Home Sweet Homicide by Craig Rice with guest Jeffrey Marks

Jeffrey Marks (publisher, Crippen and Landru) joins us to discuss Home Sweet Homicide (1944), written by Craig Rice.

After numerous mystery author profiles for The Armchair Detective, Mystery Scene, and other genre publications, Jeffrey Marks chose to chronicle the short but full life of mystery writer Craig Rice. That biography (Who Was That Lady?) encouraged him to write mystery fiction.

He has been nominated for a Maxwell Award (DWAA), an Edgar (MWA), three Agathas (Malice Domestic), two Macavity Awards, and three Anthony Awards (Bouchercon).

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HOME SWEET HOMICIDE (1944) by Craig Rice is a classic in the mystery genre for its clever combination of humor and an engaging plot. Featuring three resourceful siblings determined to solve a neighborhood murder, the novel highlights Rice’s knack for lighthearted storytelling and crafting intricate puzzles. The children’s enthusiasm for amateur sleuthing adds a whimsical (and relatable) touch.

Rice’s sharp wit and unique approach to the detective genre earned her widespread acclaim, including a rare Time Magazine cover, solidifying her legacy as one of the most distinctive voices in mystery fiction.

First Impressions About Home Sweet Homicide by Craig Rice: The Carstairs Children as Detectives

What was your first reaction to the Carstairs children? Endearing, exhausting, too clever by half, or instantly relatable and irresistible? (Carolyn particularly loved how they tracked expenditures and measured and divided amounts and quantities of food and drink—she and her siblings did the same.)

The children think that reading mystery fiction has trained them for real detection. Is the novel making fun of that idea, celebrating it, or both?

How does the sibling dynamic shape the story? Would the mystery work as well without the constant bargaining, bickering, loyalty, King Tut dialogue, and shared invention? Who’s the brains, who’s the strategist, who’s the pragmatist, and who’s the chaos engine?

Craig Rice and Marian Carstairs: Mothers, Writers, Workers

Marian is a working widow supporting her family by producing popular crime novels at warp speed. What does the book suggest about women’s work—especially Marian’s endless labor as mother and writer? How unusual or modern did she feel as a protagonist, even when she’s not technically the central sleuth?

What does the book suggest about the life of a woman writer—especially one writing under multiple (male) names and trying to turn imagination into income?

The children are deeply invested in getting Marian both publicity and romance. In what ways do the children act like parents? In what ways does Marian act childlike?

Gender, Performance, and Identity

What does the novel do with feminine performance—movie glamour, flirtation, false helplessness, beauty, tears, “slick chicks,” and social manipulation? Do you think the book is poking fun at gender roles—or quietly depending on them to make the machinery work?

Like Craig Rice herself, Marian writes under male names. The book keeps circling questions of presentation, alias, performance, and reinvention. How important is that to the novel’s worldview?

How does Marian compare with other women in Golden Age crime fiction?

Transcript

Sarah Harrison: 0:11

Welcome to Tea, Tonic and Toxin, the only book club and podcast dedicated to exploring mysteries chronologically, from Edgar Allan Poe to the present. We're discussing the best mysteries and thrillers ever written, as well as interviewing some of the world's most talented contemporary mystery and thriller writers. I'm your host, Sarah Harrison.

Carolyn Daughters: 0:34

And I'm your host, Carolyn Daughters. We aim to educate, entertain, and reignite interest in exceptional and often overlooked authors who shaped the genre. Check us out at teatonicandtoxin.com and on our socials to find tons of great content and take part in the conversation. We love hearing from listeners, we're excited you're joining us on our journey through the history of mystery.

Sarah Harrison: 0:57

Today's sponsor is Linden Botanicals, a Colorado-based company that sells the world's healthiest herbal teas and extracts. Their team has traveled the globe to find the herbs that offer the best science-based support for stress relief, energy, memory, mood, kidney health, joint health, digestion, and inflammation. U.S. orders over$75 shipped free. To learn more, visit lindenbotanicals.com and use code MYSTERY to get 15% off your first order. Thanks, Linden Botanicals. Carolyn, how are you doing this evening?

Carolyn Daughters: 1:34

I'm doing great. How are you? Me too. We found a really cool book.

Sarah Harrison: 1:36

Good. I've been looking forward to doing this whole series on Home Sweet Homicide by Craig Rice. We're going to do three episodes tonight, and it's a series I've really been looking forward to. So, I'm pretty excited. We did, and we found a really cool guest who wrote another cool book. So, we're gonna talk about all those, but before we do, I want to do our listener, our shoutout of the episode. Today's shout out goes to Ellen Seay. Ellen is the owner operator of the BiblioPub here in Roanoke, Virginia. We are partnering with the BiblioPub all this year on as much as we can, so if you're in the Roanoke area, stop by the BiblioPub. She has snacks, she has drinks, and she has a full selection of all our book club books for this year. And she also has the capability of doing special orders, so you don't need to go online, you can go straight through Ellen. So Ellen will be getting her own personal sticker, and if you're not on social media, I would say this is an excellent time to start. We just wrapped up a joint giveaway with the BiblioPub, where the winner is going to receive a number of books and swag and mystery items, so that's all very exciting. So, thank you, Ellen. We are really enjoying our collaboration this year.

Carolyn Daughters: 3:04

That's awesome. Well, today we are so excited to talk about Home Sweet Homicide by Craig Rice. Published in 1944 Home Sweet Homicide is a classic in the mystery genre for its clever combination of humor and an engaging plot, unoccupied and unsupervised, while mother is working, the three children of widowed crime writer Marion Carstairs find diversion wherever they can. So, when the kids hear gunshots at the house next door, they jump at the chance to launch their own amateur investigation, and after all, why shouldn't they? They know everything the cops do about crime scenes, having read them in their read about them in their mother's novels. They know what her literary sleuths would do in such a situation, how they would interpret the clues and handle witnesses. Plus, if the children solve the puzzle before the police, it will do wonders for the sales of their mother's books. But this crime scene isn't a game at all. The murder is real, and when its details prove more twisted than anything in their mother's fiction, they'll have to enlist Marion's help to sort them out, or is that just part of their plan to hook her up with the lead detective on the case? Craig Rice was born Georgiana Ann Randolph Craig in 1908. Craig Rice was an American author of mystery novels, short stories, and screenplays, best known for her character John J. Malone, a rumpled Chicago lawyer. Her writing style was unique in its ability to mix gritty, hard-boiled writing with the entertainment of a screwball comedy, our friend of the show, Otto Pensler, calls Home Sweet Homicide arguably Craig Rice's best and most popular novel. Given the similarity of the main character to what we know of Rice's home life, Home Sweet Homicide appears to be at least somewhat autobiographical, presumably. Lisanne's murders columnist Bill Ruhlman called Craig Rice the Dorothy Parker of detective fiction, and she was also the first author of detective fiction to ever appear on the cover of Time magazine, that was the January 28, 1946 edition. Craig Rice died in 1957.

Sarah Harrison: 5:21

Today we are excited to welcome Jeffrey Marks, the publisher at Crippen& Landru. Before I read his bio, I want to tell on myself a little bit, because this is not your first introduction to Crippen & Landru. Previously we did an episode on Ethel Lina White and The Wheel Spins (The Lady Vanishes), and we had Alex Csurko on, who I was. I was putting Alex Csurko is a hard guy to get a hold of, put us in contact with each other, and they just released. I have a copy here that I'll hold up for the option of getting a clip, Blackout and Other Tales of Suspense, Crippen & Landru just put this out, and Other Tales of Suspense by Ethel Lina White. You want to say anything about Blackout real quick before I tell them about your bio?

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru): 6:18

It's been a very popular book for us, and it's just serendipity. We published the book, and two weeks later, Sarah Wineman put out an article about Ethel Lina White in The New York Times. So, not something we were expecting, but it's been a really good seller for us, and we're really thrilled to bring her back.

Sarah Harrison: 6:39

Great timing. I loved it. I couldn't believe I'd never heard of Ethel Lina White. I loved the book. So, this is really.. so I say all that to say I was going through looking for a guest for Home Sweet Homicide, and I saw this guy, Jeff Marks, had written her biography, so I begin stalking him throughout the internet. I find his LinkedIn, and I'm just about to message him over LinkedIn to be like, "Hey, can I talk to you? When that.. I suddenly.. I don't know, my brain rang a bell and was like,"Wait a minute. Oh, I saw on your LinkedIn, Crippen & Landru, and I was like, "Wait a minute, is that the same Jeff that we talked to years ago on Ethel Lina White? Sure enough, you're already there in my inbox, because I never delete anything.

Carolyn Daughters: 7:32

Good plan.

Sarah Harrison: 7:33

I thought that was an awesome coincidence that we were able to just get in touch with you, and that you were the writer of Craig Rice's biography, which we'll discuss upcoming. So, thank you so much for joining us. After writing numerous mystery author profiles for The Armchair Detective Mystery Scene and other genre publications, Jeffrey chose to chronicle the short but full life of mystery writer Craig Rice. That biography, entitled Who Was That Lady, encouraged him to write mystery fiction. He has been nominated for a Maxwell Award, and an Edgar, three Agatha's, two Macavity Awards, and three Anthony Awards. Welcome, Jeff. And didn't you just get another award I saw in your newsletter?

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru): 8:21

He did the Malice Domestic Poirot Award, which is for non-writing people who have impacted the genre.

Carolyn Daughters: 8:34

Amazing.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru): 8:35

This is basically Crippen and Andrews Award, but I'm thrilled to take it.

Sarah Harrison: 8:40

Awesome. That's so wonderful. It is highly, highly awarded, gentlemen. Thank you so much for joining us.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru): 8:49

I'm happy to be here.

Carolyn Daughters: 8:55

Sarah, where should we start? We have about, I don't know, 1000 questions, as we usually do, and then we count them down, and after like 40 minutes, we've gone through 20 of them, maybe.

Sarah Harrison: 9:07

There's so many questions, and one of the reasons, one of the things that's so intriguing about Jeff, which we'll, we'll talk more about, but we can't help but allude to here, is this deep knowledge of Craig Rice, being as this is like the character of Marion Carstairs takes a lot from Craig herself. Maybe let's start there. Tell us, maybe the similarities and differences that you can see in Marion Carstairs.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru): 9:37

Well, the things that immediately hit me were the writing style. Her writing style was very much like Marion's in Home Sweet Homicide. So you see, Marion goes upstairs, she closes her door, she types all day, she might come down for dinner, she might not. Kids might see her that day, they might not. And all through the day and all through the evening, even when she's not visible, you can hear the typewriter going all the time.

Sarah Harrison: 10:10

That was hilarious, even when they were like having a huge party, she didn't even notice she was upstairs typing.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru): 10:21

In one of the interviews, her third husband complained about the typewriter going all the time. That was when he was asking what were some of the problems in the relationship. He said that particular type of writing was going on all day and all night, and so it was frustrating because there was no peace.

Carolyn Daughters: 10:44

You said Craig Rice's third husband. In Home Sweet Homicide, Marion Carstairs is a single parent, her husband, that her husband, the father of her three children, has died, and she's supporting the family, and the kids think, okay, we have to get her together with this police detective, because then she won't have to write these books anymore, but Craig Rice was married and was still writing the books, the typewriter is still click clicking away upstairs all day long, so a bit of a disconnect there.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru): 11:22

There was she used part of her second husband's life, so while she's presenting this character, and she's writing it at the time where she's on number three, she was using as the character a lot of similarities to her second, and I'm using the word husband loosely, so I could not find any marriage licenses. That was the older gentleman.

Sarah Harrison: 11:56

The older gentleman, right? The friend of her first, yes.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru): 11:59

Birdie, the older gentleman, so he was, but he was a journalist. They did travel for that, and so those aspects of the character are very similar.

Carolyn Daughters: 12:14

What name did she go by in her family and with her friends? She did she call herself Craig Rice? We'll talk more about this when we get to the biography. She was actually adopted, so Craig was her birth surname, Rice was her adopted surname, so when you put all that together, the last two words were Craig and Rice, so the family usually just addressed her as mom or whatever, so some did refer to her as Craig, very few, the older family members, the one who knew her as a very small child, referred to her as George or Georgie or Georgiana.

Sarah Harrison: 13:14

I'm gonna go back for a second, because one of the one of the themes that I thought was cute but a little bit puzzling about the kids in Home Sweet Homicide was their effort to hook up their mom with the police detective, and they kept saying things like, oh, she needs a man in her life, or this, or that, or the other thing, but if you think back to their father, their fictional father in the story, he was a, he was a mess, like he was never there helping. He was always, she was like dragged all over the world, abandoned, having children. I was just like, where did they get the idea that a man would be helpful in this scenario?

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru): 13:58

I was surprised by that too, especially at that era to have three children and have a blended family in that way that was a little different this 1943-1944 you have to remember when she was writing and being published and that just wasn't really heard of as much and so it was interesting to see that.

Carolyn Daughters: 14:27

I just thought the relationship and the way in which the kids ran that household was fascinating, and Sarah, you and I talked briefly about how almost disconnected Marion is from what's going on day to day with her children, who are almost the adults in the house.

Sarah Harrison: 14:47

I loved the kids and their characters, and like the level of care that they took of their mom and their concern. Her, I thought, was so cute and so sweet, and the whole time I was actually, though, a little bit uncomfortable, because, like, oh, I think this is called parentifying. I think Marion's maybe not a very good mom, and she is a single mom in Home Sweet Homicide, and so you are like, wasn't that great, they all work together, but also it's like, oh my goodness, this is tough. What was your perspective on that, Jeff?

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru): 15:29

Having already at that point researched some of it, I'm not surprised the kids were fairly in touch with each other at all times, and even later in life, and yet I think that came from the fact that they did not have like a lot of parental supervision or any connection there, and so they really clung to each other more than expecting more from mom.

Carolyn Daughters: 16:04

There are a few scenes that made me almost a little worried or uncomfortable, like at one point April is about to get into Whose car is it, Rupert Van Deusen, I think. It's Cleve Callahan, and he pulls up in this sports car, and he says, basically, get in, and it, the chapter ends there, because Craig Rice is a masterful writer, she knows when to end a chapter, but when she ended the chapter there, I was like, oh, Home Sweet Homicide going in a direction I wasn't ready for, because that in contemporary literature is often a problem, but everything turned out fine, but for a hot second I was like, oh, don't get in the car with that guy, so the absence of boundaries I found charming most of the time, and funny a lot of the time, and shocking periodically.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru): 17:12

Yes, I did too. So I think some of that is just being younger than Home Sweet Homicide was, and so therefore some of the boundaries that we have today just were not there. So it was more of a case of I tried to put it into that perspective when I was looking through some of it, just because I was like this, this was acceptable back then. They were lived on the same street, they knew each other. They knew everyone in the on the street and talked about them constantly, and so there wouldn't have been that it was almost like a second family type thing, I guess. So it wasn't what we would have seen today. Today we would have been like, no, no, no, don't do that.

Sarah Harrison: 18:01

Well, that's what I was wondering at first, when I was like, today we deal with. I'm a parent of two small kids, and so I'm always reading parenting stuff, and today we deal with things like Uber parenting, helicopter parenting, all of these like too much parenting, and you frequently hear a harkening back to the good old days, when kids had more freedom, and I was like, is that this is this what this looked like, but then when I read your biography, Jeff, I thought, oh my goodness, she might think she's writing a good parent here, because she had no idea what a good parent would look like, so maybe there's even a whole funny situation, and maybe you want to talk a little bit about this. At one point in Home Sweet Homicide, the kids give her like a child psychology book, and she takes a little bit of it, like, don't you think I'm doing a good job? It's like, do you think you're doing a good job?

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru): 19:04

That was interesting. That was something. In real life she definitely could have used that book, so there's just as you said before, that discrepancy between the fact that she's writing all the time that she doesn't probably know her children the way the people on the other street might.

Carolyn Daughters: 19:29

There's a lot she doesn't really know about them, because periodically one of her children breaks into tears as a distraction, and she's not always tapped into what's going on, and their king, their King Tut dialog, she's like, I can't remember what I loved it too, and she, she called it like heathen language or something like that wasn't her favorite thing, and so she wasn't fully tapped into what they were doing, so I mean. I don't know, I mean, I found the whole family charming, and it, aside from the mother factor of Marion's identity, like, if you take the parenting out, which is hard to do, she's got three children, and she's the only parent she took, she all right, well, she, she did it, so I'll follow her lead, like I liked her as a character? I thought, charming, interesting, hardworking, very focused mother who loved her children, just not a mother who mothered using mother as a verb, and I probably shouldn't have said the word just in front of that, like, oh, she was great, except she wasn't really mother. That's how I felt about her, is I liked her as a character, had problems with her as a parent, saw three very independent young people who were self-sufficient in almost every possible scenario.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru): 21:07

I think part of that was, I don't want to say that they did this purposely, but the amount of time that Marion is in a scene is small, so even though we're seeing this and we're making the deduction, I don't - it's not like brought out and stated, if that makes sense.

Carolyn Daughters: 21:35

Sarah, you and I also talked about, like, what is the age range for Home Sweet Homicide. I think it's an adult book, but I went back and forth a couple times because the three protagonists are under 15.

Sarah Harrison: 21:52

I think that's common today. You tell me what you think, Jeff, but like, if it's about kids, often it's for kids, but to me the tone is really different here than so we just read the Bletchley Riddle, which is about kids, and it's a sibling set, but the kids, I think, are presented really heroically in that book, and the kids in these books, while super independent, I think, approves it like all their quirks and nonsense and foibles, like the funny stuff about kids is also there too, which made me think this is this is for adults who think kids are funny.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru): 22:36

At the time, there was somewhat of an outrage, because at that point most kids were portrayed as angels, and they were, I mean, you have to consider, how that they were looked upon in that era, and so you didn't see the kids typically being sassy to adults to being on their own, having to take care of the mother, and those things upset a certain amount of people, and some of the editors who were involved, that they were concerned about Home Sweet Homicide because they were not the stereotypical children of that era.

Carolyn Daughters: 23:21

Interesting. interesting.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru): 23:23

It's making me back here trying to figure out if this would be adults at the time. Excuse me, at the time of 19 in the 1940s it would definitely be for adults, because they would not want their kids to read this and behave that way.

Carolyn Daughters: 23:38

These are because they would be their new role models, these three children. Is that what it was like?

Sarah Harrison: 23:43

The kids were just bad role models, or did they really? Because if you have kids that they're not angels all the time, so they must know.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru): 23:54

I think they did, but they still knew that that's how people of that era would want to see them portrayed.

Sarah Harrison: 24:02

Interesting.

Carolyn Daughters: 24:11

These three kids are amazing, so I could see why you wouldn't want to put, I guess, that the thing is, you wouldn't want to put ideas into your children's heads. You can just walk into someone's house, oh, there was a murder there, why don't you go see where the second bullet was lodged, like, you don't, you don't want your kids taking these kinds of liberties.

Sarah Harrison: 24:42

That was really bold.

Carolyn Daughters: 24:47

And lied to the police multiple times. But Craig Rice herself, she's so like, so funny. There are many lines in Home Sweet Homicide where I just laughed, I mean, out loud, it was just funny, I. And it's, it's a good mystery, it's not like a full on, I guess it's fair play, but it wasn't like I wasn't invested in trying to figure out who the murderer was, so much as I was invested in following this group of people chapter by chapter, and then Craig Rice herself is on the cover of Time magazine, as we said when we were introducing Home Sweet Homicide, so something's resonating. Is it the humor, the mystery? How did she land on Time magazine cover?

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru): 25:36

A few things. First, she was very comedic. It's really hard to write a comedic mystery. You're dealing with death, you're dealing with murder, you're dealing with people who have committed crimes, and yet let's make the reader laugh. And so there's only been, I would say, less than two dozen mystery authors who have done gone that path, and sadly, a lot of them are not noted today, and so that's a problem. So she was popular, she was compared to Dorothy Parker, as we said before. Now it is the I've heard this repeated, but I have not been able to prove that FDR said that he loved her books.

Sarah Harrison: 26:23

Oh, that'd be cool.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru): 26:24

So that was another point. She was getting a lot of publicity about Home Sweet Homicide, so she wanted the movie to be very close to the book. She wanted it to be exceptional, and so she was hitting all the big directors, all the big film studios, and things like that, and so she was getting a lot of publicity about this, and so all of that combined with the recommendation from FDR, that was a lot, and so that's one of the reasons he did.

Carolyn Daughters: 27:11

For me, in Home Sweet Homicide, the kids do really resonated with me from my own childhood, and I'm interested from both of you as well, like my siblings and I negotiated everything, if we ever got together, we were either collecting money, doling money out, making sure things were evenly distributed, like we did a lot of this stuff, and if the chores are divided up, which we sometimes did on our own without someone else dividing them up for us, we were like, really stern about who had more, and, oh, hey, if I do the dishes, you have to vacuum and dust, or what, like, we were like those sorts of things really resonated with me, and I wanted to hear from both of you, what, when you were reading these kids, what made you smile and think back to your own childhoods.

Sarah Harrison: 28:03

Oh, and Carolyn, didn't you also have a detective agency? So there you go.

Carolyn Daughters: 28:07

Oh, yes I did. My sister closest in age is Michele, and my name, of course, Carolyn. And so we started the CarMich Detective agency, and then Michele at one point said it should be the MichCar detective agency, but I said that sounds really stupid, so obviously, so we went with CarMich, and the first order of business, of course, is bringing detectives onto the agency, and then everybody has to pay dues, and you've got to bury the dudes into the backyard, and there's just there's a whole process involved, and solving mysteries was one of the least of our concerns, but I had a childhood detective agency.

Sarah Harrison: 28:53

If only your neighbor got murdered, you could have done something with it.

Carolyn Daughters: 28:58

Exactly. In looking back, there was my sister, had a very good friend who was at the house all the time, and that gang up, two against one, that was a lot of what I saw from my own experience was, you have the one boy child and the two girls who were friends and over each other's houses all the time, and that kind of thing. How about you, Sarah?

Sarah Harrison: 29:33

I did have a secret language.

Carolyn Daughters: 29:36

Oh, okay.

Sarah Harrison: 29:39

A little secret language, and you could only.. it really only worked written. You couldn't really speak it, like was that Latin?

Carolyn Daughters: 29:50

Did you speak it with your brother?

Sarah Harrison: 29:52

No, actually, I had another friend I spoke it, or read it, wrote it with.. it was a note writing language, really. But I loved. they had their little. A King Tut language.

Carolyn Daughters: 30:02

I loved that.

Sarah Harrison: 30:04

A couple questions when I asked you about those their little family instances were very cute. At one point, one of the detectives in Home Sweet Homicide is trying to get Archie to come clean, and then, like, he sees his sister, and it says she makes a symbol meaning family solidarity, and what on earth symbol do they have, meaning like, like the family sign for family solidarity? Was that real, Jeff? Did you ever find out about that from speaking with the kids?

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru): 30:37

I did not find out about that. I had just assumed it was something that told him to shut up.

Sarah Harrison: 30:45

I want a symbol, meaning to teach my kids about family solidarity.

Carolyn Daughters: 30:50

It might have been a fist in the air or something like that, or, or just putting your hand to your chest or something.

Sarah Harrison: 30:57

Like a gang sign or something that they're like family solidarity car stares forever.

Carolyn Daughters: 31:11

There's also one scene, it's I think referenced in passing, where they talk about how Archie was running away one time, and his mom, Marion, says to him, 'Well, let's run away together. And then they run away to the movie theater, and they come back with hamburgers and happiness. And I remembered when I was a kid watching the Brady Bunch, and there's an episode where Bobby Brady is running away, and Carol Brady comes downstairs, and she's got her bag packed, and she's like, "Let's go, and he's like, "Well, I'm running away, and she's like, "No, I'm.. if you're running away, I'm with you, let's go, we're gonna run away together. And I thought they totally took that from Home Sweet Homicide. I mean, random Brady Bunch reference ...

Sarah Harrison: 32:03

Would she still have been well known enough during that era that they'd be stealing from her books for the Brady Bunch, or is that like coincidence?

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru): 32:13

I would say it's a definite maybe. She is still well known. There are still people who come up and want to talk to me about her, so there are people who still are very interested in her, very interested in life, very interested in her books, so it's possible, but I have no idea.

Carolyn Daughters: 32:33

Also, the writers for The Brady Bunch might have been of an age where they were reading it. I've really just now shared every single thing I know about the Brady Bunch.

Sarah Harrison: 32:43

My Brady Bunch knowledge is very limited.

Carolyn Daughters: 32:49

But there's also like a mom and a dad, their spouses have passed away, they come together and they're a blended family. I could see Bill Smith slipping in here and he's now living in the house.

Sarah Harrison: 33:05

How much is true? One of the things I loved about Archie in Home Sweet Homicide is that he's, I don't even know what to call him, he's the more calculated one of the trio, he's always there, like Archie always has money, and he's always negotiating, and he's always like he's gonna come out on top. How is that? I believe her real son's name is David. Was that fiction?

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru): 33:31

David was, was very intelligent. So when I saw, when I read that, I was not at all surprised that the character is very intelligent. He worked in it. He was very involved in early stages of computing. He was just amazing. So, not at all surprised that, as a child, he was also very on top of things, and because he was talking about interest. I'm gonna loan you money, but I want interest.

Sarah Harrison: 34:04

I want all the Coke bottles to recycle, all Coke bottle money.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru): 34:10

For a child to be talking about calculating interest, and then I was sure that he would do it correctly. There was no doubt in mind that not only did he know that word, he knew how to use it, and so just that intelligence came across is so that wasn't a surprise to me.

Carolyn Daughters: 34:32

Did either of you feel this might just be my personal read? So, there's Dinah, April, and Archie, and April the middle child felt like the favored favorite child in Home Sweet Homicide, she felt like the real, like lead protagonist of the book, and I don't know if Craig Rice intended to do that or if that was just my reading of it, but. Dinah, so Archie's younger, obviously extremely entrepreneurial and good-hearted at his core. Dinah, good-hearted at her core, very good-hearted, but the real, like, mastermind seems to be April, so she seemed like the favorite child.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru): 35:19

Sadly, or not. Iris, who was April was based on, had passed away before I started the biography. She was the one that I never got to meet. So that's hard for me to say.

Sarah Harrison: 35:35

How did she pass away?

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru): 35:37

I don't recall, but it was long before I started on it. She died quite young.

Sarah Harrison: 35:45

That's super tragic. She's presented as, like, the, I think, the smart one is how they present her, like Dinah's like super great, but maybe a little slow on piecing some of the pieces together, and then Archie, super entrepreneurial, I believe you said he's probably my favorite. I loved Archie.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru): 36:09

Yes.

Sarah Harrison: 36:11

One of the things I loved about the kids in Home Sweet Homicide, as well, one of their going back to their wanting to fix up their mother, is they were constantly evaluating how she looked.

Carolyn Daughters: 36:25

Yes.

Sarah Harrison: 36:25

Junkie work slacks on, and her hair is a mess, and you need to wear this blue house coat, and you need to do your hair like this, so that you look good for the police detective. What were your thoughts on that, the two of you?

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru): 36:45

I just thought, especially the Dinah, she would be probably at her age the most conscious of trying to make herself look presentable. What are people going to think of me, type of thing. She's in that age group of late middle school, early high school type thing, and you see a lot of that speaking as a teacher now. At that age, they start worrying about what do other people think, and I just got the impression that that was spilling over from her as a teenager to I have to do this for my mother too.

Carolyn Daughters: 37:30

There was a lot of concern in Home Sweet Homicide that that the police detective would not be able to see through dowdy clothing and must hair and having your nails done, and all that, like all of these things, they were all so important, so much. They got the more expensive manicure, and forgetting the amounts of money, but it was like twice the amount of money they secretly paid for the more expensive the kids did, the more expensive manicure for their mom, as if I could be wrong, but as if most men would notice such a thing. I don't know.

Sarah Harrison: 38:07

I don't get the impression that Bill would have been too concerned, but what was funny to me is thinking about my own kids, who, who are much younger than these kids, and they 100% notice when I put forth efforts, my day-to-day Sarah with whatever I'm gonna plant trees hairstyle, and then if I put forth any amount of effort, they'll be like, Mama, you look so pretty and great, but it's also a little funny too, like what's going on in those little child brains, like how their mom looks every day, but it was just for me funny to read it from the kids as well.

Carolyn Daughters: 38:57

In Home Sweet Homicide, Dinah is a couple times referred to as thick, like stocky, almost, and it.. I don't know why. I just had hearkening back to my Nancy Drew days when I was a child, where you have Nancy Drew, and then you have her friend Bess, who's always described as pleasantly plump. I think, in fact, that's I think one of the phrases is pleasantly plump, and then George is it, George is the third, and she's boyish, and it's like you have these sorts of set characteristics of the different detectives, and April and Dinah seemed very different prototypes, almost. I don't know. I went back to Dana girls, the Dana girls. I went back to Nancy Drew, and like this idea that the physical description, also at least in these children's mysteries of the period, told you some. Thing about the character, as if being pleasantly plump made you good-hearted and stalwart, but maybe not quite as bright, or being, what I'm saying, like it, the physical description almost correlated with some other aspect of who you were as a human being. I don't know if that makes sense.

Sarah Harrison: 40:22

How is it received now, Jeff? The physical descriptions, the focus on whether someone's looking beautiful or not beautiful. I feel like we live in an age where people would be more sensitive to that than maybe they were back then. It seems maybe more typical for the time period than it is today.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru): 40:43

I think. So, but I think also a lot of the readers who have probably read 30, 40, 50 books, and in this era are going to expect a little bit of that. So, while today's characters are not necessarily going to be described in the way they are in Home Sweet Homicide, in that I think they just would expect more of that then than it is today.

Carolyn Daughters: 41:13

Jeff, how do you think that Craig Rice stacks up against her peers, the queens of crime, and Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, that sort of high caliber writer of the period.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru): 41:34

The one thing that I noticed right off on doing this is she passed away very young. I say that now because I'm 65.

Sarah Harrison: 41:47

She was in her 40s, right, when she passed.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru): 41:49

Yes, when I wrote this, I thought, oh, she's so old, but now, but so you have to consider Agatha Christie had books that she wrote in the 1920s all the way up through the 1970s Craig had from the late 1930s to the 1950s So from just a standpoint of how many books you can produce, there's a huge gap there, so, and I see this with other authors too, that they're not as familiar to readers just because the author didn't stick around long enough and write enough books to really make that impression.

Carolyn Daughters: 42:39

That's a good point.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru): 42:41

I think maybe she wrote if I want to say 14 or 15 books. It's no comparison to 83 for Agatha Christie, think 80 something also for Earl Stanley Gardner, or the Perry Mason stories, and so you have these authors who are still familiar, because you can find that series and you're there for a while, you can read for months and months and still keep reading the same author, whereas with Craig Rice, that's not going to happen, you're going to have good laughs like in Home Sweet Homicide, and then just when you're really getting into it, that's it.

Sarah Harrison: 43:19

Shoot, and just think how many she would have written. She was so prolific for the time, multiple books per year, if she had lived longer.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru): 43:28

She wrote four books a year, I believe it was.

Carolyn Daughters: 43:31

Oh my god.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru): 43:33

If you talk to authors today, I mean, Agatha Christie did the Christmas Christie every year, so she did one a year, and a lot of other authors today do the same thing, and you see all of a sudden that she was doing four a year, and it just is amazing to think of how much time she had to spend writing, and this was back in the 1940s so you had a typewriter and you wrote it, and then someone got a pen out and made marks on it, or used a pencil on it, and then they had to retype the whole thing, and then they did that again, and then they did that again, and so it's a lot more time intensive than it is today.

Sarah Harrison: 44:14

It's incredible to think about, tragically cut short, but our episode, I guess this one's tragically cut short as well, but we're gonna talk more. We've already, if you can believe it, wrapped up our time for Home Sweet Homicide. But Jeff is gonna stay with us for our next episode. We'll get to delve. I'm not asking Jeff, you're staying with us.

Carolyn Daughters: 44:44

We actually, we don't give our guests a choice. You have to stay.

Sarah Harrison: 44:48

We'll get to talk more about his biography of Craig Rice, more about her life, and what was all going on in the background of this. So, please check out the next episode. Out, and thank you so much, Jeff.

Jeffrey Marks (Crippen and Landru): 45:03

Welcome. I'm enjoying this.

Carolyn Daughters: 45:06

Thanks so much for listening. Please help other mystery lovers find our show with a like, subscribe, share, or rating. It's totally free, and it means the world to us.

Sarah Harrison: 45:16

If the spirit of mystery so moves you, we have a few ways you can financially support our labor of love. Click the link in the show notes to support this podcast. Buy your books through our Amazon store, or join our Patreon, where subscribers have access to additional episodes that include bonus content and discussions of the movies inspired by some of the greatest mysteries ever written.

Carolyn Daughters: 45:40

Thanks for joining us on our journey through the history of mystery. Until next time, stay mysterious.