My Kingdom for a Hearse
Page 23
And there was the long awaited check from Hazel Swackhammer coming in.
Just the same, he wasn’t happy. The Jake Justus Television Production Company was still without a program. Otis Furlong’s process for producing a composite televised Delora would doubtless work, but it was out of the reach of any advertising budget except perhaps Fort Knox. Maybelle, the original Delora, was alive and in one piece, but she’d made it plain that she’d retired.
He’d solved his own problem; he’d failed Jake. Jake and Helene both. And there didn’t seem to be anything he could do about it.
He was still sitting there brooding, with Jake, Helene and Joe the Angel silently respecting his mood, when Hazel Swackhammer walked in. There was actually an expression on her face. Indeed, she even looked pleased.
“I went to your office,” she said, “and your secretary told me you’d be here. She sent these over.”
“These” were a small but important package he’d purchased earlier that day and left forgotten on his desk, and an envelope, check-size.
“Please,” Hazel Swackhammer said, holding out her hand. He gave her the envelope and watched while she opened it, took out a pale green oblong, tore it into bits and dropped it in the ash tray. From the corner of his eye, he saw that it had been a ten-dollar oblong.
“I’ll write you another,” she told him. “One you deserve. But we’d better wait a while before deciding on the amount. Because right now I’d probably say, make it as much as you want.”
He wasn’t mistaken. She was smiling. Not much of a smile, but recognizable.
By mutual consent, they adjourned to a booth in the back room. There, Hazel Swackhammer said admiringly that Malone had handled a tricky situation very nicely, yes, very nicely indeed. She couldn’t have done better herself, and she was considered an expert at such things.
Malone murmured a thank you, and said modestly that it had really turned out to be a much simpler situation than it looked to be at first glance.
Joe the Angel broke up the admiration society by offering drinks on the house. “Because, old friends.” He beamed at Malone. Hazel Swackhammer said that yes, a small sherry would be very fine right now.
The little lawyer looked at her thoughtfully. Even the fact that she’d both thawed and unbent to what, in her, was a downright exuberant degree didn’t make her pretty nor anywhere near it. But his heart warmed to her. A very plain woman, her life dedicated to making more fortunate women even more beautiful. No wonder she all but worshiped the Delora Deanne she’d created out of nothing. And with the only helping hand she’d ever had attached to her own wrist.
She did her best to return the smile he gave her, and said, “I still don’t know how you knew it was Charlie.”
Malone said, “Because of the hat.”
“Yes,” Jake said, “how’s about that? What gives about the hat, Malone?”
Malone said, “If Hazel—if Mrs. Swackhammer here—had been behind all that monkeydoodling with the gruesome little gifts, she’d have reacted entirely differently to the hatbox. But when she saw that hatbox on her desk, she thought she knew what was in it—and she fainted.”
He paused and added thoughtfully, “I think I’d have fainted myself if I hadn’t known what was in it.”
“You knew?” Hazel Swackhammer said.
“Naturally,” Malone said, rolling the cigar around between his fingers. “I sent it.”
Helene said, “I might have known. And I thought it was coincidence.”
“John Coincidence Malone,” Jake said.
“And a quick telephone call on my way to Delora Deanne’s,” the little lawyer said. “A telephone call to Nelle’s Millinery. Up to then, it was all a guess.” And that reminded him. The first guess, the first giveaway, that he hadn’t quite tumbled to for a very long time. The ring.
He felt in his pocket for the package Maggie had sent over, excused himself and walked over to the parakeet’s cage. The bird regarded him balefully as he unwrapped a birdseed bell, hung it in the cage, and said, “For services rendered.”
The parakeet pounced on the bell, which gave a sharp, off-key jangle, jumped back on his perch, and shrieked triumphantly, “Telephone!”
“See?” Joe the Angel said happily. “Very rare bird.”
The word “telephone” reminded Malone of his date with Tamia Tabet. He looked at himself in the bar mirror. Tired, a dusty, unshaven face with eyes that were red-rimmed from lack of sleep. Hair that hadn’t been combed since sometime yester-day. A tie that had crept up under one ear. A wrinkled suit. A dirty shirt.
Not a thing that a good barber and a fresh suit of clothes wouldn’t fix in a hurry. But his spirits failed to rise, the weariness seemed to be in his bones. He went back to the table, sighing.
Jake, Helene and Hazel Swackhammer were talking animatedly about television. Malone slipped quietly into his chair and waved to Joe the Angel for service. Suddenly he realized that Hazel Swackhammer was talking exactly like a prospective sponsor, and Jake exactly like a prospective producer, and they seemed to be getting along fine.
“—and Maybelle is perfectly all right, and as soon as she’s recovered from all this, she is going back to being Delora Deanne again after all—”
The world immediately brightened as though someone had pulled a master light switch. There would be a Delora Deanne television show. The Jake Justus Television Company would be booming. Helene would be paid back her investment, and Jake would never, never know where it had come from. Everything was wonderful.
He listened a little more intently, and suddenly realized just what Hazel Swackhammer was saying. It had absolutely nothing to do with Maybelle Bragg. He went on listening.
“—to advertise Delora Deanne on television ought to be both different and dignified. So as I was saying—a new angle on a quiz program—”
FIN
About Craig Rice
(pseudonym of Georgiana Ann Randolph Craig; other pseuds. include Daphne Sanders, George Sanders, Gypsy Rose Lee, Michael Venning, 1908-1957)
Life Can Be Horrible.
That’s the name of a screwball short story Craig Rice once wrote.
It could have also been her epitaph.
In its January 28, 1946 issue, Time Magazine selected writer Craig Rice for a cover feature on the mystery genre. It was one of the rare accolades this now almost forgotten writer received for her amazing body of work during her lifetime.
The fact is, Craig Rice was, as a recent (and long-overdue) biography put it, “The Queen of the Screwball Mystery.” But even that’s damning her with faint praise.
What she really was is “The Queen of the Surrealistic Crime Story.” Almost everything that happens in one of her witty, whacky novels is completely off the wall. To Rice, reality was truly just a concept; a weird and wonderful playground where her imagination could romp around unfettered.
Rice twisted and distorted characters, plots, settings and events like a rubber pretzel, yet somehow she always managed to come back to this world, content at having challenged her reader’s perceptions of reality. Chopped up bodies vie with elaborately detailed descriptions of womens’ dresses for the readers attention, and every glass of alcohol is duly noted. And yet, in their own weird, surreal way, everything does follow its own peculiar logic.
The Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Home Page compares Rice to such surrealistic filmmakers as “Buster Keaton, Chuck Jones and other silent film and animated cartoon makers (who) developed an enormously creative tradition of surrealistic comedy,” and to fellow mystery writers such as Jacques Futrelle and Ellery Queen (supposedly Rice’ favorite mystery writer) who also “emphasized constantly surprising twists of plot, characters and events that startled readers by their sheer strangeness.”
And it’s fair comment to compare her to such writers, because her world was a very different one than the one that her contemporaries on the hard-boiled side of the street, such as Chandler and Hammett, created. Possibly the only
one on the hard-boiled side who came close to her was Jonathan Latimer, who had more than a few surreal touches of his own, particularly in his Bill Crane novels. And like Latimer’s private eye hero Bill Crane, Rice’s own series characters, ne’er-do-well bibulous attorney John J. Malone and his pals, Jake and Helene Justus, two endearingly inept Watsons, consumed a staggering amount of alcohol. All the better to deal with surreality of things, I guess.
But Malone and his buddies proved to be a popular diversion. They drank their way through a whole slew of novels and short stories, not to mention later film, radio and television appearances. Some of the stories were collected in The Name Is Malone (1958). She also wrote several short stories with Stuart Palmer, teaming up Malone with his detective, Hildegarde Withers. these were collected in People vs. Withers and Malone (1963).
But Rice wrote more than just the Malone series. She wrote several stand-alone novels, and a trilogy featuring traveling photographers, the fast-talking Bingo Riggs and his partner, Handsome Kusak. The books in that series are The Sunday Pigeon Murders (1942), The Thursday Turkey Murders (1943) and The April Robin Murders (1958). The last book was, in fact, left uncompleted at the time of her death, and Ed McBain completed it.
She wrote the standalone To Catch a Thief (1943), which some consider her finest work. It is, of course, long out of print. She wrote three other non series books under her own name, including the magnificent Home Sweet Homicide (1944) which was also made into a film. She also published three books under the pseudonym Michael Venning, featuring gray little New York City lawyer Melville Fairr.
Rice also wrote for film, adding several of her bizarre, surreal touches to The Falcon’s Brother (1942), with her future collaborator Stuart Palmer, and The Falcon in Danger (1943). The first, in particular, with the early death of its hero and his apparent resurrection and ultimate replacement by his brother, reeks of one of Rice’s favorite themes, that of doppelgangers and the dead who don’t seem to stay dead.
Rice also found time to write several highly-acclaimed true crime articles, and to ghost a couple of books, two for stripper Gypsy Rose Lee and one for George Sanders, the actor who had played the original Falcon in The Falcon’s Brother.
With all these projects she was involved in, it’s easy to see why it was said that she was, for a while, almost as popular as Agatha Christie with mystery fans, rivalling her in sales.
Which makes it even more of a shame is that today almost none of Rice’s work is in print, while her pals in the hard-boiled school seemingly gather more and more acclaim and respect every year. It’s a true tragedy, because in her own way, Rice did indeed do something every bit as important and ground-breaking as the boy’s club.
But if Rice’s work wasn’t exactly hard-boiled, her life certainly was. Or possibly even noir, given that almost everything about her personal life was in dispute: her birth, her real name, her number of marriages (at least four, maybe as many as seven), number of children, and even the cause of her premature death (from a probably accidental combination of pills and booze), the age of 49 in 1957 (or was it 1959?). What does seem certain is that much of her life was a long, slow slide into alcoholism and even possibly madness, that there were a string of increasingly bad (and often abusive) relationships and estrangement from her children and eventual institutionalization. As one wrote in an author bio once quipped, she “wrote the binge, and lived the hangover.”
She was born in 1908 in to an artist and a Chicago socialite who travelled frequently. Little Georgia followed in their wake, moving from place to place, rarely settling down, and never living for more than three years with her parents at a time. Indeed, supposedly her happiest times were spent being watched over by her father’s sister, Mrs. Elton Rice. It was from her, of course, that Rice drew her pen name.
Rice was a hard worker. She wrote for the papers, radio, and kept her hand in publicity work, publishing her first book, 8 Faces at 3, in 1939
One marriage was to Beat writer Larry Lipton, and another to a lunatic she met in the booby bin. At a funeral, her own daughter had to be pointed out to Rice, who didn’t recognize her because she “hadn’t visited her family in so long.” maybe domesticity wasn’t for her. In Home. Sweet Homicide, a single mom mystery writer is hard at work trying to wrap up her latest novel while her three children are ripping up the neighborhood trying to solve a murder of their own.
In 2001, Jeffrey Marks published what seems to be the first substantial biography of Rice, at last lifting the veil on the life of a fascinating but very troubled woman whose life was a far cry from the delightfully wacky works she’s best remembered for.
Bibliography
Novels
8 Faces at 3 (1939; aka “Death at Three” and “Murder Stops the Clock”; John J. Malone)
The Corpse Steps Out (1940; John J. Malone)
The Wrong Murder (1940; John J. Malone)
The Right Murder (1941; John J. Malone)
Trial by Fury (1941; John J. Malone)
Telefair (1942; aka Yesterday’s Murder)
The Big Midget Murders (1942; John J. Malone)
The Sunday Pigeon Murders (1942; Bingo Riggs and Handsome Kusak)
The Man Who Slept All Day (1942; as by Michael Venning; Melville Fairr)
Murder Through the Looking Glass (1943; as by Michael Venning; Melville Fairr)
Having a Wonderful Crime (Simon, 1943; John J. Malone)
The Thursday Turkey Murders (1943; Bingo Riggs and Handsome Kusak)
To Catch a Thief (1943; as by Daphne Sanders)
Home Sweet Homicide (1944)
Jethro Hammer (1944; as by Michael Venning; Melville Fairr)
The Lucky Stiff (1945; John J. Malone)
The Fourth Postman (1948; John J. Malone)
Innocent Bystander (1949)
Mrs. Schultz is Dead (1955)
My Kingdom for a Hearse (1956; John J. Malone)
Knocked for a Loop (1957; AKA “The Double Frame”; John J. Malone)
The April Robin Murders (1959; completed by Ed McBain; Bingo Riggs and Handsome Kusak)
But the Doctor Died (1967; John J. Malone)
.
Also:
The Pickled Poodles (1960; written by Larry M. Harris)
Ghost-written novels
The G-String Murders (1941; by Gypsy Rose Lee; aka “The Strip-Tease Murders” and “Lady of Burlesque”; Gypsy Rose Lee)
Mother Finds a Body (1942; by Gypsy Rose Lee; Gypsy Rose Lee)
Crime on My Hands (1944; by George Sanders, actually ghost written by Craig Rice & Cleve Cartmill)
SHORT STORIES
“The Bad Luck Murders” July 1943, Baffling Detective Mysteries; aka “Dead Men’s Shoes”; John J. Malone)
“His Heart Could Break” (March 1943, EQMM; John J. Malone)
“Good-Bye, Good-Bye!” (June 1946, EQMM; John J. Malone)
“Once Upon a Train” (October 1950, EQMM; with Stuart Palmer, featuring Hildegarde Withers and John J. Malone)
“Cherchez la Frame” (June 1951, EQMM; with Stuart Palmer, featuring Hildegarde Withers and John J. Malone)
“Good-Bye Forever” (December 1951, EQMM; John J. Malone)
“Case of the Vanishing Blonde” (December 1952, Dime Detective; with Mark Hope)
“And the Birds Still Sing” (December 1952, EQMM; John J. Malone)
“The Last Man Alive” (1953)
“The Murder of Mr. Malone” (1953)
“The Little Knife That Wasn’t There” (1954)
“Autopsy and Eva” (August 1954, EQMM; with Stuart Palmer, featuring Hildegarde Withers and John J. Malone)
“Rift in the Loot” (April 1955, EQMM; with Stuart Palmer, featuring Hildegarde Withers and John J. Malone)
“The Frightened Millionaire” (1956)
“Say It With Flowers” (September 1957, Manhunt; also 1997, American Pulp)
“The Tears of Evil” (1958, The Name Is Malone; John J. Malone)
“The Murder of Mr. Malone” (
1958, The Name Is Malone; John J. Malone)
“Life Can Be Horrible” (1958, The Name Is Malone; John J. Malone)
“He Never Went Home” (1958, The Name Is Malone; John J. Malone)
“The End of Fear” (1958; The Name Is Malone; John J. Malone)
“Withers and Malone, Brain-Stormers” (March 1959, EQMM; with Stuart Palmer, featuring Hildegarde Withers and John J. Malone)
“They’re Trying to Kill Me” (February 1959, The Saint Mystery Magazine; John J. Malone)
“People vs. Withers and Malone” (1963, People vs. Withers and Malone; with Stuart Palmer, featuring Hildegarde Withers and John J. Malone)
“The Butler Who Didn’t Do It” (1960; also Alfred Hitchcock Presents: 16 Skeletons From My Closet; John J. Malone)
“Hardsell” (A Month of Mystery; John J. Malone)
Collections
The Name Is Malone (1958; John J. Malone) .
People vs. Withers and Malone (1963, with Stuart Palmer, featuring Hildegarde Withers and John J. Malone)
Murder, Mystery and Malone (2002; John J. Malone)