Imprint
- 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
One reviewer referred to the well-loved third novel in Latimer's Bill Crane series as 'rough, rowdy and rum-soaked'. And true to form, just as in his previous investigations, Crane drinks his way through his current case, that of a young suicide whose body disappears just as Crane arrives on the scene.
But is there any connection between this body, and the disappearance of a young woman from a wealthy New York family In order to retrieve the missing body, and find the murderer, Crane must run the gauntlet of both local cops and gangsters, who believe he is implicated.
As well as a fascinating mystery, The Lady in the Morgue is packed full of atmosphere and period detail, from its opening scene in a morgue to its frank treatment of drug addiction and references to contemporary music.
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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