Having published five books about lawyer John J. Malone and his friends Jake Justus and Helene Brand between 1938 and 1941, Craig Rice evidently felt the need for change. Consequently, only one of the four books she published in 1942 featured that triumvirate. I’ve been unable to track down Telefair, a.k.a. Yesterday’s Murder (1942) or The Man Who Slept All Day (1942) — the second published under the nom de plume Michael Venning — but I do have The Sunday Pigeon Murders (1942), the first of two novels Rice would complete about Robert Emmett ‘Bingo’ Riggs and Boniface ‘Handsome’ Kusak. And, as a fan of Rice’s writing, I can comfortably say that, well, I found this one a little flat.

Rice may not be entirely to blame here — I’ve been in something of a slump, and have given up on at least three books before grinding my way through this one — but, additionally, this really does lack the zip and pizazz of those early Malones. For a start, the hook is far from enticing: two guys who photograph tourists in New York happen to spot in one of their photos a man who is a week away from being declared dead; so they…kidnap him to help the man who is due to collect on the $500,000 life insurance policy in the baseless belief that he’ll give them half. I get they’re not supposed to be the sharpest tools in the box…

Handsome gasped. “A half of a half of a million bucks,” he said. “That’s a lot of dough. Wait. Let me figure it out.” He was silent for a moment, his forehead wrinkled. “Hey,” he said at last, “that’s two hundred and fifty thousand dollars!”

…and it’s not like I expect my crime novel protagonists to always strictly colour inside the lines, but there’s something about this that rankles. Maybe it’s that these two then go about trying to secure this money in the most clueless way possible, and I’m no fan of novels in which idiot protagonists just ‘hilariously’ accidentally their way through; or maybe it’s that, for all the incident on display, there’s no real plot for the first half of the book, just lots of random occurrences that stack up like three children in a trench coat trying to get into a dirty movie.

Things pick up in the second half, but it’s still essentially a living room farce, with Bingo and/or Handsome going somewhere, bumping into someone and having a random encounter, and then that person jumping two-footed into the narrative thirty pages later. By the time Ronaldo Juan Pablo Simon Bolivar Tinaja appeared out of nowhere I was ready to throw my hands up and give up the whole thing as lost, four books in a year being perhaps too much for Rice to maintain the quality and care she had displayed in her earlier work.

And yet, it’s not badly written…

[The] body was warm and heavy against [Bingo’s] shoulder. He felt a little sick and very frightened. This was what happened, he reminded himself, when you tried to mix in with the big dough. People got killed. People killed each other for money, just like Uncle Herman had said. Maybe it was better to be poor, after all, and worry along with the quarters that came in from photographs taken in Central Park. You might miss out on a lot of things, but at least you didn’t find yourself in some strange woman’s car, at eleven o’clock at night, on a street you didn’t even recognize, with the body of a dead gangster heavy against your shoulder.

…it contains a few startlingly well-phrased ideas (“He said if you had enough personality, other people couldn’t change you, and if you didn’t have, it didn’t matter much, anyway.”), and explains away its essential plot with a piece of oversight that’s as canny a piece of authorly sleight of hand as you’ll encounter in the genre…though Handsome’s eidetic memory is conveniently unaware of the key fact, which seems unlikely as all hell to me. So why did I find this so unedifying after enjoying the seven Rice books I’d read previous to this (and, hell, one of those is probably one of my 10 favourite books in the genre)?

Mainly, I suppose, this just wasn’t fun. The Malones have about them a spontaneity that seems to infect everyone involved, whereas this feels like several characters in search of a plot, with the machine all too evident in its absence in that opening half and the people we’re spending time with not engaging enough to make the freewheeling enjoyable. Here it’s as if Rice expected the high incident count to make up for any actual creativity, excitement, or legitimate comedy, and I simply could not get on board with this less resolute version of this usually wonderful author. Hopefully the remaining 1942 books benefit from the shortfalls of this one, but then, looking ahead, I see she published five books in 1943 and I begin to worry again…

~

See also

John @ Pretty Sinister: Probably because it is Rice’s first book set in New York rather than Chicago she spends a lot of time showing off her newfound knowledge and doing her best to emulate Damon Runyon. The result is a book with more endearing characters, a plot that is more cohesive than usual, and a solution that actually makes sense for a change.

Kate @ Cross-Examining Crime: Events can happen suddenly which require a lot of quick thinking on Bingo and Handsome’s part. This is part of the book’s charm though, as you wonder how the pair will extricate themselves from the latest problem they have landed themselves in. I probably should have twigged to the solution, but I wasn’t feeling great at the time and therefore missed a couple of clues which would have pointed me in the right direction. Although I imagine part of Rice’s tactics is that she keeps the reader so busy keeping up with the characters’ latest antics that they don’t have time to stop and think!

Featuring Melville Fairr [a.p.a. by Michael Venning]:

Featuring Bingo Riggs and Handsome Kusak:

Standalone: