Craig Rice (writer)

In 1908, Mary Randolph Craig reluctantly interrupted her globetrotting to return home to Chicago to give birth to her first child, Georgiana Ann Randolph Craig. Mary's husband, Harry Craig, a Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, native, was nicknamed Bosco. Soon after Georgiana's birth, Mary abandoned the child to return to her husband overseas, leaving Georgiana to travel from relative to relative. They returned in 1911 to meet their three-year-old daughter but then departed for Europe again, moving on to India when the war broke out. At that time, Georgiana found a permanent home in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, where she lived with her paternal aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Elton Rice, at 607 South Main St. The Rices raised Georgiana. Elton Rice has been credited with stirring her interest in mysteries by reading her the poems and stories of Edgar Allan Poe.[2]

Rice's first steps in publishing were as a writer for The Milwaukee Journal and The Chicago American. In 1930-31 she started working for radio stations, first WCLO and then the Beacon Syndicate in 1931. Her first fictional character, Professor Silvernail, was created for WCLO Syndicate Serials (1933).[3] For a number of years she tried unsuccessfully to write novels, poetry and music, but it was not until her first story of John J. Malone, which she published under her birth surname and adopted surname Craig Rice, that she enjoyed some hard-won success.[4]

Gritty but humorous, Rice's stories uniquely combine the hard-boiled detective tradition with no-holds-barred, screwball comedy. Most of her output features a memorable trio of protagonists: Jake Justus, a handsome but none-too-bright press agent with his heart in the right place; Helene Brand, a rich heiress and hard-drinking party animal par excellence (to become Mrs. Justus in the later novels); and John Joseph Malone, a hard-drinking small-time lawyer (though both his cryptic conversation and sartorial habits are more reminiscent of such official or private detectives). Against the odds and often apparently more by luck than skill, these three manage to solve crimes whose details are often burlesque and surreal, sometimes to the point of Grand Guignol, and all involving the perpetually exasperated Captain Daniel Von Flanagan of the homicide squad. A few stories feature the team of Bingo Riggs and Handsome Kusak, small-time grifters who become involved in criminal situations and have to dig themselves free by solving the mystery.

Rice also ghostwrote for George Sanders.[5] Because of their friendship, many fans assumed that Rice ghostwrote the two wildly popular mysteries by Gypsy Rose Lee. "While the collaboration with Gypsy is often reported", J.F. Norris writes, "in the recently published and thoroughly well researched biography of Gypsy Rose Lee (Stripping Gypsy: The Life of Gypsy Rose Lee, Oxford University Press, 2009) [author Noralee Frankel makes it clear] that Craig Rice did not [emphasis in the original] write either of Lee's comic mystery novels. This is supported with correspondence between Lee and Rice. Rice did, however, help craft the screenplay for The G String Murders which became the Barbara Stanwyck vehicle Lady of Burlesque." Her association with Sanders came about as a result of her work on the screenplays of two of the Falcon movies, The Falcon's Brother (1942, Sanders's final outing as the Falcon) and The Falcon in Danger (1943, when Sanders's brother Tom Conway had taken over the role).

She collaborated with fellow mystery writer Stuart Palmer on screenplays and short stories and with Ed McBain on a novel for which she furnished the principal characters, Bingo Riggs and Handsome Kusak. (The "collaboration" with McBain is a "posthumous collaboration in which McBain completed an unfinished book begun by Rice. In a foreword to at least one edition of the book, McBain wrote that the book was essentially half-finished in first draft, but there were no notes as to how she had intended to continue it, so that he had to solve the mystery himself before completing the manuscript.)

On January 28, 1946, Rice appeared on the cover of Time magazine. The cover was created by Boris Artzybasheff.[6]

She had three children, two daughters and a son. "Craig Rice kept very few personal records. She was conventionally wed four times with other affairs."[7] One of her husbands was beat poet Lawrence Lipton.

Like many of her characters, Rice was an alcoholic and made several suicide attempts. She also suffered from deteriorating health, including deafness in one ear and blindness in one eye with incipient glaucoma in the other. She died of a barbiturate and alcohol overdose, aged 49.[8]

• Hero's Way. St Louis Post-Dispatch Daily Magazine, 10 October 1935
• Gallows Boy. St Louis Post-Dispatch Daily Magazine, 1 February 1936
• Even Chance. St Louis Post-Dispatch Daily Magazine, 22 February 1936
• Confession. Akron Beacon Journal, 27 May 1940
• Boy and Girl. Pittsburgh Press, 24 July 1940
• An Interview in the Street. Pittsburgh Press, 18 January 1941