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Craig Rice's forthcoming Crime Digest is fathered by 31-year-old Anson Bond (son of Bond Clothes), who under the name of Bond-Charteris Enterprises (working with Leslie Charteris, author of The Saint stories) put out 15 "Bonded" mystery titles which sold 2,500,000 copies. Recently Bond sold his interest in Bond-Charteris (now Saint Enterprises, Inc.) to Rudy Vallée and others for over $100,000. Now he has founded Anson Bond Publishing Co., which will continue to put out "Bonded" reprints at 25¢ each, and the Digest.
Imitation of Fiction. Women have always excelled as detective-story writers. Britain has its Agatha Christie, Marjery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh; recently risen in the U.S. are Mabel Seeley, Helen Reilly (sister of radio pundit John Kieran), Hilda Lawrence, Helen Me Cloy, Phoebe Atwood Taylor, Mignon Eberhart, et al. Although some of their stories appear in magazines, none of Craig Rice's ever does. No popular magazine would dream of buying a story in which as a matter of course enough liquor is drunk to float a distillery.
In 1944 Craig Rice wrote a book, Home, Sweet Homicide, in which liquor was not even mentioned. The most active detectives in it are three children modeled after her own. It was an idea which should have warmed the hearts of magazine editors. The children were charming examples of wholesome childhood—but a little too realistic. One magazine turned the story down because the second daughter (aged 14) used lipstick. Another rejected it because the children showed an impish disrespect for the police.
The truth of the matter is that Craig Rice can never satisfy such editors because she herself comes straight out of a detective farce.
Her publisher swears that she was born in a horse-drawn carriage at the corner of Chicago's Michigan Avenue and 12th Street and was named Craig Georgiana Anne Randolph Walker Craig.
It appears that she has had five legal last names but none of them is Rice, that she is a Catholic but has been divorced two or three times, that she never saw her father from the time she was twelve until shortly before he died, about four years ago, that she has not seen her mother for 25 years, that she did not meet her brother Christopher until he was 18, has never met her half-brother Alexander and does not know their whereabouts (both are in the Army, one stationed at Alexandria, Va., the other in Europe).
Her father, Harry Moschiem Craig, who came from Fort Atkinson, Wis., was known as Bosco. He was a slim, dark-haired and handsome young painter, studying in Chicago's Art Institute, when he fell in love with a fellow student, Mary Randolph, the daughter of a Chicago physician.
They were married in 1906, and since Mary had money, promptly set out for Paris, London and Munich. Mary Randolph, now a slender, attractive cosmopolite of 63, recalls: "It was a pleasant life. We were very nice youngsters. ... He was very charming and a talented painter. He could have been great if he had worked harder."