In January 1946 Craig Rice became the first mystery writer to appear on the cover of Time magazine. Eleven years later she died in relative obscurity, her reputation shredded by a decade of hard drinking, missed deadlines, and broken contracts.
The first time Craig Rice met her parents she was three years old. The next time she saw them she was six.
Her mother and father did not have time for parenthood. Bohemian artists, they regarded drinking Bellini’s in Venice, or absinthe in Montmartre as far more important than bringing up a child.
Born in Chicago in 1909 as Georgiana Ann Randolph Craig, the future author was dumped with various relatives before finding a permanent, settled home in Wisconsin with Mr. and Mrs. Elton Rice—her paternal aunt and uncle.
Mr. Rice fostered an interest in books, introducing his niece to the work of Edgar Allan Poe, the father of detective fiction.
The details of Craig Rice’s life are sketchy. Even pinning down the number of her husbands (certainly three, possibly four) is as hard as nailing Jell-O to a wall.
It seems she began writing for newspapers in Milwaukee before penning drama series for mid-western radio stations.
Her big break came when she wrote a detective story featuring small-time lawyer, John Joseph Malone, a big gruff man who looked0151in Rice’s words—like he’d slept on the floor of a taxi cab.
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Craig Rice on the Cover of Time Magazine
Alongside tough-talking Malone came a mismatched couple: Publicist Jake Justus (well-meaning, handsome, likely to lose an intelligence test to a tree) and Helene Brand a (beautiful hard-drinking socialite given to making wisecracks as dry as the best martini).
Together this apparently permanently sozzled trio solves crimes more by drunken luck (because booze flows through Rice’s work, as it did through her life, like a swirling river) than judgment, much to the annoyance of inept local flatfoot Captain Daniel Von Flanagan.
The Malone stories are a brilliantly funny fusion of hardboiled whodunnit and screwball comedy, The Maltese Falcon re-written by Ben Hecht.
They read like the prototypes for Coen Brothers movies, filled with dialogue that’s as snappy as a pool of crocodiles and characters that jump from the page as if propelled by rocket fuel.
The Malone stories and the novels that followed (including his long-form debut, Eight Faces at Three) transformed Rice’s life.
She relocated from Chicago to Hollywood. There she banged out a couple of books and dozens of short stories per year, wrote movie screenplays (including Lady of Burlesque starring Barbara Stanwyck), ghost-wrote mysteries for film star George Raft, and shared a house with striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee.
Eight Faces at Three
Rice married frequently (the names, like the number, of her husbands remain sketchy, one was certainly the writer Lawrence “King of the Beatniks” Lipton, the others are a blur). She also had dozens of affairs, gave birth to three children, and drank enough gin to float an aircraft carrier—or sink one.
Whatever the sprawling messiness of her personal life, Rice’s work remained, for a while at least, sharp as a diamond, glittering with invention and fizzing with wit. She carried on writing the Malone stories and created a couple of other memorably off-beat characters in Bingo Riggs and Handsome Kusak.
A couple of minor con artists, the duo solve crimes less to uphold the law than to extricate themselves from whatever pickle their antics have landed them in.
But the Doctor Died
Knocked for a Loop
The Name Is Malone
Rice’s novels were made into movies, radio serials and, later, adapted for television.
In Rice’s golden years, Malone, Justus, and Brand were as familiar to U.S. crime fans as Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey, and Miss Marple.
And Helene Brand’s signature look—fur coat, pajamas, and galoshes—was as recognizable to audiences as Sherlock Holmes’ deer-stalker and pipe, and far more glamorous.
By the time Rice appeared on the cover of Time, she was outselling Agatha Christie in the U.S. and appeared unstoppable—a force of nature powered by gags and cocktails. Yet already her life was unraveling.
The constant pressure to earn money made her take on far more work than even she could handle. She accepted too many advances from publishers and movie studios for too many projects.
Deadlines flew toward her like a meteor shower. Even a writer of her gifts and stamina couldn’t keep up.
The tougher things got the more Rice drank, and the more she drank the tougher things got.
Rice started collaborating with other writers to finish her work, or even hiring ghosts to do it for her. Her health began to fail. She went deaf in one ear and blind in one eye.
She attempted suicide more than once. Her fame and her reputation faded tragically in a mist of booze and pills.
In 1957 Rice was found dead in Los Angeles from an overdose of alcohol and barbiturates. She was 49 years old.
Celebrated in her heyday, she was largely forgotten by then. It was a terrible pity.
Rice’s was a unique and magical voice. It deserves to be heard.
Featured photo: Wikipedia; Additional photo: Time Magazine
