Bought @ Shakespeare & Company, slightly campy & funny, very much of that time period ( )

I don’t think I have ever had this much fun while reading a murder mystery but Home Sweet Homicide, a 1944 mystery novel written by American author Craig Rice kept a smile on my face throughout. The story follows three young siblings as they investigate a murder that occurred in their neighbourhood.

Dinah, April and Archie are the children of widow Marian Carstairs. Marian is an author of mystery novels and the amount of time she must spend over a typewriter, means the children have many hours of unsupervised time. When the nasty woman next door gets murdered, the children decide that they will solve the mystery but allow the world to think that their mother was the detective who put the clues together and therefore get the credit and, hopefully, a boost in her readership. These three, two overly clever sisters and an ingenious younger brother bumble their way through the book and with plenty of humor and heart solve the case and also manage some matchmaking with their distracted mother and the handsome police detective.

I think one’s enjoyment and delight in this book would depend on how much you can tolerate and enjoy these children who manage to be underfoot during all aspects of the police investigation and while the police may be competent in their investigation, they have no idea how to manage children. The author uses plenty of humor to show how these children are able to run rings around the police.

Craig Rice was the pseudonym of Georgiana Anne Randolph Craig and she was a prolific writer of mysteries, several of which were turned into movies during the 1940s and 50s. Home Sweet Homicide was my first book by this author, but I have already managed to stuff a couple more on my Kindle for future enjoyment. ( )

I liked it better as it went along (but still think it could have been shorter) but there's no good complaining about that now, the author's unlikely to change her style anytime soon ;-)

Enjoyed the resourceful child detectives (but the law-abiding citizen in me is appalled they kept frustrating the police's genuine efforts), was as keen on the domestic drama (romance!) as the central mystery, and am awfully glad I could tell all the characters apart. It amazes me how often writers will parade a series of people-with-names, not characters, and think there job done. It was clear who everyone in a rather large cast actually was--job well done!

(Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s). I feel a lot of readers automatically render any book they enjoy 5, but I grade on a curve! ( )

Marion Carstairs is a prolific mystery writer under a variety of pen names. Her three children—14-year-old Dinah, 12-year-old April, and 10-year-old Archie—have had to look after themselves as much as their mother has looked after them, because supporting a family of four on a single income by writing is a demanding job. Marion is hard at work on her latest novel when a murder happens next door. The kids decide to use their detective smarts picked up from Marion’s novels and solve the crime, ideally giving Marion the credit to boost sales of her books. But solving a mystery as a group of kids is a tougher prospect than they think…

I enjoyed this mystery very much. The kids were just the right amount of precocious: smart but not overly annoying. The atmosphere was light; whichever blurber said that Rice combines mystery conventions with elements of screwball comedy describes it exactly. So if this summary piques your interest, pick up a copy of the book. I’m glad it’s been reprinted via American Mystery Classics so that more people can discover it! ( )

Of the four American Mystery Classics I've read so far (six were released last year and six more will be out in a couple of weeks), this was my favorite. It's got the cheekiest set of kids who decide to solve a mystery and give the credit to their single mom in order to get her publicity since she's a mystery author. It was ridiculously unbelievable as a story but the fun overrode all of that. ( )