An upcoming project for my Book Club has meant moving around my TBR pile. (I had to rent a forklift!) This is actually good news, for it means I finally get to tackle Home Sweet Homicide by Craig Rice. My buddy JJ has been singing Rice’s praises for a long time over at The Invisible Event. After he positively warbled about Homicide, I immediately ordered myself a copy and planned to settle back and enjoy it. 

That was in November. 

November 14, 2019. 

In fact, on the strength of JJ’s enthusiasm, I went out and bought a half dozen other titles by the same author . . . and didn’t read them either. Yes, I’m duly ashamed, and every time JJ teases me about my “habit,” I take it like a man. But now I’m making the first dent in my collection with what many consider Rice’s best book of them all. 

There was a time when Georgiana Ann Randolph Craig, alias Craig Rice, was famous across the United States. On January 28, 1946, she became the first mystery author of all time to be on the cover of Time magazine. Her life was short and colorful. Between bouts of alcoholism and bad health and at least two suicide attempts, she wrote twenty-three novels, numerous short stories and some screenplays. Her work was adapted for film, radio and TV. She was married at least four times, had three children and numerous affairs and sadly died at the age of forty-nine of a barbiturate and alcohol overdose. One critic summed up her turbulent life and career, calling her “the Dorothy Parker of detective fiction, she wrote the binge and lived the hangover.”

Writing is not a profession for sissies; it seems to grab hold of some folks and chew them up, although it’s likely that many a tormented soul has used writing as a way to expunge their demons – and it didn’t work! Unlike Patricia Highsmith, Cornell Woolrich, David Goodis, Jim Thompson and other tortured writers of her day, however, Rice found a way to transfer her dark side onto the page in pleasing hilarious forms. The thirteen novels and many shorter works featuring boozing attorney John J. Malone are the literary equivalent of screwball comedies; indeed, several of them have found their way onto the screen in just that format. 

Home Sweet Homicide is not a screwball comedy – although it did make it onto the screen (more about that below.) It is a domestic farce, a semi-autobiographical family portrait that is both grounded in realism and rapturously idyllic. In her dedication, Rice gives all of the credit for the book to her kids Nancy, Iris, and David in an ode of love so sweet that it makes the fact of Rice’s short life all the more heartbreaking. 

Marian Carstairs is our stand-in for Rice, a successful author who writes various mystery series under aliases such as Clark Cameron, Andrew Thorpe and J.J. Lane. She is also a mother of two girls, 14-year-old Dinah and 12-year-old April, and a boy of ten named Archie. From the first page, where the three kids hang out on their front porch discussing the fact that their mother, distracted by her current novel, seems to have misplaced the dinner turkey, these three establish themselves as among the most delightful and realistic kids ever committed to fiction. They adore their mom and find things like the missing turkey endearing (“Mother isn’t really absent-minded,” says Dinah. “She’s just busy.”). Their two greatest wishes are would that she would 1. solve a murder and use the publicity from that to sell more books, and  2. meet a marriageable man. 

Before anyone can step forward and tell them how unrealistic they’re being, the kids hear gunshots coming from the direction of the house next door. And wouldn’t you know it? The lady of the house has been shot dead. If this seems like fate, the next incident seals the deal: a Homicide detective shows up at the scene, and his name is Bill Smith – the same moniker as the detective hero in Mother’s books! 

I won’t go into any more detail about the case that follows. The circumstances are pleasing and by no means inconsequential, but the whodunnit here is almost beside the point. What matters is watching the brilliant April, the comely Dinah, and the holy terror that is Archie go about solving the case (and giving their mother the credit) and uniting her with the handsome Lieutenant Smith. Along the way, we are taken on a lively nostalgic wallow through the suburbs of 1944 Los Angeles, where mobs of kids (Archie’s pals are actually called The Mob) run around slurping malteds, making mischief, dancing, and talking in slang. (Rice thankfully provides a glossary to explain the King Tut Alphabet that the kids use. By the end, you should have no trouble figuring out what the hash-e-lul-squared the kids are saying to each other!

This was a halcyon time, when neighbors – even the ones you suspected of murder – said howdy, freely shared the prize roses from their gardens, and made extra batches of cookies to hand out to hungry children. Dinah, April and Archie consumes massive amounts of food here to keep up their strength (I’m off sugar these days, but man, was I craving a slice of maple fudge cake!) It’s hardly a spoiler to tell you that they achieve both their goals in the end. What spoils this for me just a touch is that Home Sweet Homicide is all we get from Rice about the Carstairs family. I’ll get to the Malone books at some point – frankly, I never laugh much at alcoholic humor – but I’ll lay you eight to three that this will always be my favorite Craig Rice novel. 

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The 1946 20th Century Fox film adaptation of Home Sweet Homicide is available to watch on YouTube. It was directed by Lloyd Bacon, who will always be dear to my heart for helming the 1933 Busby Berkeley musicals 42^nd Street and Footlight Parade, but by the 40’s his films were far less snappy. It doesn’t help that it was written by prolific screenwriter F. Hugh Herbert, creator of Corliss Archer, a sort of idealized teenage girl who appeared in short stories, a play, a radio program and a 1945 film called Kiss and Tell, starring Shirley Temple as Corliss. Herbert replaces the natural rhythms and snappy humor of Rice’s kids with a sticky, idealized portrait of 40’s children – the sort of family dynamic that was popular on radio and would become the staple of 50’s family sitcoms.

The opening credits promise something screwball-y and wonderful: the song “No Place Like Home” plays but keeps being interrupted by gunshots and screams. Unfortunately, the film that follows, while pleasant enough, doesn’t live up to that promise. Lynn Bari and Randolph Scott are okay as Marian and Bill. The three kids are fine too – Dean Stockwell is a standout as Archie – but none of them come to life the way they did on the page, and their relationship as siblings is mucked about in order to add some unneeded conflict. The simple murder plot of the book is simplified even more: characters are dropped, and others are changed for the worse. It’s a cute movie, but it doesn’t hold a candle to Craig’s delightful confection of a book.

Home Sweet Homicide is readily available through Otto Penzler’s American Mystery Classics.