James Ronald Suspect

From the introduction of the translator and the editor

Sometimes the best scribe makes a mistake, and sometimes the most modest one surprises with how well his calligraphy turns out one day, the elegance of the stroke, the cleanliness of the page. That is what happened to James Ronald (1905-1972) with his novel This Way Out (1940), popularly known as The Suspect, which is how Robert Siodmak retitled it when he made it into a film in 1944, with Charles Laughton and Ella Raines in the main roles. A thriller that, like good liquors, has improved with the passage of time. José Luis Garci, for example, thinks that over the years it has surpassed classics such as Sospecha (1940), by Alfred Hitchcock; Berlín Express (1951), by Jacques Tourneur; or Cartas envenenadas (1951), by Otto Preminger. And it is true that if someone is capable of believing that an obese middle-aged man, like Laughton – who excels in his role despite his physique – can fall in love with a good-looking young woman, like Ella Raines, the film is fascinating. More faithful to the original text is the Cora of the film, played by Rosalind Ivan, who immediately makes herself odious to the spectator without needing to be as dirty, gluttonous and deformed as the one in the novel. Ronald does not spare her derogatory adjectives: “Cora was waiting for him awake and her flaccid body, freed from the corset, was spread out on the sofa like a monstrous excrescence.” Dirty, scruffy, selfish, lying and unfriendly, Cora makes life impossible for her husband, Philip Marshall, her son, John, and anyone who gets in her way. She does not allow a moment of relaxation, bent on absurd manias such as removing the light bulbs in the house, leaving areas in darkness. So when Mary Grey, a tormented young woman named after a type of tea, appears on the scene, it is soon clear that Cora has everything to lose. She, the witch, like the dog in the manger, neither eats nor lets others eat, a position that will end up condemning her. And that is where the novel and the film really begin, with Cora’s death, narrated in an expressionist way, with such crudeness that it gives the reader aches, overwhelmed by the effort required to put an end to the victim. […] Once the crime is committed, suspicion arises, a term that Siodmak aptly chose as the title of his film, capable of keeping the reader in suspense until the last page of the novel, where curiously, and this is another example of singularity, there is no feeling of guilt. […] Set in London in the mid-1930s – we know this because Cora likes the American movie star Fredric March – The Suspect has saved from oblivion James Ronald, author of thirty-eight novels, seven of them signed under the pseudonyms Kirk Wales and Michael Crombie, of whom little or very little is known. There is not even agreement on the date of his death, although it seems to have happened in 1972. During his last fourteen years of life he did not write, or at least did not publish, a single line.