Sat 9 May 2015
Reviewed by William F. Deeck: JONATHAN LATIMER – The Lady in the Morgue.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[3] Comments
William F. Deeck
JONATHAN LATIMER – The Lady in the Morgue. Doubleday Doran/Crime Club, hardcover, 1936. Reprint editions include: Pocket Books #246, paperback, 1944. Dell Great Mystery Library, paperback, 1957. IPL, paperback, 1988. Film: Universal, 1938 (Preston Foster as Bill Crane, Patricia Ellis, Frank Jenks as Doc Williams).
William Crane, private eye, is at the morgue in Chicago to try to discover the identity of a young woman who is a resident of that temporary dwelling place and is believed to have committed suicide. The body is stolen, the morgue attendant is murdered, and the police blame Crane for both crimes.
Crane also has the misfortune to be considered the body-snatcher by two gangsters, both of whom want the corpse for difforent reasons and don’t care what happens to Crane as long as they get the body. The gangsters think the body is one individual, while Crane’s clients think she’s someone else.
Crane and his colleagues, Doc Williams and Tom O’Malley, are on the verge of, if not well into, alcoholism, and the main wonder of the novel is how they keep functioning full of liquor and without sleep. Still, they do manage to find the corpse — where else but a graveyard — and cart it back to the morgue, where the corpse suffers the indignity of having her head removed and Crane is nearly murdered.
As might be imagined, this is a rather ghoulish novel, but surprisingly amusing also. And not bad detection on Crane’s part.
One does wonder, though, how the corpse, several days after her demise and having under gone embalming, for reasons inexplicable — why embalm a corpse that is to be burled illegally? — can still be in a state of rigor mortis.
May 9th, 2015 at 10:10 pm
I like all 5 of the Bill Crane novels by Latimer and I found them all to be humorous. When I reread them, I enjoyed them even more. One novel even has Crane or one of his cronies lying in bed reading a BLACK MASK pulp.
May 10th, 2015 at 9:56 am
The Bill Crane books are one of my favorite PI series. I always wished there were more of them, but perhaps five was the ideal number. Any more of them and Crane would have had to be taken away in a detox wagon.
For a long interesting article about Latimer and his writing career, check out this piece by John Fraser on the primary M*F website:
https://mysteryfile.com/Latimer/Latimer.html
Included at the end is a long bibliography by me of all of Latimaer’s work, including his screenplays for Hollywood and TV.
May 10th, 2015 at 6:03 pm
I’m a huge Latimer fan who first knew him for his screenplays and then discovered his own novels. He remains one of my favorites because despite the screwball humor Crane does some legitimate detective work — notably in THE WESTLAND CASE where he solves the case with solid work and ballistics.
The two films aren’t bad though Foster is more robust than I imagined Crane — I imagine he got the role because he has a slight resemblance to everyone’s favorite detective of that period, William Powell. His Crane beats Lloyd Nolan’s Michael Shayne for establishing some of the early private eye traditions.
One thing to note about Latimer’s books they push the limits on both sex and language. For years the politically incorrect speech in the novels was censored though Latimer is not expressing prejudice but the way the people he wrote about really spoke.
As for the sex, Crane seems to end up either naked or with a naked women or both on a regular basis, and once he has a recurring girlfriend the relationship is racy. In that Latimer resembles Hammett more than anyone else, though I might argue Latimer offered a fourth turn on the genre, a screwball vision as Hammett offered a more realistic view, Chandler a romantic one, and Cain a sleazier one.
I certainly get the feeling Latimer inspired the screwball school as much as Hammett’s THIN MAN or Norbert Davis work. Cleve Adams Rex McBride always reminded me a bit of Latimer as did Kurt Steel’s Hank Heyer (if you never read Steel, find a few of the Heyer books, you’ll enjoy them).