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- The Murder Room
Fiction, Crime & mystery, Classic crime
'Jonathan Latimer is the best kept secret in noir fiction' Max Allan Collins, author of Road to Perdition
In his first case, William Crane goes undercover in a private sanatorium to solve a theft, and makes no secret of the fact that he believes himself to be a great detective, even presenting himself as Edgar Allen Poe's C. Auguste Dupin.
Indeed, he manages to dazzle the picaresque staff with his feats of deductive reasoning while consuming alcohol, including martinis and absinthe, in such copious quantities the plot almost feels like filler for a cocktail menu. It comes as some surprise that he is able to stand upright, let alone perform feats of detection that would put more famous literary detectives to shame. But perform he does, and with the greatest aplomb!
Jonathan Latimer
Born in Chicago, Illinois, Jonathan Wyatt Latimer (1906-1983) attended school in Arizona and college in Illinois. He was a reporter at the Chicago Herald Examiner and, later, the Chicago Tribune, where he wrote crime and met Al Capone and Bugs Moran. He began writing fiction in the mid-1930s, and his early novels were hardboiled screwball comedies - among the first of their kind - which follow the exploits of hard-drinking yet surprisingly successful private eye, Bill Crane. Later he turned to an altogether darker style, to such an extent that his masterpiece, Solomon's Vineyard, was suppressed for years in the United States and only published in unexpurgated form in the early 1980s. Latimer served in the United States Navy during World War Two, after which he moved to California and worked as a Hollywood screenwriter on shows such as Perry Mason and Columbo. He died of lung cancer in La Jolla, California.
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