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): 

Trouble Always Comes in Threes

"Some people bear three kinds of trouble - the ones they've had, the ones they have, and the ones they expect to have."

- H.G. Wells.

I'm taking a short detour from insatiably consuming impossible crime stories, which will commence soon after publishing this piece, to finally post the planned follow up to my little critique of Craig Rice's The Wrong Murder (1940) – a review of its aptly entitled sequel, The Right Murder (1941).

To shortly recapitulate, in the previous novel, The Wrong Murder, the newlywed and unemployed Jake Justus makes an unusual bet with Mona McClane, who stakes her far-famed casino on the presumption that she can get away with gunning someone down on a packed street and getting away with it. At first, everyone takes it as a joke, but then a murder is committed that conforms to the rules of the bet and the sporting woman was seen near the scene of the crime! Jake, Helene and Malone go out of their way to pin this murder on Mona, but the inevitable conclusion is that they have been solving someone else's murder and their prime suspect confirms their fruitless pursuit of the wrong corpse. 

The Right Murder picks up the story not long after the point where The Wrong Murder left off, and we find a very lonely John J. Malone, on New Years Eve, trying to get drunk at Joe the Angel's City Hall Bar – when his sentimental musings are broken by a man who staggered into the barroom. He asks for Malone, thrusts a key in his hands and dies on the spot! Someone had poked him in the back with a knife. But a dead man, stumbling into a bar room and unburdening himself of an inquisitive item before collapsing, is a relatively sane thing to happen contrasted against the other events in this story. 

Yeah, this another one of Craig Rice's booze fuelled madcap mysteries, in which Chicago's trinity of trouble kidnap and plaster a witness, who claims to have killed two men when he's piss-drunk but draws a complete blank when stone cold sober, to help him jug his memory – and even hook him up to a polygraph machine after a drinking binge! You really tend to feel sorry for the poor psychoanalyst conducting the test and will no doubt be haunted by this consult for the rest of his professional life.

The second victim, by the way, dies at the home of Mona McClane, dispatched in a way that suggests the same hand at work as the one that cut-short the life of the man in the bar, and that puts her right back in the crosshairs of Jake, Helene and Malone. But will the heap of bizarre events and clues, which includes an extraordinary coincidence concerning names and two disturbed graves, lead them to a solution that will earn them the deed of Mona's casino or is their aim once again off-target – and following the wrong stiff to another murderer they weren't trying to find?

This story takes you on one heck of a ride and has nearly everything you come to expect and love from the Queen of Screwball Mysteries. Unfortunately, the solution does a poor and unconvincing job at explaining all the rummy occurrences and doesn't entirely adhere to the rules of fair play. There are a few clues that make it possible to make an educated guess at some parts of the solution, but when it comes to motive and relationships, between murderer and victims, we're pretty much left in the dark until Malone's revelation – and that left me completely dissatisfied.

The Right Murder may be typical of all things Ricean, but as a detective novel it fails to live up to its predecessor. Still, to be fair, the race towards the final chapter was fun and with Helene driving even exciting. Deadly, but exciting! So if you're already a fan you might as well pick this one up, and find out if they're successful in finally pinning a first-degree murder charge on Mona McClane, but if you're new to her work it's advisable to begin elsewhere – e.g. Home Sweet Homicide (1944) or My Kingdom for a Hearse (1957).

And, as a closing thought: has anyone else ever wondered, imagined even, what would happen if Jake and Helene Justus and Jeff and Haila Troy would enter the same bar room one after the other? Yes, I think that's why one series is set in Chicago and the other in New York. :)

Trouble is Their Business

I have often professed my undying love for American detective stories from the hands of such artisans as Ellery Queen, Kelley Roos, Patrick Quentin and Stuart Palmer, but there's a special nook in my heart that glows for the animated, alcohol fuelled, soft-boiled screwball mysteries dreamed up by the very offbeat Craig Rice. Her books are unapologetically fun to read, vigorously plotted, populated with off-the-wall characters and linkup the puzzle orientated mysteries of S.S. van Dine and Ellery Queen with the tougher, hard-bitten private eye tales of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

The Wrong Murder (1940) is a particular good example of her taking the traditionally constructed detective story by the scruff, and force enough booze done its throat to make even the reader feel tipsy – and overrun it with feisty mobsters, speeding cars, tight situations and occasional fisticuffs.

The Big Gamble

The story picks up where the previous one left off, namely The Corpse Steps Out (1940), which I, by the way, haven't read yet, and Helene just left Jake at the after party of their wedding to rush her father to the airport – when Mona McClane enters into the picture. She's a betting woman who won a casino from a notorious mob boss, Max Hook, who's a semi-regular character making his first appearance in this book, and she wants to stake her priced casino in a bet with Jake Justus. What are the terms of the wager? Well, she's going to knock someone off, "(...) in broad daylight on the public street with the most ordinary weapon I can find... promise you plenty of witnesses," and if he can pin the murder on her the casino is his.

Nobody at the party takes her very seriously, but they begin to have second thoughts when the next day news headlines carry the story of a shooting, at a busy street corner during a shopping rush, that left the unidentified remains of a nondescript man on the pavement – and Mona McClane was seen near the scene of the crime! Here's Jake Justus, recently married and unemployed, presented with an opportunity to earn himself a well-run, money making casino simply by tagging its current owner with a first-degree murder charge.

Simple, eh? Well, not really. With Helene and her dad in tow, who never made his flight due to being arrested and thrown in the can with his lovely daughter, there's bound to be trouble along the way – and their friend and drinking buddy, the unscrupulous criminal lawyer, John J. Malone has to drag them from a police jail on more than one occasion. They also have to shake a few gangsters off their tail, guaranteeing a few amusing sequences in which you slowly start siding with the poor thugs, who really never stood much of chance against Chicago's terrible trio, while also trying to make sense of a whole bunch of coincidences, tramping about for clues and plenty of rest stops along the way for drinks. 

There's a second murder, committed under identical circumstances, later on in the book and throws a fairly original impossible problem at the reader: how's it possible that the body was miraculously stripped of all its clothing during the ambulance ride from the crime-scene to the city morgue? The solution isn't overly ingenious and it's only a single strand in the plot, but it added a little extra to the overall story – and shows how adept Rice was at intertwining certain, contrasting elements of the mystery genre.

The book has some disadvantages, though. First of all, the title of the story and the fact that there's a sequel to this book, The Right Murder (1941), exonerates Mona McClane from the outset and its plot isn't the cleverest one she has ever conceived. It's not bad, far from it, but it suffers from the same problem as Carr's Till Death Do Us Part (1944) and Christie's After the Funeral (1953): you tend to think less of them because they sprouted from the same, ever-inventive minds that turned out several novels that became landmarks of the genre. They are excellent detective stories in their own right, but are dwarfed when compared to monuments like The Hollow Man (1935), The Murder on the Orient Express (1934) and Home Sweet Homicide (1944).

If the name of a lesser author was slapped across the front cover, this book would've received a standing ovation, but now you just shrug and say, "meh, not bad, but I've seen her do better than this." And it's really a compliment, when your readers mark a well-crafted and briskly told story as an average effort only because your other books were even better.

This book is as a good a place to start as any, but if you want to know what Craig Rice was capable of doing, when she really was swinging for the fences, you should begin with Trial by Fury (1941), My Kingdom for a Hearse (1957), the Bingo Riggs and Handsome Kusak trilogy and the aforementioned, non-series masterpiece, Home Sweet Homicide. I'm also fond of Having Wonderful Crime (1943), which reads like one long love-letter to Ellery Queen and seems to have drawn its inspiration from The Egyptian Cross Mystery (1932). The book even drops off Malone, Jake and Helene in New York.

On a final note, I was hoping to read The Wrong Murder and The Right Murder back-to-back, but I sort of promised someone a review of Bill Pronzini's Shackles (1988) and yesterday the first pile of specially selected impossible crime books arrived – which I will be dipping into after the next review. 

So that's what in store for this blog in the weeks to come. Stay tuned! 

"Dreams are illustrations... from the book your soul is writing about you"

"There are many doors to Fantasia, my boy. There are other such magic books. A lot of people read them without noticing. It all depends on who gets his hands on such books."

- Mr. Coreander, The Never-Ending Story (1979). 

I always had a weakness for crossovers. It's difficult to explain where this fascination came from, but there's something positively thrilling about watching two different universes collide with one another and merge into one – and a character from one book acknowledging a character from another book, as an actual person, is enough to send a tingling down my spine. It's for this reason that I enjoy Rex Stout's non-series detectives as much as the ones he wrote featuring Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. They are jam-packed with places and secondary characters that make it very clear they all inhabit the same universe, but, to my great sorrow, Wolfe, Fox and Hicks were never destined to cross paths.

So you can imagine my glee when, a few years ago, I discovered that Stuart Palmer and Craig Rice had collaborated on a bunch of short stories, collected in The People vs. Withers and Malone (1963), in which their series detectives actually worked together on half a dozen cases (was there a god, after all?)!

But as great and fun as the stories were, and the experience of reading them, they somewhat pale in comparison to what happened after I turned over the final page. This is not a book review, but an account of the night I stepped through one of the Fantasia's hidden doors and met Hildegard Withers and John J. Malone face-to-face. ;-)  

The Dream

I swear, they're sneaking up on me!

I vividly remember the night that my conscious mind dislodged itself from my sleep-wrapped brain, entered an alternate dimension, and walked into a dimly-lit room, dressed sharply like a 1930s gumshoe (think Timothy Hutton as Archie Goodwin, but I felt more like Sam Tyler at that moment), and there, on the floor, was the body of a man. Near him lay a revolver that hadn't given up smoking yet.

Well, here was a unique opportunity to prove my prowess as the cerebral detective I always fancy myself to be, and went down on all four to methodically study the remains and the murder weapon, when, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, Hildegard Withers and John J. Malone burst onto the crime-scene. They grabbed me, each under one of my arms, and started dragging me out of the room. The police were on there way, they told me, to arrest me for this murder, but rest assured, they would prove me to be innocent of this dirty deed – and all this time I was kicking and screaming that I didn't want their help, because they always make things worse than they already are.

Then the dream cuts to a bizarre, almost surrealistic car chase with a few dozen patrol cars. I'm locked in the trunk by the dynamic duo, banging and screaming to be let out, and lurched over the steering wheel (with a gleam of madness in her eyes) is Hildegard Withers – while Malone hangs out of the side window, with an half empty bottle of whiskey, hollering a song about pretty girls and booze.

And then I woke up... but was it all a dream? Well, I can tell you it was one of the most realistic and lifelike ones I ever had in my life. Withers and Malone weren't vague, dreamy images but actual, three-dimensional human beings. I remember the pressure of their grip on my arms. Heck, I even smelled the booze on Malone's breath!

This means one of the following things: a) my brain couldn't fully comprehend that I had just read an actual GAD-crossover, and as a result I was having a full-sensory hallucination b) the stories were so epic that they ripped a hole in the time-space continuum and allowed me to travel to a parallel universe were detective stories are the reality c) for a brief moment, my sleep induced mind figured out how to open one of the doors leading to Fantasia.

But what do regular visitors who haunt this blog think?