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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.