The Name is Malone (1958) by Craig Rice

Craig Rice's The Name is Malone (1958) is together with The People vs. Withers and Malone (1963) and Murder, Mystery and Malone (2002) three, posthumously published short story collections starring the hard drinking, shop soiled Chicago criminal attorney, John J. Malone – who has to do without the company of Jake Justus and Helene Brand in his short story outings. Stuart Palmer's Miss Hildegarde Withers replaced Malone's troublesome friends in the above mentioned collection of crossover stories, but most of the short stories tend to be solo cases for the Chicago attorney. So they also tend to be less screwbally than the novels and the stories collected in The Name in Malone, while having comedic elements, are more in line with the hardboiled, alcohol fueled private eye fiction of those days with plots.

The first story from The Name is Malone is the curiously and tantalizingly-titled "The Murder of Mr. Malone," which appeared to have been originally published in 1952 or '53, but have been unable to find out in which magazine publication. But it was first collected here. It has that odd touch of surrealism that runs through a lot of Rice's detective fiction. Malone is hired by Ed Cable to investigate the death of his aunt, Eva Cable, who died from natural causes and left behind one of those "screwy wills." Eva left her entire fortune to the daughter of an old friend, Mici Faulkner, which left the young woman "a decidedly astonished heiress." Ed Cable ordered Malone to investigate the will and the cause of death, but his investigation showed Eva died of natural causes and the will to be genuine. But when Malone is stuck at a Los Angeles airport ("...still fogged down"), the case begins to twist and turn in unexpected ways. Malone's luggage and ticket gets mixed up with those of the "friendly stranger" he met at the airport cocktail bar and unknowingly travels under the stranger's name, J.J. McNabb. When he finally lands, Malone is greeted by newspaper headlines screaming, "JOHN J. MALONE, CHICAGO ATTORNEY, FOUND MURDERED ON PLANE." So he continues digging into the problem under the dead man's name, which turns out to have an interesting variation on murder hinging on a motive that's not a motive.

So good, tangled and sometimes humorous opening story showing Rice belonged to that small, select group of mystery writers who could write comedic mysteries that can be genuinely funny. For example, Malone arranges for the body of "Malone" to be be transported to funeral parlor of his friend, Rico di Angelo, who tells Malone that "ever since your body arrived, I have been expecting to hear from you" – "tell me, Malone, is it for your life insurance?" Yes, Malone enjoys quite a prestine reputation in Chicago. Lastly, I should note the story has a slightly bigger role for Malone's secretary, Maggie, who even gets herself arrested off-page for her employer's murder. It sometimes felt like Rice was nodding and winking towards Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason and Della Street.

There is, however, nothing to laugh about in the second story, "The Tears of Evil," culled from the March, 1953, issue of Manhunt. A dark, grim tale of crime rather than a detective story where the question is not so much whodunit but why. Malone attends the wedding anniversary of two close friends, George and Kathy Weston, whom, of all the people he knew, they "were two of the ones he'd liked the best." During the party, George staggers towards Malone with the expression of "a punch-drunk prize-fighter" and tells him Kathy is dead. Murdered. George found her naked lying on the bedroom floor with a broken neck. There were about seven other people in the house and one of them, curiously enough, served time for "assault and rape" and is currently out on parole. Not a character you often find in the works of Golden Age mystery writers. But this is not a whodunit. The real murderer is pretty obvious and the question becomes why it was done, which is where the story falls to pieces. Firstly, this is one of the shortest stories in the collection and can only tell you these people are important to Malone ("If Kathy was dead, then a little part of him had died too"). Not show you. So the story completely misses the emotion punch it tried to deliver. Secondly, there's not a single clue to the motive and leaves a not unimportant detail unexplained. I can see why it was included, but surely, there must have been better, uncollected stories in the series?

The third story is a locked room mystery, of sorts, but already discussed "His Heart Could Break" (1943) not so long ago as part of the anthology Golden Age Locked Room Mysteries (2022). So I'll be skipping that one here. 

"Goodbye Forever," originally published in the December, 1951, issue Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, which is a virtually unknown impossible crime story in the tradition of G.K. Chesterton, John Dickson Carr and Edward D. Hoch – neither listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) nor Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019). Larry Lee, "handsome young orchestra leader" and "America's Number One glamor boy," who has a new song to feature on that night's radio broadcast. Lee worked up a special, last-minute arrangement using the first four notes from a cursed song, Tosti's Good-bye Forever. A prevailing, stupid superstition among musicians that any part of the song can never be played or broadcast without some terrible disaster happening immediately. Since it was a last-minute arrangement, it was impossible to rehearse and now Lee is worried about the nervous, highly superstitious clarinet players, Art Sample, because those four notes were "so skillfully hidden in the orchestration that no one would know what he was playing," until he had played it. So he asks Malone to come along to the radio studio as legal insurance in case something would happen.

Malone agrees to come along to the radio studio, but wonders whether it's a gag or publicity stunt cooked up by Lee's press-agent. But when the band played the four notes, Art Sample slowly crumpled to the floor in front of Malone's eyes. A medical examination reveals he had been killed with a quick acting poison, aconite, but "he didn't eat or drink anything, or even smoke, just before he died." No, the poison was not on the reed of his clarinet. So an impossible poisoning and the seasoned, borderline obsessed impossible crime fans will likely spot the method and murderer, before the vital clue is given. But normal people have a shot at solving it by spotting that tell-all clue. A very decent, very conventional impossible crime story that as Mike Grost observes "fits into the paradigms of John Dickson Carr's Locked Room Lecture" and reads like an ancestor of Hoch's locked room stories. This could just as easily have been the plot for a Simon Ark or Dr. Hawthorne story. Sure, "Goodbye Forever" is not a blistering original impossible crime mystery, but quite enjoyed it as a whole and really deserves to be a bit better known. 

"And the Birds Still Sing" was first published in the December, 1952, issue of EQMM and is best described as an imaginative flight of fancy with Rice's take on the multiple, false-solutions. Malone has a client dropped into his lap out of nowhere. Mona Trent, an ex-showgirl, needs his help and asks the lawyer to come to her apartment the next morning to discuss the matter in detail. But when he arrives the next morning, Malone finds Mona Trent sitting in a big chair near the window with "a neat little bullet hole in her forehead." She had been killed with a rifle shot. What follows is a carousal ride as Malone goes from client to client as he goes through multiple, different solutions involving the victim's jealous ex-boss, an even more jealous admirer and a woman who took a shot at the chirping morning birds. A fantastic story reminiscent of the best from Ellery Queen with its multiple, false-solutions and the real solution hinging on space, time and bits of seemingly trivial information ("Maggie, where can I find an Almanac?"). A highlight from this collection! 

"He Never Went Home," originally published in the March, 1957, issue Manhunt, is another unusually structured, mostly well-done detective story opening with Susie Snyder waking up in her apartment and finding the body of a stranger sprawled on her davenport – a knife sticking out of his chest. Whoever tried to frame Susie counted on her "flying into fits" and "coming unglued generally," but she kept calm and called Malone. Malone immediately goes to work on covering up anything that could get her into trouble, but first arranges a fake alibi before tampering with the evidence inside the apartment. But then he finds himself in a sticky situation when an anonymous tip to the police brings Captain Dan von Flanagan and Detective Lieutenent Klutchetsky, of the Homicide Squad, to the apartment. The strength of this story is definitely in how far Malone is willing to go to protect a client and the brilliantly posed, slightly surrealistic problem posed by the murder weapon later on in the investigation. It also provides a clue to the murderer's identity, which is not nearly as good or inventive as other elements. Great storytelling with a somewhat uneven plot that has moments of inspiration. 

"Life Can Be Horrible" comes from the September, 1953, issue of Manhunt and is possibly unique in the history of the genre as well as occupying a special in the series, but both for vastly different reasons. Firstly, the story gives a bigger role to a family of recurring characters headed by Joe the Angel, of Joe the Angel's City Hall Bar, where Malone usually celebrates his victories in court, drowns his sorrows or tries to pry a quick hundred-buck loan from Joe. Joe the Angel sends his two young nephews, Eddie and Frankie di Angelo, to Malone as they themselves in potentially a lot of trouble. Eddie and Frankie were approached by a big, pretty lady who told them her ex-husband was holding onto ten thousand dollars in thousand dollar bills that belonged to her. She offered the boys a cut of the money, if they agreed to get it and provided them with instructions ("sap him"). But what they find was a body and no money! Secondly, Malone is receives another client, "a king-sized Amazon," named Nadine Sapphire who's "a lady wrestler." Nadine Sapphire tells Malone the same story about a husband holding on to ten thousand dollars and Malone accompanies her to the secluded house expecting to help discover the body, but "now the body was gone and the money was here." And then Rico di Angelo calls Malone to tell that somebody had left a body in his funeral parlor! A pity you really can't solve what actually happened as some of the relevant information does not surface until Malone attends a wrestling event to watch Nadine Sapphire wrestle Daphne Flowers ("a combination of ballet and sheer mayhem"). That brings us to what this story a rarity and possibly one-of-a-kind.

First of all, I'm not American. So might have missed something culturally, but professional wrestling always struck me as more American than Teddy Roosevelt, MacDonalds and Bald Eagles mating to a gunfire rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner. You would think the world of professional wrestling with its loud, colorful and clashing personalities, real and fake, would have provided fertile ground for mystery and thriller writer alike for the past 100 years, but appears to be practically untouched – only example being Rice's "Life Can Be Horrible." Sports mysteries have a long history to the point where you can call it a sub-genre or sub-category of the genre with its own fans and collectors. You can find sports mysteries incorporating murder in almost every sport imaginable, but not professional wrestler and their absence in the American detective story and pulps is simply baffling. I always understood it was pretty big in America and quite important during the early days of television, but, whenever a ring is involved in a sports mystery, it usually is a boxing ring (e.g. John V. Turner's Death Must Have Laughed, 1932). So why did it never, in all those decades, provided a backdrop or character for more than one detective story or novel? It seems like an untapped reservoir of potential for creative mystery writers to play around in. Just think of all the bizarre motives and potential tricks that could spring forth from that strange, back then closed world of wrestling. Anyway, moving on!

Regrettably, the last three stories are not anywhere near as good as the previous seven stories and partly mired in the territory of the pulp-thriller, which was not for the best here. 

"Good-bye, Good-bye" (1946) started captivating with a very well-done, dizzying scene in which a young woman is clinging to the ledge twenty-two stories above the pavement. Malone manages to get her inside and learns she has a history of attempted suicides, but she claims someone tried to kill her. The story definitely has its moments, but the ending turned on a curious, complicated will and inheritance that felt a little trite. "The Bad Luck Murders" (1943) is another story that began very promising as Malone tries to help a client find her criminal, no good brother among the lost youth and homeless men who roam the city shelters and two-bit flop houses. Only thing that adds any interest to the story as Malone uncovers a ridiculous, needlessly complicated and risky murder plot. That's coming from the mouth of someone who fanboys all over impossible crime, dying messages and unbreakable alibis! "The End of Fear' (1953) begins as a chase thriller as a rich heiress apparently killed two men and went on the run "carrying a briefcase full of narcotics," but the echoing gunshot immediately clues you which direction the story is heading once Malone enters the picture halfway through. Not one of Rice's best or most inspired detective stories and only notable for Helene making an appearance.

It's a pity the last three stories dragged down the overall quality of The Name is Malone, because the seven stories preceding them were great examples of Rice's ability to combine complex plot patterns with vivid, borderline surrealistic storytelling to create her own unique brand of detective fiction. Some worked slightly better than others and personally liked the more tightly-plotted, fairly-clued stories like "His Heart Could Break," "Goodbye Forever" and "And the Birds Still Sing," but, on a whole, the collection was a pleasant reminder why John J. Malone is my favorite dodgy lawyer-detective. Definitely recommended with the only caveat being that fans who know Malone primarily from his novel-length outings will miss the all-out, boozy madcap antics, screwball comedy and the general pell-mell. There's still some of that in the short stories, but done with a bit of restraint... except for the excessive drinking.

A Melee of Miraculous Mysteries

Years ago, I compiled a list, entitled "My Favorite Locked Room Mysteries II: Short Stories and Novellas," which covered, as one of the comments pointed out, impossible crime tales from the well-known locked room anthologies amalgamated with a handful of more obscure stories – such as Robert Arthur's unsung classic "The Glass Bridge" (collected in Mystery and More Mystery, 1966). I wanted to update this list for years, but simply had not enough material at my disposal to expend on it.

So I have been discussing more short story collections and single short stories on this blog, which has brought some gems or interesting curiosities to light. I'll be drawing on these reviews when I have read enough to finally update the list. This blog-post is meant to reduce the glut of single short stories clogging my pile of unread detective stories. I'll be going through them in the order I have read them.

Craig Rice's "...And Be Merry" is a short-short story of three pages, originally published in the January, 1954, issue of Manhunt and confronts John J. Malone with the impossible poisoning of Alma Madison. She was found dead in a locked dinette, but Captain von Flanagan, of Homicide, told Malone they had been unable to find even "a trace of cyanide in that whole apartment." The victim was under treatment of a psychiatrist and the explanation hinges on her eccentric behavior. An unusual short-short impossible crime story, but, sadly, also a very forgettable one.

Charles Larson's "Mail Me My Tombstone" appears to have been only published in the April, 1943, issue of Ten Detective Aces and is not listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991).

Jim is a happily married writer of detective stories, but "the mad jangling" of the telephone briefly turns his life upside down. An old flame, named Rita Manning, has been arrested for the murder of her husband, Steven Loring, who was "a big-time gambler," but Rita tells him she was with her mother when three witnesses heard gun shots from inside the house – she wants Jim to solve the murder by posing as her lawyer. A complicating factor is that the house was securely locked and bolted from the inside with the sooth in chimney undisturbed. A minor, but pleasant, story with a solution obviously derived from a famous short story and the locked room-trick is a slight modification of an age-old trick.

Ed Bryant's "The Lurker in the Locked Bedroom" was originally published in the June, 1971, issue of Fantastic and blends fantasy, horror and contemporary crime fiction with a psychic detective and a classic locked room scenario – which was somewhat reminiscent of Edogawa Rampo (e.g. "The Human Chair" and "The Stalker in the Attic"). Aleister Houghman is called to the Swithit Hotel for Young Ladies where three young women have been assaulted and raped in Room 491, but the door of the room has "a latch, a safety chain and two bolt-type locks." So how did the perpetrator managed to get to the women? The solution is a pure, undiluted fantasy with a great and darkly humorous take on a classic trope of the horror genre, which kind of disqualifies it as a locked room mystery. However, it certainly is a memorable treatment of the impossible crime story.

E.C.R. Lorac's "Remember to Ring Twice" is one of the few short stories she produced, originally published in 1950 in the Evening Standard, which was finally reprinted in the anthology The Long Arm of the Law (2017).

Police Constable Tom Brandon overhears a conversation in the bar of The Jolly Sailor about five hundred pounds, an elderly aunt and being "fed up lookin' after the old lady." A week later, P.C. Brandon is walking his beat when this conversation comes floating back to him when, behind the locked front door of a house, he hears "a faint scream and a series of heavy thuds." The front door is unlocked and they find the elderly aunt at the bottom of the stairs with a broken neck. Unfortunately, the story was way too short to play and the solution too technical to be completely fair with the reader, but it certainly was a good police story. I liked it.

The next story I read was Harry Kemelman's "The Man on the Ladder," collected The Nine Mile Walk and Other Stories (1968), which everyone appears to like, but I didn't care for it at all. The quasi-impossible situation is a man falling to his death from a roof and the murderer has an iron-clad alibi, but the solution was infuriatingly obvious. And this made the second half a drag to read.

Finally, Eric Ambler's "The Case of the Overheated Service Flat," originally published in the July 24, 1940, issue of The Sketch and is one of only half-a-dozen short stories about the refugee Czech detective, Dr. Jan Czissar – who's a thorn in the side of Assistant-Commissioner Mercer. In this story, the police is trying to hook a notorious wife-killer, Thomas Jones, who prematurely buried three wives after they tragically died from carbon-monoxide poisoning. These deaths have left him a man of independent means, but the first two deaths have been shelved as unfortunate accidents. And the police really want to nail him for the murder of his third wife. Only problem is how to proof it.

The premise of the story is very similar to Arthur Porges' "The Scientist and the Wife Killer," collected The Curious Cases of Cyriack Skinner Grey (2009), which even has a clever, science-based solution that you would expect from Porges! I really liked this tale and you can expect me to return to this series at some point in the future.

So, all in all, this medley of impossible crime stories was the expected mixed bag of tricks, but I'm glad I can now cross them off my locked room column of my to-be-read list. I'll try to pick a non-impossible crime novel for my next read.

The Corpse Steps Out (1940) by Craig Rice

Georgiana Ann Randolph is best remembered by her penname, "Craig Rice," which she adopted in the late 1930s when creating a triumvirate of hard-drinking, morally ambiguous, but comical, detective-characters as memorable as Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason and Rex Stout's Archie Goodwin – earning her the title of Queen of the Screwball Mystery. An honorary title nobody to date has disputed and with good reason.

Rice was one of those rare mystery novelists who could write genuinely funny detective stories and her second effort, The Corpse Steps Out (1940), is arguably her best screwball mystery.

The Corpse Steps Out takes place one and a half year after 8 Faces at 3 (1939) and John J. Malone, Jake Justus and Helene Brand have gone their separate ways. However, they have a knack for attracting copious amount of trouble and this destined them to meet again, which happens when a client of Justus becomes involved in a blackmail plot with multiple murders and bodies being lugged around the city of Chicago – which makes this a darkly comedic, madcap chase story in the spirit of Carter Dickson's The Punch and Judy Murders (1936) and Norbert Davis' The Mouse in the Mountain (1943). All of this running around begins with the lead star of the Nelle Brown Revue finding the body of the man who tried to blackmail her with a stack of embarrassing love letters.

Jake Justus appeared in 8 Faces at 3 as a newspaper reporter, but has since gone into business for himself as a press agent and manager. When the reader meets him again he wonders why, with untold billions of people in the world, "everything had to pick him to happen to." Nelle Brown is a client of Justus and he sees it as his duty to keep her out of trouble. Even if it turns out she shot her ex-sweetie to pieces.

There are, however, complication and they crop up at an ever-increasing pace: one of these complications concerns the removal of the body from the kitchen of the crime-scene and the person responsible left a note for the landlady – asking her to sent the belongings to Honolulu, Hawaii. So that took care of one problem, but the love letters are still out there and these letters pose a greater threat for Brown's radio career than a potential murder rap.

According to Justus, radio reaches every household in America and "you've to keep it clean," because their sponsor would cancel the contract in "a minute if this thing broke the wrong way."

As you would expect by this point in the story, a second blackmailer rears his head and wants Brown to sign a personal-management contract, which means that he collects all of her income and pays her a weekly salary. A nice, legal way to apply an inescapable vise-grip on a blackmail victim, but this is not the only thumb-screw this second blackmailer tries to apply on the radio star. Brown is forced to perform in a secret audition for a prospective buyer of her revue, an out-of-town soap manufacturer, but at the end of the show they discover his body in the private room where he was listening to the show – slumped in a chair with a bullet in his head. So they did the only sensible thing you can do in such a situation. No, no, no. They did not phone the police. That would be silly. They dragged the body out of the studio, drove it to Lincoln Park and dumped the body on a bench. But the various blackmail schemes and rising bodycount is not the only source of comedy in this story.

After Justus is reunited with Helene Brand, a famous beauty, socialite and heiress, they decide to get married, but getting to knot tied is easier said than done and every time they determined to go to Crown Point to get married a monkey wrench, or two, is thrown into the work – such as getting chased by a squad car full of police officers with a body in the backseat. She even has to go into hiding until Malone can get an arson charge off her neck. Not to mention a case of body snatching, obstruction of justice, falsifying evidence and resisting arrest.

Well, you get the idea. The Corpse Steps Out is a fast-paced, rip-roaringly funny detective story, but this does not mean that all of the outrageous plot develops are played merely for laughs. There's method to Rice's madness.

There are three, convincingly motivated, shooting deaths in the story and the second murder, one committed in the radio studio, comes with a nifty, unexpected twist in the tail and this makes the plot rewarding as well as funny. But even the more serious aspects of the story are not devoid of humor. Rice mercilessly pokes fun at the type of 1920s detective novel John Dickson Carr criticized in his famous essay, "The Grandest Game in the World," in which the author makes the scene of the crime resemble a bus terminal at rush-hour as characters wander in and out of the room – leaving behind cuff links, bus tickets, handkerchiefs and cigarette ends. Justus observed at one point in the story that the first murder "seems to have been one of the major social events of the year," because "everybody was there." Everybody was walking in and out of the apartment as the victim was bleeding out on the kitchen floor.

My only complaint is that my favorite shady lawyer-detective, the incomparable John J. Malone, only has a very small role in the book.

Malone is basically just there to provide a solution when the time comes to wrap up the show, which is why some editions bill The Corpse Steps Out as "A Jake Justus Mystery." However, this does nothing diminish the sheer joy and clever aspects of the story. I would actually recommend readers who are new to Rice to begin with The Corpse Steps Out instead of 8 Faces at 3, because it gives you a good idea what Rice was capable of doing when she was in top-form.

Anyway, in my case, I'm glad that for once I saved one of the better entries in a series for last, which is not something that happens very often. There are, however, two posthumously, ghostwritten novels, The Picked Poodles (1960) and But the Doctor Died (1968), but they're considered to be piss-poor in quality and the latter was reputedly written as an attempt to cash in on the spy craze – except that this last "official" title in the series is completely devoid of Rice's trademark sense of humor.

So this only leaves me with a collection of short stories (The Name is Malone, 1960) and the three mystery novels she wrote as "Michael Venning," but those are stories I'll get to another time.

A Tiny Bit of Trouble

"The shortest joke in the world. Two words: midget shortage."

- Jimmy Carr

A brief glance at the blog-posts that have accumulated under a specific "toe-tag," labeled Craig Rice, learns that the last review of her screwball series featuring the trio of John J. Malone, Jake Justus and Helene Brand date back to the early parts of 2011 – which can be construed as criminal negligence. Luckily, I found myself in the mood for something zany and The Big Midget Murders (1942) was just within reach. So let's jump right into it.

In a previous outing, namely Trial by Fury (1941), Jake Justus had won a casino from a Chicago millionaires in a wager "that she could commit a murder without being caught at it" and emphatically lost.

As a result, Jake became the proud owner of a casino and restructured the place into a cross between a nightclub and a theatre, which he financed with a loan from Max Hook – a semi-regular character in the series. However, owning money to "a gambling czar" with a body count to his name proved to be the least of Jake's problems.

The main course of entertainment comes from the act of Jay Otto, "the biggest little midget in the world," who's as talented as they come, but with a hate-filled, spiteful personality that reportedly drove his former secretary from a New York hotel window. So is it any wonder Jake calls in the help of his friend and Chicago's famous criminal lawyer, John J. Malone, to help him "fight out" of a "tricky clause in his contract." But it never comes to that.

They find Jay Otto in his dressing room, his "face blackened and discolored," hanging inside his closet from a noose made out of silk stockings. It's murder with a capital lowercase m!

So, they do what every sane person would do in such a situation: stuff the body in a bull-fiddle case and attempt to cover it up! There is, however, one snag in their plan: they turn out to be characters in a Craig Rice novel and therefore nothing will go smoothly or according to the plan – which explains the large amount of alcohol consumption by the characters. It can be a tiresome universe to life in.

First of all, the bull-fiddle case with the body inside is taken from the casino and turns up again on the doorstep of Justus and Helene, but this time it's empty. The problem is that the key to the fiddle case was in Justus' pocket, which resulted in The Big Midget Murders being marked as a (semi) impossible crime story and was even listed by Robert Adey in Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes (1991). However, the explanation to the body being taken from the locked case makes this explicitly not a locked room-type of mystery and shouldn't be read as such or else you might end up severely disappointed – which also has to with only being a minor point in the overall plot.

Anyhow, the body of Jay Otto turns up in his own bed, redressed in silk pajamas, which puts Malone, Jake and Helene in the troublesome position of simultaneously having to figure out what just happened and keeping police attention away from the casino. Which is easier said than done.

This alcohol-fueled, merry-go-round involves a faded diva, named Ruth Rawlson, who accidentally drank from a doped bottle of whiskey in Otto's dressing room and knew of his death way before anyone else. There is Otto's assistant, Allswell McJackson, a kind giant of six-foot-six who has a chemistry degree, but had to settle for his current position because nobody wanted to hire a college professor who "looks like a wrestling champion" and became an immediate suspect after the second (official) discovery of the body. A search for a leather-covered strongbox gets Justus bumped on the head, but that's par of the course for a series closely linked to the hardboiled genre and Helene discovers a second body hanging from a pair of silk stockings – which leads to a dangerous encounter with one of Max Hook's rogue gunman and a descend into a dark cellar.

All of this somehow ties together with some of choirgirls at the casino and a classic money scheme that involved the dead midget, but Malone figures it all out during a Tommy Cooper-esque magic performance at the casino. A bit I very much enjoyed, but, as I've said before, I love bits of magic and illusions in my detective stories. Even if it doesn't involved an impossible crime plot. It's just fun to read.

The only drawback of the revelation is that the central clue hangs upon a minor observation, which helped in hiding the murderer from the reader, but should take nothing away from this drunken ride and its smooth, almost perfect arrival at it's logical conclusion. You might argue that The Big Midget Murders is a rather average fare for Rice, but, you have to remember, that not all classic mystery writers were Craig Rice and her punch-drunk style of plotting-and writing were practically unique in the genre.

So every book in this series has been, thus far, somewhat of an experience that I can definitely recommend, especially if you want something out of the ordinary, because Craig Rice knew how to avoid the ordinary.

If you're completely new to Rice, I would recommend to start with her classic and charming standalone novel, Home Sweet Homicide (1944), which won't fail to make you fall in love with her work.

Unfinished Business

"Every silver cane has a grubby end..."

- Albert Stroller (Hustle)  

Georgiana Ann Randolph was an accomplished and adulated mystery writer under the nom de plume of "Craig Rice," whose booze fueled, madcap shenanigans centering around John J. Malone garnered her the moniker of Queen of the Screwball Mystery, but Rice's standalones and reputedly ghosted novels carved out a reputation for themselves.

Home Sweet Homicide (1944) stands out in Rice's oeuvre as a rare, but truly original, standalone novel and essential reading for everyone who enjoys good fiction – regardless of which genre you prefer. I'm even tempted to say the book transcended the genre. However, Rice wrote more than just that one book and the praise I have seen being heaped on To Catch a Thief (1943), written as if by "Daphne Sanders," secured the title a spot at the top of my wish list. Well, I wasn't disappointed when I finally got around to reading it.

John Moon doubles as protagonist and antagonist in To Catch a Thief, shifting between thievery and snooping around for clues, which makes him ancestor of Lawrence Block's The Burglar Who-series, but relieving Poppy Hymers of a string of emeralds has top priority at the opening of the story – before everything becomes progressively worse. The car they're in crashes and Moon is forced to improvise a kidnapping. Poppy feels isolated from the world and decides to join Moon in his mission. And it's a mission. The story moves to the office of Donovan, a private-investigator, who was hired to investigate a thief targeting a group of seven men and sends them warning notes – signed by a person referring to himself simply as "N." Yes. This aspect of the plot vibrates with V for Vendetta-vibes.

The group formed a syndicate and left a financial massacre in their wake when they crashed the stock market, wiping out a slew of innocent people in the process, which gives Rice an excuse to slip in a bit of social commentary on a situation that's (to say the least) still topical today. Donovan gets to poke around the debris of lives they wrecked, while Poppy's stepmother, Dorothy Hymers, cooks up a plot with her lover, Leon Martelli, to steal her own bracelet and blame it on the mysterious "N" – who's well aware of the plot and stages a double-cross. The double-cross turns into a triple-cross when someone strangles an unconscious Mrs. Hymers after Moon left the house. Like Arsène Lupin in Maurice Leblanc's 813 (1910), Moon spearheads the murder inquiry in which he's one of the suspects and knows his way around a disguise. He even poses as a keen amateur detective to bother and drug the policeman guarding the scene of the crime!

This all makes To Catch a Thief very different in structure from every other Rice novel I have read to date, but you can still identify it as one of her stories because it's covered with one tell-tale marking: her detectives operate as a team. There's Poppy playing Evey to Moon's "V" and Donovan has close ties with Tom Clark of The Gazette and Inspector Garrity of the Homicide Squad. Moon also has semi-official team mates in a former prizefighter and a forger/fixer. There's a Leverage reference hidden in there somewhere.

Moon and Donovan agree on a truce in order to find the murderer of Mrs. Hymers, while suspects go missing and the body count keeps rising, however, the actual question of the book is the identity of John Moon – who could be anyone from a figure in the background story of the financial raiders or even maintaining a third identity.

I love a good roguish tale as much as a well crafted mystery and Rice skillfully guided the plot through the gray area separating the genres, but, surprisingly, the zaniness was toned down quite a bit and you could say this was Rice at her most sober. To Catch a Thief is not an overly serious or drab book, far from it, it's not written in the tipsy, punch-drunk style of the Malone novels. Despite the typical Ricean plot elements, there's a serious, but human, touch to the story and there were a few very well drawn scenes. I liked the book is what I'm trying to say. But then again, Rice seldom disappoints.

Note for the curious: the penname "Daphne Sanders" was the name of a character from The Wrong Murder (1940). If only JDC knew picking a pseudonym could be that easy.

The Ghost in His Name

"Who do you think you are, Ellery Queen?"

- Melva Lonigan (Crime on My Hands, 1944)

During the early 1940s, Craig Rice, Queen of the Screwball Mystery, collaborated as a scenarist on The Falcon movies, which starred actor George Sanders as a debonair gentleman detective with an appreciation for the female form, and from this pool of creative consciousness eventually sprang Crime on My Hands (1944) – a lighthearted detective romp in which George Sanders takes it upon himself to clear-up a number of fatal shootings on the set of an action-packed Western. 

The name that was printed on the front cover and across the title page of this book was that of George Sanders, but there was, at least, one silent partner, working behind the scenes of this project, who did most, if not all, of the work. Craig Rice was the ghost in the typewriter, however, it's unclear if Cleve Cartmill, who seems to have strayed from his usual haunts, science-fiction and fantasy, to help her pen this facetious detective novel. But then again, it's not entirely impossible, either, and his part could've been limited to lending his expertise, as a science-fiction writer, to help her with the technical details on one of George Sanders' inventions – which he rigged up in order to trap the killer. It proved to be unsuccessful enterprise.

Crime on My Hands opens with a sneak-peek at George Sanders at work, as he shoots one of the final scenes for his latest movie, Die by Night, in which he plays the role of a self-assured, philandering amateur sleuth to perfection, but the thespian has grown tired of always playing the detective. 

"The vogue is for the light-hearted playboy with a butter heart and iridium brain to become involved in a murder situation. Now the audience knows that I, as the amateur detective, am going to triumph in the end. There's no suspense, except of an intellectual nature. The melodramatic action seeks to cover that dramatic fault, but I know suspense is lacking. I can't be wholehearted about it when I know that I will win, no matter what."

Fortunately, for him, he had to foresight to hire a clever and competent business agent, Melva Lonigan, to look after his professional interests and she managed to procure a contract in his name for the lead role in Seven Dreams – a fast-paced, action-filled Western fraught with danger and romance set against the backdrop of a barren, sun blasted desert landscape. Unfortunately, for him, this change of pace and setting is short-lived, as he, once again, finds himself hunched over the sprawled, blood-spattered remains of an extra, in the middle of a circle of wagons, but this time the cameras aren't rolling and the microphones are turned-off – and our on-screen gumshoe quickly notices that movie villains are nothing like their the real-life counterparts.

This murderer, for example, neglected to lither the scene of the crime with incriminating evidence for him to glance at and mutter cryptic remarks. As a matter of fact, this evasive gunman even expunged the few tell-tale clues, such as a film can protecting the undeveloped scene of the fatal shooting and a pair of silver handled revolvers, which our self-styled amateur sleuth had to go on. Not a good sport at all.

What I found interesting, whilst reading this book, was how well Rice had obliterated nearly every trace that could identify her as its author. There are still one or two sequences in this book that bear a partial finger print of her style, such as filming a scene in an artificially created sand storm, in which Sanders seems to be confronted with his shadowy adversary, and the parade of suspects who came tramping into his cabin during a botched attempt at entrapping the gunslinger, but, all in all, this is not a detective story that conformed to her usual style. 

In a way, this is also quite amusing, if you take into consideration that the authorship of Gypsy Rose Lee's The G-String Murders (1941) and Mother Finds a Body (1942) were ascribed to her. I have only read the latter, but I immediately understood why people found it so easy to believe that they were penned by Rice – since they were covered with, what appeared to be, her fingerprints. There was a whiff of surrealism that emanated from the pages, the three main characters formed a unity (all but one of Rice's series detectives are team players) and the zaniness was vintage Ricean.

Lee's authorship of The G-String Murders and Mother Finds a Body has now been established and they were probably put down on paper with Rice's style and plotting technique in mind – which simply explains how a not entirely untalented amateur could equal the best efforts of a professional. Crime on My Hands also reinforces this claim, in a topsy-turvy way. Why would she ghost one book in her own, unique and easily identifiable style and cleverly disguise the other. I mean, if I wouldn't know any better and was asked to hazard a guess, as to who ghosted this book for George Sanders, the closest I would get to hitting the mark would be blurting out Stuart Palmer's name – on the fourth or fifth guess.

On a whole, Crime on My Hands is an OK story of crime and detection, but a must-read for fans that prefer their sleuths at their most amateurish and face their perils and brave their dangers in an upbeat manner – with a roguish grin plastered across their face. It's just plain fun, even if the track to the solution runs along a badly maintained railway line. But that shouldn't impair the fun derived from the overall story. The Rue Morgue Press should definitely take a look at this one for their catalogue.

There's a second detective novel that bore the name of George Sanders on its cover, Stranger at Home (1946), but this one was from the hand of Leigh Brackett – a writer primarily known for her science-fiction and screen writing. But contrary to its, more well-known, predecessor, this book is actually still in print and one that I will probably take a look at in the upcoming year.

Murder, Mystery and Mom

"Sometimes we go for a whole week without finding one single corpse."

- Gypsy Rose Lee (Mother Finds a Body, 1942)

The paternity of Gypsy Rose Lee's two detective stories, The G-String Murders (1941) and Mother Finds a Body (1942), has been speculated on from the moment the first copy rolled off the presses, and popular opinion at the time ascribed them to mystery novelist Craig Rice - who later fanned the fires of supposition by ghosting Crime on My Hands (1944) for actor George Sanders. This fallacy was considered to be a fact until recently evidence emerged that definitively proved Lee's authorship and the controversy was finally laid to rest. 

But having read Mother Finds a Body, I can understand why readers so easily gobbled up the surmise of Craig Rice's supposed role as Gypsy Rose Lee's ghostwriter. The plot is simply covered with what appears to be her paw prints. There is, first of all, a whiff of surrealism that lingers throughout the plot and the zaniness is vintage Ricean, but even more deceptive was perhaps the unity between Gypsy Rose Lee, her newly acquired comic-spouse Biff Branigan and her busybody mother Evangie. Rice's detective are with a single exception team players: John Malone, Jake and Helene Justus; Bingo Riggs and Handsome Kusak and the three kids who take center stage in Home Sweet Homicide (1944). So if Rice didn't indite this book than, at least, it can be assumed that Lee modeled her story on Rice's style and plotting technique.

Mother Finds a Body hits the ground running as Gypsy's mother, who was allowed to accompany them on their honeymoon, since she was unable to attend the wedding ceremony, finds the rapidly decomposing remains of a man in the bathtub of their trailer – whom they picked up at an earlier stage to act as their best man and ended up as a part of a tagalong party. The audacious and unconventional advice from mother is to bury the stiff and wipe the memory of him from their minds. There is, after all, no need for her daughter to expose herself to a police enquiry and negative publicity now that she's finally ascending the career ladder in the movie industry, but Gypsy and Biff insist on dropping-off the stinker at the next police station. Well, mom has her own plans and knows what's best for her daughter and son-in-law and does what every mother in her situation would've done: start a small-scale forest fire and dump the body in a shallow grave during the ensuing chaos.

Gypsy's mother is an endearing and memorable character who deserves top billing in this story just for being a world-class mom. It would've been very easy to slip up and mother an obnoxious personage, but here it was just done right and I think this passage says it all:

"Mother loves writing letters. She loves it almost as much as steaming open letters other people have written. Unfortunately, Mother's letters are what people call "poison pen." Mother doesn't call them that, of course. She thinks of her letter writing as a sacred duty. Too often I’ve heard her say, 'Someone should drop that woman a line and tell her just how she is – copying your song like that. It's my duty as your mother to do it. I will do it.' Then Mother would get that too-innocent look in her eye and she would say, 'Of course I won’t sign it. I’ll send it miscellaneously.'"

Unluckily, for her, the scheme she contrives to rid themselves of an odoriferous corpse misfires horribly, and the bodies slowly, but surely, begin to pile up at the border town where the trailing assemblage strands in a murder investigation – and the honeymooners have to figure out if the murderer is a member of their tagalong party, which includes two strippers and a hack comic, or one of the locals like the shady saloon owner.

Gypsy Rose Lee did a bang-up job at constructing a playful and clever enough detective story, inhabited with an odd assortment of slightly eccentric characters, with one or two interesting plot ideas revolving around the problem of dope peddling. Not every outsider, who visited the mystery genre, delivered as fully on the promise of writing a detective story as Lee has done here, and it replenishes my hope that her first novel, The G-String Murders, is not the insipid, disconnected mess of a story as some reviews suggested.  

Briefly put, this bright, humorously and fetchingly written story was exactly what I needed as a remedy after working my way through the automaton-like melodrama of Wynne's The Green Knife (1932) and the turgid prose of Markham's Death in the Dusk (1928).

Recommended without reservation, especially if you want to read something that could've been penned by Craig Rice. This is probably as close as you'll get to match the original.

As a bonus, here's an interesting video of Gypsy Rose Lee as a mystery guest on the 1950s game show, What's My Line? (they also have some really great episodes with Vincent Prince and Peter Lorre as mystery guests):