Sat 4 Jun 2022
A PI Review by Tony Baer: JONATHAN LATIMER – Headed for a Hearse.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[4] Comments
JONATHAN LATIMER – Headed for a Hearse. Bill Crame #2. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1935. Sun Dial Press, hardcover, 1937, as The Westland Case [photoplay edition]; Gregg Press, hardcover, 1980 [introduction by William L. DeAndrea]. Paperback reprints: Mercury Mystery #38, 1940s, abridged [digest-sized]; Century #136, 1950; Jonathan Press Mystery J-84, 1950s, abridged [digest-sized]; Dell #D196 [Dell Great Mystery Library #6], 1957, abridged; Macfadden, 1964; IPL, 1990. American Mystery Classics, softcover, 2022. <B>Filmed</B>as The Westland Case, Universal, 1937, with Preston Foster as Bill Crane, Carol Hughes, Barbara Pepper, Frank Jenks as Doc Williams), Astrid Allwyn, George Meeker, Theodore von Eltz. Director: Christy Cabanne. Screenwriter: Robertson White.
I’ve now read all five of the Bill Crane novels, albeit completely out of order. I’m pretty confident in saying that this one, Crane’s second outing, is clearly the best of them. It may even be the best medium boiled detective novel ever — at least that I’ve encountered.
It’s got everything and it’s tightly plotted in a manner I had no idea Latimer, at least in his Crane books, was capable of.
It starts out with a Chicago death row inmate, Westland, scheduled to get the chair in six days for killing his wife.
The murder victim was found in a locked room, her keys next to her, and Westland the only other one with keys. There’s no other plausible entrance than the locked door. She was shot with a service era Webley, a rare gun one of which is owned by Westland. But it’s been missing since the murder. He was convicted on circumstantial evidence. But the electricity in the chair doesn’t care.
So Crane gets called in. And he tries really hard to keep it together thru the first half of the novel. But the fun really starts begin when his dipsomania kicks in. Drunk to the point of near incoherence on a combo of bourbon, absinthe and gin, three days prior to electrocution, he’s finally in fine form. He’s hilarious (‘she’s no mercenary — she belongs to a much older profession than that’), and booze is to Crane’s wiles what spinach is to Popeye’s biceps.
Crane starts methodically, but even (and especially) in his drunken inspiration, he dances circles around the cops and criminals alike. He really is, as is his wont to bray, a ‘great detective’.
He picks the lock to the locked room mystery, and in the nick of time.
It nicked my time too, keeping me up til 3 am last night to see what happens. Which never happens. Like Crane, I need my sleep. And when I sacrifice my precious sleep to finish a book that’s got 100 pages left — lemme tell ya: the thing is good. It’s funny, it’s tough, and it’s a real honest to goodness mystery with a detective that actually detects — not just a bull in a china shop hoping serendipity strikes. But that too.
So, like I said, the thing’s got everything. And it’s tight. It works. It’s really good. So there you go.
June 4th, 2022 at 8:45 pm
Crane’s reasoning in finding the murder weapon and his use of ballistics experts in proving his case is as good as anything in Classical Detection. Like THE MALTESE FALCON that has one clue as good as anything in Agatha Christie this one is enhanced by the actual detective work involved.
Latimer sets a high bar early on by making Crane’s job almost impossible and then pays off.
The final scene of this one has a ring of truth too. It really isn’t needed for the plot, but it ties everything up neatly and it is the touch of a novelist who understands that even once the plot is resolved there still needs to be a nod to character.
June 4th, 2022 at 9:08 pm
Thanks to fellow blogger Evan Lewis, THE WESTLAND CASE, the movie based on HEADED FOR A HEARSE can be seen here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUWZhohOnGw
June 6th, 2022 at 6:59 pm
Thanks for finally allowing me to see this film!
Had mixed reaction.
Foster and Jenks sparkle as the comic detectives.
The impossible crime is disappointing and routine.
Reasoning about ballistics had its moments.
June 14th, 2022 at 1:46 pm
I go into the Latimer phenomenon in some detail in my 29,000-word special section on the Crime Club’s Golden Age in the recently released BLOOD ‘N’ THUNDER 2022 SPECIAL EDITION, still available at muraniapress.com (hint, hint).
I’ve read four of the five Bill Crane books several times over the last 40-odd years, and whether I believe HEADED FOR THE HEARSE or LADY IN THE MORGUE the best depends upon which one I’ve revisited more recently. But I agree with David Vineyard that Crane’s location of the missing Webley — employing a stop watch, a monkey wrench, and a taxi driver — is as good a piece of detecting as can be found in any Golden Age work.
I actually saw all three Bill Crane movies before I read the books, so they remain sentimental favorites. I had the privilege of screening THE LAST WARNING (adapted from THE DEAD DON’T CARE) with its director, Al Rogell, who told me that Preston Foster and Frank Jenks were just as irrepressible as Latimer’s Bill Crane and Doc Williams. While shooting on location at an estate with a spacious swimming pool, they wanted to get away early and go to the races at Santa Anita. So they pushed Rogell into the pool, knowing he’d wrap production for the day rather than work soaking wet.