Jonathan Latimer
Personal Information
Description
Jonathan Latimer was born in Chicago on 23rd October 1906. His main series character was the private investigator Bill Crane. An important character in the development of the hard boiled genre. A notable title is Solomon's Vineyard, the controversy over the content saw the US publication delayed by nine years. The author later concentrated on screen plays and also worked for five years on the Perry Mason television series. from Goodreads
Books
The Dead Don't Care
Jonathan Latimer's detective novels dealt with many hero-types but Bill Crane was the featured detective in his most successful commercial efforts. Four B-Movies were made in the 1930's featuring Crane. Without having read this particular novel at this point, I can't take this brief preview any further. However, upon reading The Dead Don't Care, I will write a review as soon as possible.
The big clock
George Stroud is a hard-drinking, tough-talking, none-too-scrupulous writer for a New York media conglomerate that bears a striking resemblance to Time, Inc. in the heyday of Henry Luce. One day, before heading home to his wife in the suburbs, Stroud has a drink with Pauline, the beautiful girlfriend of his boss, Earl Janoth. Things happen. The next day Stroud escorts Pauline home, leaving her off at the corner just as Janoth returns from a trip. The day after that, Pauline is found murdered in her apartment. Janoth knows there was one witness to his entry into Pauline’s apartment on the night of the murder; he knows that man must have been the man Pauline was with before he got back; but he doesn’t know who he was. Janoth badly wants to get his hands on that man, and he picks one of his most trusted employees to track him down: George Stroud, who else?
Murder in the Madhouse
The orderlies do not need a straitjacket for Bill Crane. He is not violent, although he does have a bad habit of making embarrassing deductions about the doctors. This sarcastic, hard-drinking man has deluded himself into thinking he is Edgar Allan Poe’s great detective, C. Auguste Dupin. For this, he has been put away in a stately mental hospital on the Hudson. But Crane is not as delusional as he appears. Though he may not be Dupin, he certainly is a detective—one of the greatest, and occasionally drunkest, of them all. Sent undercover to investigate the theft of an inmate’s fortune, Crane finds the institution not as comfortable as he had hoped. When his fellow patients start dying, he must solve the murders, or risk losing his sanity after all.