruning of my shelves brought back to me many of the happy memories from those books. So today, I’m going to run through the ten which left, perhaps, the strongest impression on Young Jim.
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The Invisible Event 