An emerald phantom who is haunting Heaton Forest turns murderous. A man holds a dinner party with his four worst enemies and is promptly shot shortly thereafter. A woman disappears from her hotel room in Brighton, despite nobody seeing her leave the building. And six people take refuge in a house to escape the threat from a mutual enemy that they will die one by one – and then promptly start dying one by one…

Four cases for Dr Daniel Britling – police surgeon/amateur detective – to get his teeth into. Oh, and a surprise bonus story that has nothing to do with Britling and isn’t even mentioned on the back cover, for some reason…

James Ronald is to fellow blogger JJ as Brian Flynn is to me – a surprise discovery who costs a bloody fortune to collect. Ronald has an extra complication as well, as he was a prolific author but not everything he wrote was a crime novel. After reading the rather wonderful They Can’t Hang Me, I invested a small amount in A Medal For The General which had nothing remotely criminous in it at all.

Luckily, however, Moonstone Press with the help of Chris Verner, are collecting the complete “Stories Of Crime And Detection” of which this is volume 1, collecting the complete Dr Britling stories as well as Blind Man’s Bluff, the first story that Ronald had published. As that’s chronologically the first, I’ll mention that first as the story I enjoyed the most – it’s not a mystery but just a very effective “blind protagonist” short story. Rather lovely.

Ronald is a very entertaining writer, with an eye for detail and some great turns of phrase. The stories have some very strong emotional beats as well – the ending of Find The Lady, for example, or one of the deaths in Six Were To Die have more impact, are more moving than most stuff that I’ve read in the genre from the time.

These aren’t the greatest mysteries, however. Find The Lady struck me as pretty obvious, and Too Many Motives pinches its method wholesale from… somewhere else. The main attraction here, Six Must Die, either a long novella or a short novel, is entertaining and gripping, yes, but there’s no real detection here. Most of what Britling does is work out how the mysterious nemesis killed his latest victim, rather than actually find out how the killer is getting into the house in the first place.

But these are all so well told, it’s very easy to give Ronald a free pass on these issues. On the basis of this very early work from the author, and my enjoyment of They Can’t Hang Me, I’m looking forward to Volumes 2 and beyond.