Any guessers as to this mystery author's identity? I had never seen this particular photo of her before.
The Passing Tramp: Wandering through the mystery genre, book by book.
The Passing Tramp: Wandering through the mystery genre, book by book.
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ReplyDeleteMarcia, you were correct, though you deleted it!
ReplyDeleteLooks like Judith Anderson's daughter. I'm guessing a very young Elizabeth MacIntosh AKA Josephine Tey.
ReplyDeleteAh nuts... I think my first guess is very wrong. Further investigation tells me it must be young Georgina Craig AKA Craig Rice. All her glamor make-up in her later years cannot disguise the placement of her eyebrows, her nose and her mouth.
DeleteJohn, I think the eyebrows are mostly penciled in to follow the arch; some women at the time shaved theirs and penciled them in where they wanted them. What looks very odd to me is that, if you look closely, her eyes are two different shapes; the right eyelid is drooping a bit and the left one is wide open. I'm not a doctor, but it reminds me of the aftereffects of Bell's Palsy.
DeleteI think I recall from Jeff Marks' bio that she lost her sight in one eye, but wasn't that later in the 1940s? She also did suffer nerve damage from being beaten by one of her husbands, but that, again, was later in the 1940s. When this picture was taken, I think, she had just married Larry Lipton and was in a stable period when she did most of her writing.
DeleteThis again reminds me of the irony that she she wrote some of the funniest mysteries yet had one of the most troubled lives of mystery writers.
Of course John gets it. I'd only seen a few later pictures of her, where she is much more glammed up. This was a press photo from 1940, after she had published her first novel, when she was probably only about 31 or 32. You can see the traces of her youth, but also some harder living, perhaps. There's also the sardonic expression you would expect from the writer of the Malone mysteries.
ReplyDeleteThe clue was in your post title! Who was That Lady is the title of a biography on her! But my first guess was also Tey.
ReplyDeleteYup, there's always a clue.... ;)
DeleteWell, that will teach me to go with my first instincts! There's not that many pictures of Craig Rice -- at least not in a Google Image search anyway, but I thought the shape of the nose, mouth and face were her and figured it was maybe a picture of her without all the makeup and glitz.
ReplyDeleteYeah, no glitz here, but I thought interesting because it gives a better idea, I would guess, of her regular appearance she looks like someone who would have been fun to know..
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