Episode 108: Childhood Detective Books: Home Sweet Homicide by Craig Rice (Guest Jeffrey Marks)

SPEAKERS
Sarah Harrison, Carolyn Daughters, Jeffrey Marks

Sarah Harrison  00:12

Welcome to Tea, Tonic and Toxin, the only book club and podcast dedicated to exploring mysteries chronologically from Edgar Allan Poe to the present, we’re discussing the best mysteries and thrillers ever written, as well as interviewing some of the world’s most talented contemporary mystery and thriller writers. I’m your host, Sarah Harrison.

Carolyn Daughters  00:33

And I’m your host, Carolyn Daughters. We aim to educate, entertain, and reignite interest in exceptional and often overlooked authors who shaped the genre. Check us out at teatonicandtoxin.com and on our socials to find tons of great content and take part in the conversation. We love hearing from listeners, and we’re excited you’re joining us on our journey through the history of mystery.

Carolyn Daughters  00:57

Today’s sponsor is Harrison Heritage. Harrison Heritage is a specialty grower dedicated to preserving and cultivating rare and historic flora and fauna. They have a strong focus on early American and Virginia heirloom cultivated varieties using regenerative pasture-focused and experimental farming practices. Harrison Heritage prioritizes soil health as the foundation for nutrient-rich, resilient ecosystems. Their mission is simple: to safeguard the flavors, genetics, and agricultural traditions of the past while fostering a healthier future, Harrison Heritage, preserving the taste of history. And we’re thrilled to have them as our sponsor. And Sarah, Nate, and the whole Harrison Heritage crew are just getting started, and they would love to have you follow them on Facebook @HarrisonHeritage or on Instagram @Harrison.Heritage.Farm to keep up with what’s new and what’s next.

Sarah Harrison  01:07

I feel like I’ve introduced every episode with “I’m really excited today, Carolyn,” but I am. It’s always true.

Carolyn Daughters  01:13

I know. People must think that that’s pre-recorded, and yet we’re always so excited. I know we’re always like, yay, we’re podcasting, we get to talk about books we love, yay! I mean, there are worse gigs. And today we get to talk about childhood detective books.

Sarah Harrison  01:25

We have such a level of expertise in our guest today, and we go for different kinds of expertise, right? But Jeff is here today as the biographer of Craig Rice herself, so we get to talk in depth about women mystery authors and this author’s life in particular. There’s a lot to talk about.

Carolyn Daughters  01:25

I’m so excited about that, because this is one of the women mystery authors that I had never heard of until we were putting together our list of the best mysteries and thrillers ever written, and we’re in the 1940s I’m so excited. Speaking of the 1940s our listener of the episode, not born in the 1940s no, no, no, speak of Sergio Angelini, who really knows literature, and particularly films of the era, 40s, 50s, that era, and he joined us on Green for Danger by Christianna Brand, and he’s been an amazing promoter of our podcast ever since he was on the podcast, and we love that. Sergio Angelini has the Tipping My Fedora podcast, which is so interesting, and focuses not exclusively, but mainly on films, and really looks at what makes them magical from that era. And so, thank you, Sergio, for being a friend of the podcast, and you’re going to be our listener this month. Check out his episodes if you haven’t yet.

Sarah Harrison  03:00

Check out his podcast.

Carolyn Daughters  03:01

He has so many interesting things to say. We loved having him as a guest.

Sarah Harrison  03:07

Today we’re discussing Craig Rice. She was born Georgiana Ann Randolph Craig in 1908.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  03:15

It’s just like royalty.

Sarah Harrison  03:22

Like royalty, lots and lots of names.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  03:29

I rarely hear it. I think Georgiana, but like I said, most people called her George or Georgie, so it wasn’t if they did reference it, but it’s one of those things, like your grandparents call you.

Sarah Harrison  03:43

Craig Rice was an American author of mystery novels, including childhood detective books like Home Sweet Homicide. She was also the author of short stories, and screenplays, best known for her character John J. Malone, a rumpled Chicago lawyer. Her writing style was unique, and its ability to mix gritty, hard-boiled writing with the entertainment of a screwball comedy. Our friend Otto Penzler calls Home Sweet Homicide arguably Craig Rice’s best and most popular novel. Given the similarity of the main character to what we know of Craig Rice’s home life, the book appears to be at least somewhat autobiographical, presumably sans murders. Columnist Bill Ruhlman called Craig Rice the “Dorothy Parker of detective fiction,” and she was also the first author of detective fiction ever to appear on the cover of Time magazine, January 28, 1946. She died in 1957 and Carolyn, I think, is going to show us the Time Magazine cover in just a moment.

Carolyn Daughters  04:45

Today, we’re excited to welcome back Jeff Marks. He’s the publisher at Crippen and Landru. He’s joining us to talk about his biography of Craig Rice. What an incredible woman. Can’t wait to talk about this. After writing numerous mystery author profiles for The Armchair Detective Mystery Scene and other genre publications, Jeff chose to chronicle the short but full life of Craig Rice, one of the best women mystery writers we’ve read to date. That biography is called Who Was That Lady, and it encouraged him to write mystery fiction. We should talk a little bit about that as well. Okay, Jeff has been nominated for a Maxwell Award, an Edgar, three Agathas, two MacCavity Awards, and three Anthony Awards. He also just won the Poirot Award at Malice Domestic, or, rather, Crippen and Landru won. So, congratulations, and welcome!

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  05:56

Thank you.

Sarah Harrison  05:58

Welcome back.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  05:59

Yes, enjoying very much being here.

Sarah Harrison  06:02

I want to dive into this crazy biography. Or a biography of a crazy life, but Carolyn, can you hold up that Time magazine again? Hopefully I actually try and do as little as possible, but I want the software to make a clip of it and share it. Really cool.

Carolyn Daughters  06:32

It says on the cover, “Author Craig Rice, successful murder still requires imagination.” Super incredible, and there’s a photo in here of Craig Rice and her three children.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  06:50

Yes.

Carolyn Daughters  06:50

Home Sweet Homicide, of course, has three characters who are the protagonists who are children. It would probably fit into a category called childhood detective books, but for an adult readership. Marion Carstairs, the mother. But the photograph says, “insufficient respect for the police?” So I think this could have probably been one of the criticisms of this book. I don’t know that they’re a laughing stock in the book, per se. Maybe a couple characters are written humorously, and the children can run circles around a few of the detectives, but it’s really interesting. It’s a fun article that talks about Craig Rice, the author, and also the characters in the story, the humor in the story, and how mystery lovers are few and far between. The article basically says that some people disdain the genre as either campy or kitschy and not very serious. We’ve talked about this in particular last season in 2025 about the reception of detective novels in the 30s, 40s, and this article is pointing saying it’s in many cases hard to take the genre seriously, unless it’s a Raymond Chandler novel or something of that ilk, for example. And yet Craig Rice is on the cover of Time magazine, which I think is amazing. Jeff, you had told us a little bit in our last episode. Listeners, if you haven’t listened to that episode yet, you don’t have to listen to them in order, you can listen to that one after this one if you like. But you had mentioned some of the reasons why Craig Rice was popular at the time. How did she resonate with the American public? And what sorts of criticisms did some portion of the American public have with her and her childhood detective books like Home Sweet Homicide?

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  08:55

Well, in looking at the time period where the Time Magazine came out, Craig Rice was in the midst of negotiations in Hollywood to get this book, Home Sweet Homicide, made into a movie. She was interviewing a number of directors, writers who she thought were up to snuff with the book. She was very particular about the book with the John J. Malone books, not so much. She, in fact, did the old “give me the money and I’m going to run.” So when you see the other movies based on her books having a wonderful crime, which is one of her John J. Malone books, they gutted the entire thing. They kept the three main characters, John J. Malone and his friends, Jake and Helene, and that was it. The entire plot is different than the story that you see in the movie, so at that point you’re not going to have a good feel for that. You’re not going to want to read more, because it’s nothing like the book whatsoever. You’d be surprised, so there were a lot of Hollywood newspapers talking about who Craig Rice was speaking with about having the book made into a movie. She talked to Otto Preminger about it, which was funny because she has long been accused of writing the G String Murder, which was written by …

Carolyn Daughters  10:44

Gypsy Rose Lee.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  10:46

Who was dating Otto Preminger. So you see, when you start looking, you see all these tie-ins, and you’re like, oh, well, that’s probably how she got in the door with him, was that she knew Gypsy Rose Lee, and so Gypsy Rose Lee was able to, but she was going through and looking for everyone to see who was going to be the best for that.

Carolyn Daughters  11:09

How did Craig Rice get on your radar? I think you had said that she had there are all these copies of her books, and the book jackets all had these inconsistent stories. What led you to think like I’m going to look deeper? What made you think there might be an actual story here.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  11:26

Well, as you read in the bio of me, I talked about the fact that I’d written a number of articles, and I started seeing some really interesting things. A lot of the authors who would talk to me would start talking about their books, and I would start to see little pieces of where their own lives were coming and spilling out into their books, and I was fascinated by that, to think, here is someone who really isn’t consciously saying I’m going to write a book about ABC, because that was in my life, or that’s something that’s really important to me. They just did it, and so I wanted to explore that in a little bit more detail. What were things that people wrote over and over again, and how did that tie to their lives, so I started looking around. I wanted to do someone from the 1940s or 50s, just because when I was exploring mystery, this would have been the 1970s and so I was going to use bookstores and buying a lot of used books, and those used books all happened to be 1940s and 1950s books, so that’s the era I knew, and so Craig Rice was on my list of people I was interested in doing, because I really liked her books, particularly the childhood detective books. I like laughing, I like the witty wordplay, and all of that, and so I was interested in doing hers, and as you said, I started pulling some articles, any biographical information that I could find, and they, none of them were the same, and so this is the 1950s and 1960s and I’m fascinated by why they’re not the same at that point we had enough information that we’re an information society and information time period, and why don’t they know, and they didn’t know how many kids she had, they didn’t know how many husbands she had, they didn’t know how many books she had, they didn’t know if she’d written some books or not written some, and at one point there was actually listed a collection of her short stories. No, there’s no such book. I had to track it down.

Sarah Harrison  13:53

And there’s no such book. She was the author of famous childhood detective books like Home Sweet Homicide, and there was no official, accurate biography.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  13:58

Someone made it up, and it just spread with the rest of the story about her, so and they also talked about the fact that they didn’t know where the name “Craig Rice” came from. Well, Craig was her birth surname, Rice was her adopted surname, so Craig Rice is not some mystery, right? Craig Rice was an obvious name, yes, an actual obvious name, and all of these things were known. And then the thing that got me interested was I was able to find her family. I was able to find Nancy’s family. Nancy was the oldest daughter. And she couldn’t possibly have known this when she wrote the book, but similar to the book, Nancy had nine children. So, when you think about the character in the book who’s talking about having all these children, I believe the book had nine and the movie had six, so I mean, but, but they were different numbers. But anyway, in either case, Nancy ended up having a large number of children. They do all this stuff. So the first time I met them, the first time I talked to them on the phone, they cleared up a majority of these questions I had, where did her name come from? How many kids did she have? How many husbands did she have? And they just boom, boom, boom, and they knew all this stuff.

Carolyn Daughters  15:30

Of course.

Sarah Harrison  15:30

It’s almost amazing that they knew it. So, having been reading your biography, that’s been clearing up a lot for me, and  the worst possible way, like, and I guess it’s maybe it’s just a stereotype about comedians leading such tragic lives and overcoming trauma, but talk to us a little bit about Craig Rice’s traumatic upbringing herself, and then to me, the worst part was not even that she had such a hard upbringing, but that she then revisited a lot of that on her own children. She wrote childhood detective books like Home Sweet Homicide, but she ended up doing to her children what was done to her.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  16:15

She did, so I talked about the fact that she had a surname and an adopted name. Her mother was an artist, and so you can see where Craig might have gotten some of her creative work. Her father was too. They traveled the world, they spent a lot of money, and a baby was going to hold them down. So a family member took the baby in. They had not been able to have any children, and so this was a boon for them that they were able to raise a daughter. They, the birth parents, came about three years after that and wanted to take her back. They did take her back shortly, but again, we’re not prepared to have a child at that point.

Sarah Harrison  17:05

Wow, and they just dumped her off again. They dumped her off again.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  17:10

They started to do this a third time, and Craig just said, “No, wow, I am not doing this, because she was probably 12 or 13 at the time, and just said, “No, I’m not going with you, I’m staying here, this is my home. And at that point she was able to be adopted, and they just signed the paperwork and left. And what’s heartbreaking about that is she had a half-brother, and they kept him, and they took him with them everywhere. So there’s that trauma that we’re talking about. Not only was she bounced around from place to place, but she was not considered to be worthy of being taken with the parents.

Carolyn Daughters  17:54

Do you know why? I mean, why was that? Was it age disparity? Was it gender? What was going on there?

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  18:02

I want to say it’s gender. Obviously, the other brother was Alex. He was a boy, and they kept him and left Craig Rice with the family.

Sarah Harrison  18:20

Talk about generational trauma, that is, you could have named the book that, like, her mother, right? Her mother, I think, was orphaned and raised by her grandmother, her maternal grandmother. That’s a little bit different, right? If your mom passes away, and then you have a stable upbringing, but I think still it felt like some residual idea that kids don’t need mothers or something.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  18:47

And then you come to that, Craig Rice was like, oh, I’m never going to do this to my children, and then turns around and does the same thing. It’s surprising, as she’s the author of childhood detective books that are so filled with charm and close family relationships.

Sarah Harrison  18:57

Yeah, she just dumped her own kids off on someone else.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  18:58

The irony is she dumped the two girls with the couple who had raised her.

Carolyn Daughters  19:06

Oh, wow.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  19:07

Not only is it repeating the pattern here, we’re like down to the nails of we were going to repeat this pattern down to the same people.

Sarah Harrison  19:18

Well, and the son had it was so, so crazy to me, and I guess it was because these adopted parents couldn’t take on a third, but the son was just randomly in foster care for 10 years.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  19:30

Yes. Oh, it’s a totally different family.

Sarah Harrison  19:32

Separated from everyone.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  19:35

And at the time that she wrote this book, Home Sweet Homicide, that was the time that all of the kids came back to her home, and so that’s probably where she got the idea to do the book. Was she had a family at home with her at that time?

Carolyn Daughters  19:52

Were her kids precocious? Were they wise beyond their years and pretty savvy the way the characters are in childhood detective books like Home Sweet Homicide?

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  20:04

They were, so I mean, all of them were very involved in different careers and different things that were not really heard of at the time, so as I mentioned the other session, David, the youngest boy, was into it. He was very much known in that area for all the work he did, and we’re talking the 50s here. So this is before we got computers that were small enough we could put in our desk, and all of that, he’s doing all this work there, and doing quite a bit of it, and being well known for it. Iris was very involved in television in the 1940s and 1950s so again another rising area where she was very involved, and in fact, you see that if you look at My Kingdom for a Hearse, which is one of Craig Rice’s later books in the 1950s it steals that profession, so the characters are involved with television, and so it’s interesting to see that she uses a background that she can get information on in the book. I’m blanking right now on what Nancy’s profession was, but all three of them were very involved in. I do know Nancy and her husband traveled a lot, but she took all the kids with her.

Sarah Harrison  21:43

Thank goodness.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  21:45

That’s a whole lot of goodness.

Sarah Harrison  21:49

That was like the dynamic I have to say was shocking for me, and we talked a little bit in the last episode about the expectations of the time period children were written about as angels, and in my thinking, I’m remembering, like, Leave It to Beaver.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  22:04

I don’t even know if that’s it.

Sarah Harrison  22:05

It was in the 50s, but you have this idea about a Leave It to Beaver style family and moral lessons, and every single real-life character in her life is running around abandoning children every and everything else, and like the system seemed to allow for that. I can’t imagine today, although I mean, I know some people from other countries who were just their parents didn’t want them, they put them in foster care, they gave them up, you could give them up for adoption, but just to be like, this is inconvenient. Childhood detective books like Home Sweet Homicide seem so family oriented.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  22:05

Yes.

Sarah Harrison  22:05

I’m going to put them in foster care and travel for 10 years, and then on top of that, I think what was it. You alluded to her second non-official marriage with what was the gentleman’s name, Birdie.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  22:05

Birdie, Albert.

Sarah Harrison  22:05

Birdie was sick, and so she left her boyfriend. She wasn’t with Birdie at the time, she was home with her adopted mother, and her adopted mother was, who’s raising her kids. It’s like, no, you need your places with him, your places with your boyfriend, not your kids. Oh, can you talk to me a little bit about the thinking of this time period? What is going on?

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  22:05

She just wasn’t very.. I hate to.. she just really wasn’t into anyone, and so she would.. so she met her first husband, they had got married to had two kids together. Birdie was actually a friend of husband number one, and so left husband number one for birdie. There seemed to be some question as to why birdie couldn’t get divorced. There were all sorts of stories that were given, his wife was Catholic, his wife was in a mental home, all those kinds of things, but I was never able to track down any information on that part of that is because this was written in the 1990s and I have a lovely internet where I could do this, I still wasn’t able to, because I went back and tried to look up a few of these, so they technically weren’t married, even though they presented each other as a spouse, and when Birdie got sick, she showed her concern by leaving him there and looking for husband number three, which she did, and so they got married again.

Sarah Harrison  22:05

That was wild too, though, like you mentioned in your book, I think that was Larry. Larry had traditional ideas about the family. Family, and they needed to live under one roof, except his family, who he abandoned to marry Craig Rice.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  22:05

Yes, so he left his wife and two children, and I didn’t realize for many years that one of his children was James Lipton?

Carolyn Daughters  22:05

Oh, the James Lipton?

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  22:05

Yes, him, Inside the Actors Studio. I talked to him about it at the time, and he really didn’t recall. He was fairly young when his father left and went with Craig Rice, and so he just really didn’t have much to say about her, but I did talk to him about it, and it was like I didn’t really put together all these pieces, and so he left his first wife there.

Sarah Harrison  22:17

Correct, without support. Childhood detective books like Home Sweet Homicide seem so confusing against this real-life backdrop.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  23:28

Without support, yes, she supported them, they were together for a five year, six years, something like that. They got divorced, and when they got divorced, Larry married his secretary. That was never discussed, and I couldn’t get any confirmation, of course. When someone marries their secretary, you have to wonder how long that was going on.

Sarah Harrison  26:29

Didn’t Craig Rice hire him? I remember, like she was using all of her book revenues for unnecessary expenses, like Larry’s office and secretary.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  26:38

Right.

Sarah Harrison  26:38

She paid for that secretary because he really was failing at writing.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  26:43

Yes, and Larry was supposed to be doing a lot of the tax information, and he decided not to file. You have this overwhelm. overwhelming set of things that happen all at once, and so you have what I would suspect would be Craig was realizing that perhaps the secretary didn’t need to be there, she was going up, up, up in her career, Larry was not, and then you had all this tax stuff going on all at once, and so that meant a big chunk of their money was gone, and that’s a whole lot to deal with at one point, and so they did get a divorce at that point. She went on, married number four, and this was a legitimate marriage, and she married a door to door vacuum cleaner, salesman. So nothing to do. So the first two three men that she had been involved with had all been first two were writers, Larry was a writer, and this one was had nothing to do with writing whatsoever. So there was a big gap already between interests. She made a big ordeal out of this. She had invitations, she had a big cake with little skulls all around the cake.

Sarah Harrison  28:18

What? A little icing skulls.

Carolyn Daughters  28:26

They were icing, though. Sarah, they were not. They were not real skulls.

Sarah Harrison  28:31

Oh, that’s totally normal for a wedding. Absolutely, icing skulls.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  28:34

And I actually, for Crippen and Landru, when we did our 25th anniversary anthology, I bar borrowed that cake, and I love that, and had the cover since it was a celebration. I was like, “Hey, I know, I know of a great celebration cake here. A similar version to that as part of the icing skills.

Sarah Harrison  28:58

Yes, they were icing skulls.

Carolyn Daughters  29:00

Do you have a photo of this? Because we have a skull in our Tea Tonic and Toxin logo, and it would be very cool to see a photo of this cake.

Sarah Harrison  29:10

We need an anniversary of icing skull cake.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  29:16

Yes. Thank you. Because it’s fun, so and then she got divorced from number four. At that time, she had to go into a mental institution. She was suffering a lot of the times with mania, she was suffering a lot from depression and bouncing back and forth between those, and while she was in this institution, she met number five. See, these childhood detective books like Home Sweet Homicide seem very innocent against the details of her real life.

Carolyn Daughters  29:52

Oh, wow.

Sarah Harrison  29:52

Was it a patient or a doctor?

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  29:53

No, I will. I don’t make very many statements telling people how to live their lives. But do not marry someone that you meet in the institution with you. So that would be my one statement. If I had to pick one, that would be the one I’d say.

Sarah Harrison  30:12

Marriage advice from Jeffrey Marks. Yes, that’s fair.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  30:17

That would be, and so she had a lot of problems from all the drinking and all the issues that she was having. She went to a rehab center to break away from some of that, and then she began to write again while she was there, and so this is the last set of books you’ll see this big gap in her novels, so I think she doesn’t write a novel from like 1949 until 1957. 1957 is the year that she passed away. She had two books that came out right around the time that she died.

Sarah Harrison  30:58

There’s a couple of instances about her life that I recall from your book, where on the one hand she’s experienced incredible trauma, which may be linked to the alcoholism, but on the other hand, you point out that she was working as a journalist and it was a boys field at the time, and she perhaps felt like she had to drink and act like one of the guys, which put her on this atypical path before ever becoming a mystery writer. Can you talk a little bit about that work?

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  31:36

Craig Rice was a journalist before she started writing, she really wanted to be a crime writer for the newspaper, so she wanted to do the trials, which is where John J. Malone comes from, so she does manage to do that, but the some of the pictures that you see of her from that time when she was doing articles for other parts of the newspapers were very fluffy, very feminine versions of herself, and so that’s what she tried to get away from. That was one of the reasons she switched and just used Craig Rice as a name, because she wanted to be known, at least androgynously, so that people wouldn’t know who she was.

Carolyn Daughters  32:30

Which also happens in Home Sweet Homicide, where Marion Carstairs has a bunch of pseudonyms, and they’re all, they’re all male.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  32:38

Yes, and some of Craig Rice’s others are too. She had Michael Venning, that she wrote three books under the name of Michael Venning, and when someone came out to get a picture of Michael Venning for, but it was some highlight of Craig and highlight of Michael Venning, they asked for a picture of Michael Vending. She went in, she borrowed Larry’s hat, put on the fake beard, and went back out.

Sarah Harrison  33:09

I love it.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  33:10

And they had a picture of Michael Vending after that.

Sarah Harrison  33:15

That’s hilarious. I love how she doesn’t take it seriously.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  33:20

Right?

Sarah Harrison  33:21

You know her names, the publicity, what gender is she? She just lets people think whatever they want to think.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  33:29

Yes.

Sarah Harrison  33:29

Whether she doesn’t care or whether she knows that it’s going to work in her favor, I’m not sure.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  33:34

Yes, and that brings us to the Time Magazine. If you read the Time magazine article about her life, you might as well skip it. She was rightly a famous author of childhood detective books like Home Sweet Homicide, but there were so many lies and so many mistruths in there. In a lot of cases, she stretched the truth. She said that she was related to Thomas Jefferson. Well, one of her names is Randolph. That was, want to say, Jefferson’s mother’s maiden name, something like there was a tie to Jefferson being involved with the Randolphs, and so she took and placed those together and said, “Oh, I’m related to Thomas Jefferson,” and they wrote that they didn’t do any kind of research.

Carolyn Daughters  34:28

Wow. Time magazine did not fact check.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  34:32

No, they didn’t.

Sarah Harrison  34:33

Incredible.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  34:35

I think they probably just were not used to someone like Craig Rice. I mean, honestly, when I did the articles that I did prior to writing this biography, if they said I was born such and such place, I did not call that county courthouse and ask them for a copy of the birth certificate. I just wrote that down and went with it. From that standpoint, there were a lot of things that she made up. This wasn’t the story in childhood detective books like Home Sweet Homicide.

Sarah Harrison  35:12

Didn’t her father do the same? Wouldn’t he say he was like some kind of European royalty?

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  35:20

Yes. And it just went on and on that way, and so they didn’t find out because they didn’t fact check until the story was out, until after the cover was done, and after the article was done, and Craig Rice’s mother wrote to them, and very politely said, this is all a bunch of the yes.

Sarah Harrison  35:44

Was it politely though? Because didn’t her mother hate her ever since she rejected, taken away? She made the rejection permanent, like there was not going to be any, and just bad mouthed her daughter for the rest of her life, wow, like zero accountability for abandonment, there, right.

Carolyn Daughters  36:05

Right. Wow.

Sarah Harrison  36:07

It was upsetting to read as a mother.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  36:10

Yes, I mean, because you should, they just basically after Craig Rice had said, “I don’t want to go with you, when she was in her teens, and just said, “I want to stay with these people, they’re my parents, and so she wrote her off. It was never a chance for her to, she, the mother just never bothered with her again. Things like this, where she was going to get even.

Sarah Harrison  36:34

Publicly embarrass her.

Carolyn Daughters  36:35

It had to be hard for the foster parents to keep her for like three years, and then the biological parents come back and say, “Hey, we’re ready to take her back, and then drop her back off again, like at some point, it’s a really interesting early conversation about parenting and parenthood, and who an actual parent is, biological, or adopted, or what have you, like where one finds one one’s family, because her biological mother, from what I’m hearing, seemed to think that she had a claim on her whenever it was convenient for her to reclaim her.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  37:20

Absolutely, I was just like, I’m here, give me the kid.

Carolyn Daughters  37:26

Interesting.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  37:27

Now, tying back to what I talked about originally, with this Craig Rice said, this doesn’t bother me. This has never bothered me. And yet, when you start reading her books, none of her main characters have a nuclear family, including in childhood detective books like Home Sweet Homicide.

Sarah Harrison  37:43

They’re all the orphans made good, aren’t they?

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  37:48

You see some of the stories, and you start looking, and she either doesn’t mention parents at all, mentions one or not the other, or the character was in foster care prior to becoming an adult, so for not bothering you at all, it certainly seemed to crop up in everything she did.

Sarah Harrison  38:13

Let me ask you this. I’ve been thinking about, I know exactly one person who was abandoned to an orphanage at the age of five and adopted by an entirely different family, and I strongly felt that he had an attachment disorder, and had has, and I still feel that way, but always said the same things, and I didn’t feel like it to me, I don’t really think I’m bothered by it, I don’t ever think about it, which I think is characteristic of this issue, but also, do you, do you feel like it is just a characteristic. You mentioned her attachment issues frequently in the book, but also was it a protective mechanism where she just wouldn’t want to be that vulnerable to admit that. Think all mother’s rejection bothered her.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  39:08

I honestly think all of the above, that she didn’t want to admit that, hey, my mother didn’t want me. I mean, she was happy with her foster parents slash adoptive parents, she loved them very much. It was quite clear, but just that whole.. and it was constant, because up until the time she was a teen, that does she love me, does she not, does she want me, does she not? Well, she does for this moment, and then not for that moment, and is very disconcerting.

Carolyn Daughters  39:45

Wow, I mean, such a history that she had, and so you’ve, you, as you said, met, I think, two of her three children, like, did they share with you? Any thoughts on whether their mother had been like cognizant tapped into like history repeating itself to some degree with their own upgrade, like what did they share their take on their own childhoods and upbringing at all with you? It’s a lot, lot to ask of anyone, but maybe they did, maybe they didn’t.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  40:21

They did talk about the struggles they had with their own parents. They didn’t really talk about whether or not Craig Rice was aware of that by the time that they got to know her, which was pretty much as an adult. Craig Rice was very much into alcoholism, so I don’t know that you could have gotten past all of that to get some lucid cognitive idea of what was going on in her mind. Childhood detective books like Home Sweet Homicide were very innocent compared with the life Craig Rice was leading.

Carolyn Daughters  40:55

Wow, I know we did a whole episode on childhood detective books and Home Sweet Homicide. And we’re going to do a whole episode on Home Sweet Homicide, the film, but I mean, just talk a little bit about what it was like to meet her two children, and how that helped shape your understanding of who Craig Rice was as a person and as a writer.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  41:22

Well, one of the things that surprised me the most, and explained why a lot of her works were out of print, and things like that, they didn’t know that she was popular, so here were here people who were reaching out, trying to figure out what was going on, wanting to print her books, trying to find an agent for her, trying to find all this, and when I first talked to the, was actually the parents, and or the children, and the grandchildren, they were like, why do you care, why do you want to write about it? Is anyone going to be interested in this? Can you sell something like this? I mean, questions like that, that they just had no concept of who she was in place in the genre, who she was in place of what her books and things like that was interesting that they just were so far away from that that they didn’t know.

Sarah Harrison  42:29

That’s fascinating well friends unbelievably we are at time I feel like I’m always the bearer of bad news but I think we have captured Jeff for one more episode, as Carolyn alluded to. You got to actually watch the film of Home Street Homicide, one of the most amazing childhood detective books, with Craig Rice’s children, which is amazing. And I just recently watched the film for the first time, and it’s definitely one of the best childhood detective books and films. And I want to hear all about it, but for those of you that is going to be in our bonus content episode, so not everyone, if you’re, if you’re on Patreon, you’ll have access to that. But Jeff, who, where can people find you, your work? We haven’t even got to talk about Crippen and Landru in this biography celebrating its 20th year on this cover.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  43:23

Yes, that’s probably the easiest way to find me is through Crippen & Landru. So, if you email the webmaster, that’s me. You ordered the order guy, that’s me. So, if you do one of those, you’ll answer. The book is there. It’s still available. There’s also a Crippen and Landru published collection of Craig Rice’s short stories.

Sarah Harrison  43:55

Awesome.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  43:56

and I’ll tell a little bit of that too in the next piece.

Carolyn Daughters  44:01

I have just one other quick thing, and then want to talk about our next book that we’re going to do, but Crippen and Landru, so you guys have worked to revive interest in overlooked writers and rare short fiction, like who’s next on your list? I know you told Sarah and me, you have a list. Who’s coming up?

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  44:25

Well, we just got finished with a John Dickson Carr book. We are getting ready to publish an Edward Hoch book, so he is the only short story writer to ever become a grand master in for Mystery Writers of America wrote hundreds of short stories, and so we’re publishing in the short amount of time. After that, we’re doing a locked room anthology of stories around the world, so and then. And after that we are doing Josephine Tey.

Carolyn Daughters  45:03

Awesome, that’s great. And we will be covering Josephine Tey on our podcast as well, so that’s going to be cool.

Sarah Harrison  45:12

So much going on, you have so many irons in the fire, that’s awesome. Classic mystery writers, love it.

Carolyn Daughters  45:22

I’m going to take a second to introduce our next book. After childhood detective books like Home Sweet Homicide, we have Death Comes as the End by Agatha Christie. This book is incredible. The Queen of Mystery transports us to ancient Egypt, I believe it’s her only book not set in the 20th century. In 2000 BC, death gives meaning to life. At the foot of a cliff lies the body of Nofrit, concubine to a cop priest. Many see it as fate, the beautiful, venomous young woman who deserved to die, but the priest’s daughter suspects foul play and believes the evil doer lurks within their household and watches helplessly as the family’s passions explode in murder. The book was published in 1944 and it reflects Agatha Christie’s fascination with the ancient world, inspired by her time in the Middle East with her archeological archeologist husband, Sir Max Mallowan. It’s the first full-length novel to merge historical fiction with the mystery genre, paving the way for the historical who done it.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  46:25

Can I share one quote that she made about now?

Carolyn Daughters  46:29

Yes, please.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru)  46:30

She said that marrying an archeologist was wonderful because they’re the only person who is more interested in you as you get older.

Sarah Harrison  46:44

I love that. That’s awesome. Well, on that note, thank you so much for joining us, Jeffrey. It’s been great talking through this fascinating woman and her life and her books, and thank you for all the good work that you’re doing at Crippen and Landru.

Carolyn Daughters  47:01

Thank you, Jeff, and listeners. If you’re not on the Patreon, join the Patreon, because we’re about to do a really cool conversation with Jeff about childhood detective books, Home Sweet Homicide, Craig Rice, and the film version of the book. You can only get it on the Patreon.

Sarah Harrison  47:11

And we will link to Crippen and Landru in the show notes to make your life easier. You can go check out all of the great stuff he has going on there. Thank you so much.

And thanks so much for listening to our episode on Home Sweet Homicide by Craig Rice. It’s one of the best childhood detective books we’ve ever read. Please help other mystery lovers find our show by subscribing or with a like, a share, or a rating. It’s totally free, and it means the world to us.

If the spirit of mystery so moves you, we have a few ways you can financially support our labor of love. Click the link in the show notes to support this podcast. Buy your books through our Amazon store or join our Patreon, where subscribers have access to additional episodes that include bonus content and discussions of the movies inspired by some of the greatest mysteries ever written.

Carolyn Daughters  51:52

Thanks for joining us on our journey through the history of mystery. Until next time, Stay Mysterious.