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.

As my grandfather used to say, “When you fall off the horse, get back on the horse”.  And that’s why he lost his job as a stuntman in Western movies. But the fact remains that lately I’ve had some disheartening reading experiences with favoured authors — John Dickson Carr, J.J. Connington, Freeman Wills Crofts, A.A. Fair, Craig Rice, Cornell Woolrich, J.J. Connington again — and so the tempting thing is to leave them alone for a while, wait for that memory to fade, and then return. But, no, I’m not doing that, I’m reading Rice again now, because why not? That’s what the horse is here. It was a literary horse all along.

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.