The 43% (Alcohol) Solution: An Appreciation of Craig Rice

Mayor: Drebin, I don't want any more trouble like you had last year on the South Side. Understand? That's my policy.
Frank: Yes. Well, when I see 5 weirdos dressed in togas stabbing a guy in the middle of the park in full view of 100 people, I shoot the bastards. That's my policy.
Mayor: That was a Shakespeare-In-The-Park production of Julius Caesar, you moron!!! You killed 5 actors!!!

-The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!

Welcome, readers, to another special edition of At the Scene of the Crime! I’ve really been spoiling you all with these articles of late, where I (somehow) manage to persuade a fellow partner in crime to collaborate on an article, be it a book review, a general discussion, or a fusion of the two. I didn’t have to resort to blackmail or Mike Hammer techniques this time, but I did manage to persuade Jeffrey Marks to join me today. In case you didn’t know, Jeff is the author of an excellent biography of Anthony Boucher, a personal hero of mine. I reviewed the book earlier in this blog—in fact, it was the first non-fiction book I reviewed. Also, Jeff is the author of Who Was That Lady?, the official biography of mystery author Craig Rice. And that is why we’re here today, to have a discussion about Rice.

I’m not up-to-date with biographical details (yet), so I can’t tell you where Craig Rice was born, who her parents were, and what her favourite colour was. But I can tell you this much: she was the author of some of the funniest mysteries I’ve ever read, and managed to be the first female mystery author to appear on the cover of Time magazine— which is quite an accomplishment, n’est-ce pas? Unfortunately, her life was far too short, dying before her 50^th birthday in 1957.

Jeff, thanks a lot for agreeing to join me today!

LXXVII. In which the mystery reader gets less than his money's worth.

I recently acquired a copy of William DeAndrea’s Encyclopedia Mysteriosa, which already has become a valuable tool in my blogging activities. When looking up Elliot Paul and his detective, Homer Evans, I came across the following information:

“Like his creator, an American living in Paris, Homer Evans was intended to be a parody of Philo Vance. On that level, the character was a failure. Although far more accomplished than Vance (for instance, Evans had to give up painting as a hobby because all the professional artists of his acquaintance were nearly suicidal with despair), Elliot Paul was incapable of making anyone a tenth as obnoxious as Vance. Where the Homer Evans mysteries succeed is as absurdist, almost surreal farces, populated by likable loonies somehow involved in murder cases that didn’t have to make much sense—they just had to serve as a framework for the craziness.”

Well, there we have it: William DeAndrea has already summed up everything I have to say about Elliot Paul’s Mayhem in B Flat. This is a world so alcohol-soaked it makes Craig Rice’s books seem like the work of a teetotaller. The adjective describing the mad mix-ups that populate this book has yet to be coined. Tarantula fights, kidnappers, gangsters, drunkards, brawls in nightclubs, chorus girls and girls in general (a long line of them) run all over the place in this book, smack in the middle of which is a murder mystery— or at least something that masquerades as one.