Cross Marks the Spot

‘I didn’t mean to kill him!’Stories of Crime & Detection Volume Six contains a full-length novel and a novelette.Cross Marks the Spot.  Actress Cicely Foster is invited to movie mogul Jacob Singerman’s flat to discuss a role in a ‘talkie’. Singerman makes advances on Cicely and she fights him off, striking his head in a struggle.  Reporter Julian Mendoza, ‘the bloodhound of Fleet Street,’ sees Cicely flee the building, and discovers the mogul murdered. Cicely’s blood-spattered glove and opened purse are at the scene of the crime and he tracks her down. It looks bleak for Cicely…but for the small matter of the corpse having been found with a bullet between his eyes. Mendoza’s investigation leads him to Colossal Pictures and the world-famous director Gustav Von Blon. The Sundial Drug Mystery   During a stormy night, three actors are travelling to the Norwich Theatre when their car breaks down. They arrive outside a deserted mansion and force their way in.  A series of mysterious events ratchet up the tension, and the trio become aware they have trespassed into a hornet’s nest of mystery and intrigue. JAMES JACK RONALD (1905-1972) was a prolific writer of pulp fiction, mystery stories and dramatic novels. Raised in Glasgow, Ronald moved to Chicago aged seventeen to ‘earn his fortune’, later returning to the UK to pursue a writing career. His early works were serializations and short stories syndicated in newspapers and magazines around the world. Ronald wrote under a number of pseudonyms, including Michael Crombie, Kirk Wales, Peter Gale, Mark Ellison and Kenneth Streeter among others. Several books were adapted into films, including Murder in the Family (1938), The Witness Vanishes (1939), and The Suspect (1944).