![]() ![]() The G-String Murders must have been one of the earliest examples of the “celebrity mystery,” where a well-known person not known for their writing then “writes” a mystery.“I wrote it three times,” Gypsy says, “with a Thesaurus.” As a writer she is a new original on the American scene - the first important brunette since Gentlement Preferred Blondes. Here, in The G-String Murders, is a new, brisk literary style, written in her native mascara language by Gypsy Rose Lee - in person. “Here is the living portrait of burlesque with assorted deaths thrown in.Besides the two mystery novels, her 1957 autobiography, Gypsy, detailing her rise to fame, was a bestseller that inspired a Broadway hit and was filmed in 1962 with Rosalind Russell as Rose Hovick and Natalie Wood as Gypsy, and remade as a 1993 TV movie with Bette Midler as “Mama Rose” and Cynthia Gibbs as Gypsy. She parlayed that into an uptown gig as a Ziegfeld girl in “Hot Cha,” and from there to theatre, appeared in twelve films and eventually her own television show, The Gypsy Rose Lee Show in 1958. Minsky, who featured her in his infamous New York club. She started out as a child, performing with her sister June in a small time act called “Dainty June and Her Newsboy Songsters” and worked her way up to her own act, “Rose Louise and Her Hollywood Blondes” (her real name was Louise Hovic).Įventually she was spotted by H.K. Cyr., and was once proclaimed herself to be “the most publicized women in the world.” She certainly knew how to get press, anyway. ![]() Lee was, of course, one of the most famous strippers of all time, right up there with Lili St. Maybe it was Stanwyck singing that rousing little musical ditty “Take It Off the E-String, Put It On the G-String” that got the Academy all ga-ga. Still, Lady of Burlesque did well, even garnering an Oscar nomination in 1944 for Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture. Amazingly, given her hunger for self-promotion, Gypsy didn’t play herself. Naturally, a sequel soon followed, Mother Finds a Body (also allegedly ghost-penned by Rice), and a movie adaptation of the first book under the title Lady of Burlesque, starring a singin’, dancin’ Barbara Stanwyck, although in the film her character’s name was changed to Dixie Daisy. It’s also a pretty good mystery, with more than a few unexpected twists, but at its heart it’s a zippy, slang-laden, screwball affair, full of oddball scenes (the first body is found on the backstage toilet) and eccentric characters, particularly the strippers, who include a “Communist”, a man-hungry vamp and a bubble-headed rookie who keeps forgetting how much clothing she’s supposed to remove onstage. The G-String Murders certainly must have ruffled a few feathers back in the day, with its behind-the-scenes look at an already “risqué” world, with its rather daring references to backstage toilets, makeup tables, pasties and other paraphernalia of the trade, and a surprisingly vivid and unsettling visit to a women’s holding cell down, when several of the strippers are arrested and manhandled by the cops. Regardless of who wrote it, though, the public seemed to have enjoyed this rollicking (and slightly naughty) tale of a stripper who decides to go all Sherlock when some whack job starts strangling her fellow strippers with - what else? - a G-string. ![]() Others aren’t so sure, and as recently as 2018 it was being published under Rice’s name. Malone, actually wrote the book, although some (including her son) assert that there is more than sufficient written evidence in the form of manuscripts and Lee’s own correspondence to prove she mostly wrote it herself, albeit under the guidance of Rice and others. It was pretty widely assumed for decades that Craig Rice, the creator of sleuthin’, drinkin’ attorney John J. Or, at least, she claimed to have written it. Yep, Gypsy Rose Lee, “America’s most famous take-it-off artist,” wrote a mystery novel, The G-String Murders (1941). in which she herself (who else?) played detective. The most famous stripper/detective/detective novelist of all has to be GYPSY ROSE LEE. “She’s descended from a long line her mother listened to.” ![]()
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