Mulled Murder, with Spice

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Not very long ago--in the year when Chamberlain waved his umbrella, crying "Peace in our time"--an unknown young woman was writing radio scripts, in Chicago. Her name was Craig Rice and she was all of 30. To her the era of peace just ending had meant a dozen years of bohemian life: three bungled attempts at marriage; innumerable failures to write poetry, novels and music; barely successful efforts to earn a living around newspapers ; and some definite progress in helping local bohemians support the distilling industry. This slightly dated era of peace-in-her-time was ended, not by Mr. Chamberlain, but by her conceiving the idea of writing a mystery novel.

Had Craig Rice conceived a child instead of an idea, he would by now have progressed to first grade in school. But the idea has progressed faster. It has already turned into 15 books which have made her a highly successful mystery writer, with Hollywood contracts. And last week it turned into a contract to become editor of her own mystery magazine, the Craig Rice Crime Digest (scheduled to begin publication this spring).

American Genre. Novelist Thomas Mann recently proclaimed Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment "the greatest detective novel of all time" (TIME, Jan. 21). It was a considerable tribute, and there was considerable doubt among detective-story addicts whether Dostoevsky deserves it. Some critical minds which are addicted to detective stories believe that today more craftsmanship goes into mystery novels than into all other kinds of novel combined. Moreover, successful murder still requires imagination, as much as in the days of Edgar Allan Poe.

The form of detective story originated by Poe and Conan Doyle still exists today in the U.S., side by side with a distinctively American genre originated by Dashiell Hammett (The Thin Man). Craig Rice is virtually the only woman of this school--with the possible exception of Gypsy Rose Lee, with whom Craig lived one summer in Connecticut while she was writing Mother Finds a Body and Having Wonderful Crime.

The American genre has been called the tough, the hardboiled, the wacky and several other names. It earned the epithets because it is apt to mix the pleasures of the wake and the manhunt in a combination of hard drink, hilarity and homicide. It inclines to make murder a laughing matter and put the question of Who Will Swing for It to the arbitrament of alcohol.

This breaks the literary canon that flippancy about death is indecent. It also cracks a lot of other time-honored conventions: the eccentric, all-knowing detective, the stupid Dr. Watson, stupendous examples of deduction, the contest between evil and the law, the contest of wits between reader and author (whodunit) --not to mention the sealed room and other elaborate means of murder. Sometimes it very nearly gets rid of plot itself.

An outgrowth of the American genre is the detective farce, of which Craig Rice (and Elliot Paul, in a different way) is an exponent. She invests unholy living and heinous dying with a high atmosphere of mixed excitement and amusement. The excitement is provided by realism of a sort--the realism which goes with the ruthlessness of gangsters and other criminal ugliness--and it is set to dialogue of the Hemingway type.

But the methods of realism are only a tool. In blending the horrible with the ludicrous, alcohol becomes the catalyst. Drink encourages characters endowed with normal human cowardice to plunge gaily into the ugliest and most dangerous situations and carry them off with unexpected turns of drunken ingenuity. The puzzle is no longer a chief attraction. The principal characters are all detectives and all Watsons too.

The Greatness of Gertrude. Because the reading public is divided between those who read detective stories and those who consider them trash, the audience for a good detective story is definitely limited, and much smaller than the audience which can, with luck, be reached by a novel of copulation.

The ceiling for detective stories is 20,000 copies (it was somewhat lower before the war). Any author who sells in the 15,000 to 20,000 bracket is tops. In this bracket are writers like Erie Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler, Ellery Queen, Rex Stout, Mabel Seeley, Mignon Eberhart, Craig Rice.

Practically speaking, no one goes over 20,000. The few who do so regularly are authors who draw on the non-detective-story audience: such exceptions as Mary Roberts Rinehart, Dorothy Sayers, and of course Gypsy Rose Lee (whose G-String Murders sold nearly 30,000 copies).

Thus the direct return from a detective story, however good, is under $6,000 (10% to 15% royalty on 20,000 $2 books), as compared to perhaps $15,000 on a popular novel (10% to 15% royalty on 40,000 $2.50 books).

In the reprint market, detectifiction may sell prodigiously, but the royalty is small: 1-c- a copy on most paperbound newsstand books (1 1/2 after a book sells more than 150,000). Thus if a Craig Rice book sells 500,000 copies on the newsstands, she makes an additional $6,750.

The publishers of Pocket Books present the Oscars of the reprint business. They are small sterling silver kangaroos, and their name is Gertrude. If one of their author's books has sold more than 1,000,000 copies in Pocket Book form, he receives a Gertrude.

Fortnight ago, before an assemblage of publishers and authors in Manhattan's Rainbow Room, Robert de Graff, president of Pocket Books, presented Gertrudes to Ellery Queen (Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee) for New Adventures of Ellery Queen, to Dashiell Hammett for The Thin Man, to Thorne Smith posthumously (the prize was accepted by his two daughters) for Topper, to Max Brand posthumously for Singing Guns (a western), to Damon Runyon for Best of Damon Runyon and Damon Runyon's Favorites, and to Shirley Cunningham for The Pocket Entertainer (popular with troops).

In reprint sales Craig Rice is a comparative newcomer. Her first Pocket Book reprint (Trial by Fury), put out only a little over two years ago, has sold over 550,000 copies. The second (Having Wonderful Crime) has sold over 300,000. It is a toss-up whether she or Agatha Christie will first have a little Gertrude in her home.

Craig Rice is also Michael Venning (under whose signature three of her 15 books have been written) and Daphne Saunders (who has signed one of the 15). Michael Venning's biography has been called for by Who's Who and (for a gag) she has posed for his picture wearing a crepe beard, and her husband's coat.

Craig Rice's forthcoming Crime Digest is fathered by 31-year-old Anson Bond (son of Bond Clothes), who under the name of Bond-Charteris Enterprises (working with Leslie Charteris, author of The Saint stories) put out 15 "Bonded" mystery titles which sold 2,500,000 copies. Recently Bond sold his interest in Bond-Charteris (now Saint Enterprises, Inc.) to Rudy Vallee and others for over $100,000. Now he has founded Anson Bond Publishing Co., which will continue to put out "Bonded" reprints at 25-c- each, and the Digest.

Imitation of Fiction. Women have always excelled as detective-story writers. Britain has its Agatha Christie, Marjery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh; recently risen in the U.S. are Mabel Seeley, Helen Reilly (sister of radio pundit John Kieran), Hilda Lawrence, Helen Me Cloy, Phoebe Atwood Taylor, Mignon Eberhart, et al. Although some of their stories appear in magazines, none of Craig Rice's ever does. No popular magazine would dream of buying a story in which as a matter of course enough liquor is drunk to float a distillery.

In 1944 Craig Rice wrote a book, Home, Sweet Homicide, in which liquor was not even mentioned. The most active detectives in it are three children modeled after her own. It was an idea which should have warmed the hearts of magazine editors. The children were charming examples of wholesome childhood--but a little too realistic. One magazine turned the story down because the second daughter (aged 14) used lipstick. Another rejected it because the children showed an impish disrespect for the police.

The truth of the matter is that Craig Rice can never satisfy such editors because she herself comes straight out of a detective farce.

Her publisher swears that she was born in a horse-drawn carriage at the corner of Chicago's Michigan Avenue and 12th Street and was named Craig Georgiana Anne Randolph Walker Craig.

It appears that she has had five legal last names but none of them is Rice, that she is a Catholic but has been divorced two or three times, that she never saw her father from the time she was twelve until shortly before he died, about four years ago, that she has not seen her mother for 25 years, that she did not meet her brother Christopher until he was 18, has never met her half-brother Alexander and does not know their whereabouts (both are in the Army, one stationed at Alexandria, Va., the other in Europe).

Her father, Harry Moschiem Craig, who came from Fort Atkinson, Wis., was known as Bosco. He was a slim, dark-haired and handsome young painter, studying in Chicago's Art Institute, when he fell in love with a fellow student, Mary Randolph, the daughter of a Chicago physician.

They were married in 1906, and since Mary had money, promptly set out for Paris, London and Munich. Mary Randolph, now a slender, attractive cosmopolite of 63, recalls: "It was a pleasant life. We were very nice youngsters. ... He was very charming and a talented painter. He could have been great if he had worked harder."

Two years later Mrs. Craig returned briefly to Chicago to bear their daughter. She reached St. Luke's Hospital (without mishap at the corner of 12th St.) and the child was named merely Georgiana Randolph Craig. Mary soon left Georgiana with Bosco's mother and rejoined her husband in Europe. In 1911 they both returned and made the acquaintance of their three-year-old daughter. But in 1914 they set out again for Europe and when World War I came, went on to India. There Bosco continued to paint, and had something to do with the tea business.

In 1918 his wife returned to Chicago to bear another child, Christopher. Two years later she and Bosco were divorced. He married again, and stayed in the Orient until 1940, when World War II began to make it uncomfortable. His daughter says she had a letter from him in Tokyo in 1933 in which he told her that he was trying to sell the Imperial Japanese Government the output of an iron mine in India. Unfortunately he had arrived in Tokyo with only 100 yen, had already run up a bill of 1,000 yen at the Imperial Hotel alone. But to his surprise the deal went through. He left Japan with plenty of money in his pocket, only to make a horrifying discovery on his arrival in Shanghai: there was no iron in the province where the mine was supposed to be.

At any rate, Bosco emerged from the legendary Orient in time to meet his daughter and grandchildren when they went to California in 1941.

Meantime Georgiana's mother had been married again, to another painter, a Russian named Sacha. He had an unpleasant last name which he later changed to Randolph. Thus twice-married Mary Randolph became Mary Randolph again. They had a son, Alexander, and went to live in Venice. There she bought a palazzo on the Grand Canal, and while her husband painted she carved a great many statues out of hard clay and painted them. Sacha has since died, and Mary Randolph now lives with her widowed sister in Chicago. She and her daughter are on good terms and she admires "George's" books, but it is doubtful whether she will get to California to see her daughter before going to Venice to sell the palazzo and dump ''several tons of painted clay" into the laguna.

Meanwhile Georgiana had been left, at the age of six, with Bosco's sister, Mrs. Elton Rice. The Rices took her variously to Fort Atkinson, to a ranch in Okanagan County, Wash, and to San Diego. Her education came partly from her uncle, who liked to read her the poems of Edgar Allan Poe, and partly from a Jesuit missionary with classical tastes.

At one time Georgiana was put in Miss Ransome's School at Piedmont, Calif., but ran away. At 18 she was off for Chicago and a decade of failure and booze.

People who remember her from those days describe her as a thin, dried-up little girl who was very plain, did not care for her appearance and did not show how much she had on the ball. Others remember that she was nice to work with. One fellow Bohemienne recalls: "She was the only woman I ever met who could crochet, play chess, read a book and compose music at the same time--and hold a highball. I almost forgot that."

Nobody, including Craig Rice, seems to remember much about her husbands. The first was named Arthur John Follows ("a dreamer type," some say). Another was Albert Ferguson, a newspaperman of some talent, considerably her senior, who died shortly after she divorced him. She says there was another (apparently that was the marriage which was decided on the toss of a coin--she lest; it only lasted three days), but she is resolutely vague about his name. At any rate, her marriages brought her three children who are quite as nice (and as good friends with her) as in Home, Sweet Homicide.

And Then Success. The Craig Rice who after seven years' work is a successful mystery-story writer is still apt to have a smudge on her face and to work at an old typewriter in a pair of dirty slacks. Her right eyelid droops slightly. Her cheeks are plump, and she has a dimple at each corner of her mouth when she smiles. Women in general do not dislike her, and many men think she is fascinating.

Shortly before she turned to detective stories, she married again. Her last husband is no mystery. His name is Lawrence Lipton and he smokes a great many smelly cigars. He has also written two novels, neither of which won a Pulitzer Prize, much less a Gertrude.

Now they live in Santa Monica, in a cream-colored stucco house with ersatz pillars, that looks like a small-town public library. It surrounds a sort of atrium where the rain drips through a skylight into a fish pond. The rather overly large living and dining rooms are satined and chintzed. The master bedroom contains the "Craig Rice dressing table," a wide, crinoline-draped affair supported by two female legs appropriately gartered and stockinged in black mesh.

Bosco's sister, Mrs. Rice, who brought up Craig, lives with them. There are also a number of cats, and three statues which came with the house but have been improved by the children: Gus (Augustus Caesar, now adorned with crepe mustache and bow tie), Vicky (a putty-colored Queen Victoria, more handsome now with make-up and a pair of spectacles), and Flattop (a somewhat flat-headed nymph who wears a red hair ribbon and necklace, but is due to become ravishing when a net brassiere, now on order, is delivered).

Daughters Nancy and Iris and Son David (16, 15 and 13) are nowadays mostly away at boarding school. Husband Lawrence, who takes seriously his position as a man of letters, has a downtown office to work in. Craig, who like most professionals is not choosy about such things, has her workshop on an enclosed porch which she shares with Gus and a new luxury, a secretary.

Even with these assistants, turning out detective stories is not a mechanical job. Mysteries run only 60,000 to 80,000 words (the bare minimum for novels). Four of them a year (such as the hardest-working writers turn out) may total something over a quarter of a million words, not an undue output for a serious author. But the job is tough enough so that Craig is now from one to two years behind on mysteries contracted for with each of her three publishers (Simon & Schuster, Coward-McCann, Dial Press). It is a fine thing to be successful, but it means work.

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