Unsolved Murders No. 1, or: The Un-Googleable Death Of A Midcentury Crime Mag

Craig Rice is why. Craig Rice — per CrimeReads’s Lisa Lutz, the “gin-soaked” mystery author who “mattered once. In a big way.” — is why I came into possession of a well-kept copy of Unsolved Murders, a 1954 true-crime mag whose chief selling point at this distance is Rice’s name on the masthead.

And Craig Rice likely played a big role in Unsolved Murders existing at all. A reader tipped me to Rice’s nonfiction output, which I’d only heard about in passing, and from there I wound up wandering through some of the mustier halls of eBay, and then to UM — a Google-search-resistant title that appears only to have published the one issue in 1954, and then possibly a second pair of issues ten years later, although I only have the earlier mag on hand and can’t compare mastheads to say for certain. The second set of issues claims to come “from the editors of True Detective”; the first, noting self-righteously at the top of the TOC page that it’s “Dedicated to Better Law Enforcement,” doesn’t appear to have that pedigree, but Rice would have more than sufficed in that regard. Compared to both Dorothy Parker (wit; booze consumption) and Agatha Christie (genre; sales numbers), Rice had graced the cover of Time in 1948 and would have gotten Markall Publishing the start-up capital it needed, easily.

So the real mysterious death here, perhaps, is that of Unsolved Murders.