Who Was That Lady?

The official biography of Craig Rice
by Jeffrey Marks
Delphi Books

Just after the end of World War II, after years of battles and body-counts, a war weary Time magazine decided to interview a major American mystery writer for a cover story to give the country a change of pace.

Although the mystery genre began in America with Edgar Allan Poe, Americans had come late into the whodunit. The field had long been dominated by the British writers such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and G.K. Chesterton.

Dashiell Hammett, the American author of five mysteries and the creator of hardboiled Sam Spade and dashing Nick and Nora Charles, hadn't published a novel since 1934, a dozen years earlier. His leftist political leanings made him less than an attractive choice for the interview.

Nor was Raymond Chandler-- the writer behind Philip Marlowe-- any better. By 1946, he had only published four books in the Marlowe series, but he was already getting a reputation for being hard to deal with.

Eventually, by process of elimination the Time editors decided on a female publishing phenomenon of the 1940s, Craig Rice.

On paper, Craig looked like the perfect cover copy: she was young (37), attractive brunette who wrote the madcap murder mysteries that sold like black market nylons. The tongue-in-cheek adventures of Jake and Helene Justus and John J. Malone, the boozy Windy City lawyer who never lost a client, brought smiles to a nation fighting a war overseas. As a tabloid reporter covering Midwest murder trials, she had learned to meet deadlines and routinely turned out two or three novels a year, along with numerous short stories and screenplays.

Even FDR professed being a fan of Rice and a recent novel, Home Sweet Homicide, was being converted to a movie starring western hero Randolph Scott as Lieutenant Bill Smith. The novel was a semi-autobiographical mystery featuring a struggling crime writer's three children who solve a murder next door. Rice was a successful writer with three children. --Jeffrey Marks

Great News. The first Craig Rice book in 40 years came out in early 2002. Murder, Mystery, and Malone was published by Crippen and Landru. It's an anthology of previously uncollected short stories by Rice, a perennial mystery favorite in the genre.