“Houdini made the same false assumption. When he leaned exhaustedly against the cell door, completely baffled by his failure to overcome the lock, the door suddenly swung open and he fell into the corridor. The old Scot, you see, hadn’t locked it at all!”

GOOD-BYE, GOOD-BYE!

Craig Rice

Detective: John J. Malone

BORN GEORGIANA Ann Randolph (1908-1957), Craig Rice’s real-life mysteries were a match for her fiction. Because of her enormous popularity in the 1940s and 1950s (she was the first mystery writer to appear on the cover of Time magazine), she was often interviewed but was as forthcoming as a deep-cover agent for the Central Intelligence Agency. How her pseudonym was created is a question that remains unanswered sixty years after her premature death. Equally murky are questions about her marriages, the number of which remains a subject of conjecture. She was married a minimum of four times, and it is possible the number reached seven; that she had numerous affairs is not in dispute. She had three children.

Rice was born in Chicago, where she spent much of her life. Her parents took off for Europe when she was only three years old so she was raised by various family members. While working in radio and public relations, she sought a career in music, writing poetry, and general novels, with which she had no success, so she turned to writing detective novels with spectacular results.

Rice is perhaps best known for the John J. Malone series, though his fictional career began as a friend of a madcap couple, the handsome but dim press agent Jake Justus and his socially prominent bride-to-be, Helene Brand. Malone’s “Personal File” usually contains a bottle of rye. Despite his seeming irresponsibility, Malone inspired great loyalty among his friends, including the Justuses, Maggie Cassidy, his long-suffering and seldom-paid secretary, and Captain Daniel von Flanagan of the Chicago homicide squad. The series began with Eight Faces at Three in 1939 and ran for a eleven novels. In addition to a total of seventeen novels under the Rice pseudonym, she also wrote To Catch a Thief (1943) as Daphne Sanders and three mysteries as Michael Venning.

“Good-bye, Good-bye!” was originally published in the June 1946 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine; it was first collected in The Name Is Malone (New York, Pyramid, 1958).

Good-bye, Good-bye!

By Craig Rice

A WOMAN in the crowd gasped, almost screamed. Near her, a man in a gray topcoat covered his eyes with his hands. Half a block away an overdressed, overpainted, and very pretty girl sank to her knees on the concrete sidewalk and prayed. But most of the crowd stared upward in silence in half-horrified, half-delighted fascination.