Renton’s Ruse: An Australian Cricket Story
Martin Chandler |Published: 1999
Pages: 12
Author: Rosenwater, Irving
Publisher: Private
Rating: 2.5 stars
This is undoubtedly one of Irving Rosenwater’s stranger frolics, but then he can be forgiven that, given that all thirty copies of this one were given away to his friends.
On this occasion Rosenwater also passed over the writing duties, well most of them anyway. The author of this Australian Cricket Story is one John Patrick a man who, I regret, I have been able to find out next to nothing about and, perhaps surprisingly, Rosenwater does not reveal anything about him in his prefatory note. I wonder if perhaps on this occasion even Rosenwater’s diligence could find nothing?
What the note does do is explain where, in June 1910, the story first appeared, the Pall Mall Gazette, a magazine that first appeared in 1893 and ran until 1914.
And the story itself? I have to say that I don’t much care for cricket fiction, and this didn’t start very well, which doesn’t augur well for a positive verdict. But the narrative improved sufficiently to persuade me to go back to the beginning and start again and having done so I have to concede that it is not a bad story at all, as the complete stranger guesting for one side asks for an over or two with the game lost and promptly takes 8 wickets for two runs to win the day.
All in all I still think Renton’s Ruse is more than a tad self-indulgent, but in the final analysis it was certainly worth reading.
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