Having written six fast-paced and energetically witty mysteries featuring Jake and Helene Justus and their lawyer friend John J. Malone, Craig Rice decided that 1942 would be a year of experimentation. Some worked, some was hard work, and some was probably successful if you like that kind of thing. Thankfully, 1943 saw her return to Malone & Co., though the ghost of experimentation wasn’t completely laid and a little of the need to innovate — no bad attitude, not if you see yourself in writing for a while — carried through to Having Wonderful Crime (1943). So Jake, Helene, and Malone decamp to New York rather than Chicago, but murders happen in the Big Apple too, and before long we’re caught up in one.

Finding newlywed Dennis Morrison drunk and getting larcenous with the flowers in their hotel lobby, Jake and Helene take him up to their room, where he sleeps off his excesses. In the morning, the police come looking for Dennis with terrible news: his new wife, Bertha, has been murdered in the night, and they need him to identify the body. Except, when he goes to identify her at the end of chapter 2, he is met with a surprise: the beheaded woman in his wife’s bed, wearing his wife’s pyjamas, is, in fact, not the woman he married.

From here the book becomes the sort of freewheeling adventure you’d expect from Rice when the Justuses are involved, with various hunches and ideas pursued and much drinking ensuing, the three leads pinballing around New York in search of information, each pursuing their own investigations for their own ends. And, to be honest, that’s kind of a shame: one understands Rice’s desire to mix things up, but keeping Jake, Helene, and Malone apart — and introducing the false tension of Jake keeping a secret from Helene — isn’t really what made these books so successful to begin with. It takes, it must be said, a little getting used to.

The first half, then, feels a little slow, as Rice introduces reasons to keep her trio investigating and not communicating, caroming into each other only to bounce off in new directions with the same senseless suspicion ripe among them. In fairness to Rice, I think this opening section is a little long because there’s a great surprise that she’s trying to hold off until the halfway point, and it is very entertaining in places: see Jake trying to get a simple message into the head of poetess Wildavine Williams, or the magnificently casual jokes Rice tosses off for a pastime without ever drawing your attention to them:

“I just want to get a look at her, that’s all,” Helene said. She added firmly, “Don’t be jittery, Malone.”

“I’m not jittery,” Malone said in an indignant tone, putting a match in his mouth and trying to light it with his cigar.

The detection remains good — c.f. Helene phoning around to find out about the firm Mawson & Mawson, or the early observation about Bertha Morrison’s unpacking — and the characters so sharp that you could shave with them (“Bring each of these gentlemen a glass of water and bring me four double whiskies, all at one time.”). I especially liked Malone’s taming of an apparently ungovernable child, and the ever-evolving relationship with the police officers Birnbaum, O’Brien, and Schultz. Key to the whole thing is the Helene-Jake-Malone alliance, however, and it’s rather late in the day when Malone is moved to reflect that he needs and cares deeply for his friends, or that Helene sallies forth into danger reflecting that in previous examples of this behaviour the other two were always “somewhere within screaming distance”.

When all’s said and done, the plot makes a fair amount of sense, too, and, since I was misdirected away from the murderer, it arguably achieves what it sets out to. There is, perhaps, a slight paucity of real clewing, and I fixated on one detail that had absolutely nothing to do with anything — good work, Jim — but I also had, as I usually do when this author gets together with these three characters, a wonderful time being carried along, even if, as I say, it felt like it took a little longer than usual to warm up the engine. If you’re not a fan of these characters, of Rice, or of this style of mystery then it will do nothing to convert you, but anyone going into this hoping for more of the usual zany enjoyment won’t be disappointed.

Now, can someone please reprint Rice in her entirety? The near-total absence of her books from the recent GAD boom is frankly baffling.

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

Featuring Bingo Riggs and Handsome Kusak:

Standalone: