Mr. Bonnington looked at him.
“But the postmark on the letter?”
“Oh, that was very simple. The postmark was smudgy. Why? It had been altered with lampblack from Nov. 2nd to Nov. 3rd. You would not notice it unless you were looking for it. And finally there were the blackbirds.”
“Blackbirds?”
“Four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie! Or blackberries if you prefer to be literal! George, you comprehend, was after all not quite a good enough actor. He looked like his uncle and walked like his uncle and spoke like his uncle and had his uncle’s beard and eyebrows, but he forgot to eat like his uncle. He ordered the dishes that he himself liked.
“Blackberries discolor the teeth — the corpse’s teeth were not discolored, and yet Henry Gascoigne ate blackberries at the Gallant Endeavour that night. But there were no blackberries in the stomach. I asked this morning. Plenty of evidence once you look for it. I called on George and rattled him. That finished it! He had been eating blackberries again, by the way. A greedy fellow — cared a lot about food. Eh bien, greed will bang him all right unless I am very much mistaken.”
A waitress brought them two portions of blackberry-and-apple tart.
“Take it away,” said Mr. Bonnington. “One can’t be too careful. Bring me a small helping of sago pudding.”
Goodbye, Goodbye!
by Craig Rice
In the January 28, 1946, issue of “Time” magazine Craig Rice came into her own. On the cover was a full-color portrait painted by Artzybasheff, with a purple background showing a smoky ghost with six arms — a sextopus, and we invent the word with malice aforethought — rising gruesomely out of typewriter keys; the ratiocinative wraith is black: masked and his (or her?) six hands grasp, reading from left to right, a dagger, a rope (held semi-noose-like in two hands), a bottle of poison, an automatic, and a hypodermic syringe (note the extraordinary restraint of the artist: no blunt instrument — or have blunt instruments gone out of fashion?). And inside “Time” was a three-page article on the past, present, and probable future of the lady known as Craig.
In case you happened to miss the “Time” profile, we give you some of its highlights... Between the ages of 18 and 3 °Craig Rice indulged in a dozen years of Bohemian life: three bungled attempts at marriage; innumerable failures to write poetry, novels, and music... The distinctively American type of detective story, originated by Dashiell Hammett, has been called tough, hardboiled, and wacky — a combination of hard drink, hilarity, and homicide; Craig Rice, says “Time,” is virtually the only woman of this school; further, an outgrowth of this American genre is the detective farce of which Craig Rice is also an exponent; she invests (still quoting “Time”) unholy living and heinous dying with a high atmosphere of mixed excitement and amusement; the excitement is provided by realism of a sort — the realism which goes with the ruthlessness of gangsters and other criminal ugliness — and it is set to dialogue of the Hemingway type...
Craig Rice is also Michael Venning and Daphne Sanders — 11 books signed by Rice, 3 by Venning, and I by Sanders, as of the time of the “Time” article; when Michael Venning’s biography was called for by WHO’S WHO, Craig posed for Michael’s picture (as a gag) wearing a crepe beard and her husband’s coat... Interior Decorating Note: The master bedroom contains the “Craig Rice dressing table,” a wide, crinoline-draped affair supported by two female legs appropriately gartered and stockinged in black mesh; (how about the bottles of perfume on the dressing table? — aren’t they reformed whiskey bottles?)...
“Time” makes the following statement which caught your Editor in the solar plexus and floored him for a full count: “Women (says „Time“) have always excelled as detective-story writers.” When your Editor recovered sufficiently from this haymaker to peck out a protest, he gathered the atomized remains of his self-respect to ask if the editors of “Time” ever heard of: Edgar Allan Poe, Emile Gaboriau, Wilkie Collins, A. Conan Doyle, R. Austin Freeman, Gilbert K. Chesterton, Melville Davisson Post, E. C. Bentley, Ernest Bramah, Freeman Wills Crofts, H. C. Bailey, Edgar Wallace, Philip MacDonald, John Rhode, Anthony Berkeley, Francis Iles, Earl Derr Biggers, S. S. Van Dine, Dashiell Hammett, John Dickson Carr, Georges Simenon, Erle Stanley Gardner, Eric Ambler, Raymond Chandler, and not to put too fine a point on it, Ellery Queen — and we apologize to all the other good men and true who have excelled as detective-story writers but whose names are not included only because space limitations prevent us from going on forever. In further rebuttal we call to the stand the following distinguished witnesses: SHAKESPEARE: Let every man be master of... SIR WALTER RALEIGH: History hath triumphed over time. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES: Old Time is a liar! BEN JONSON: That old bald cheater, Time. LONGFELLOW: Time, with reckless hand, has torn out half the leaves from the Book of Human Life. MILTON: Time, the subtle thief. PLATO: As the years go by, time will change and even reverse many... opinions.
One last quotation from “Time”: Craig Rice’s stories never appear in magazines. Oh, “Time”! In its issue of March 1943, EQMM brought you “His Heart Could Break,” the first Craig Rice short story about John J. Malone. In our safe-deposit vaults we have the second Craig Rice short about John J. Malone — “The Bad Luck Murders” — which will appear in a forthcoming issue of EQMM. And following this song-and-dance introduction is Craig Rice’s prizewinning story, “Goodbye, Goodbye!” — the third short about that hard-living, hard-drinking little criminal lawyer, John J. Malone. And also coming in a future issue of EQMM is Craig Rice’s first Michael Venning short story. The defense rests...
A woman in the crowd gasped, almost screamed. Near her, a man in a grey 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.
On a narrow ledge twenty-two stories above the street, there was what seemed, from this distance, to be a small dark blob. The crowd knew that the blob was a girl in a mink coat, that she had been crouched on the ledge for hours, and that a minister, a policeman and an eminent psychiatrist were pleading and reasoning with her through the open window.
John J. Malone, Chicago criminal lawyer, was not one of the crowd. He was only trying to push his way through it to the entrance of the hotel, where a profitable client was waiting for him, one who was ready to hand over a fat retainer before giving himself up on a burglary rap which John J. Malone knew he could beat in five minutes even before a prejudiced jury.
The important business of collecting that retainer was one reason why the little lawyer didn’t notice the crowd at first. A lone, crumpled five dollar bill was in his right pants pocket, and he had a date with a very special and very expensive blonde just half an hour from now. And this particular client would pay the retainer in cash.
Malone was beginning to lose his temper with the crowd when he suddenly realized that the space in front of the hotel was roped off. That was when he looked up.