English novelist, born at Northampton on the 26th of September 1843. Educated at Queens College, Cambridge, where he graduated in law in 1867, he was called to the bar at Lincolns Inn in 1871. In the meantime (1868) he had bought Once a Week, which proved a losing venture for him, but which brought him into touch with Walter Besant, a contributor [see Besants preface to the Library Edition (1887) of Ready-money Mortiboy]. There ensued a close friendship and a literary partnership between the two men which lasted ten years until Rices death, and resulted in a large number of successful novels. The first of them, published anonymously, Rice being responsible for the central figure and the leading situation, was Ready-money Mortiboy (1782), dramatized by them later and unsuccessfully produced at the Court Theatre in 1874. In rapid succession followed My Little Girl (1873); With Harp and Crown (1874); This Son of Vulcan (1876); The Golden Butterfly (1876), the most popular of their joint productions; The Monks of Thelema (1878); By Celias Arbour (1878); The Seamy Side (1880); The Chaplain of the Fleet (1881); Sir Richard Whittington (1881), and a large number of short stories, some of them reprinted in The Case of Mr. Lucraft, &c. (1876), Twas in Trafalgars Bay, &c. (1879), and The Ten Years Tenant, &c. (1881).
James Rice died at Redhill on the 26th of April 1882.