Jonathan Latimer

• Born: October 23, 1906
• Birthplace: Chicago, Illinois
• Died: June 23, 1983
• Place of death: La Jolla, California

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; hard-boiled; private investigator; thriller

Principal Series: William Crane, 1935-1939

Contribution

In the five William Crane novels, Jonathan Latimer synthesized puzzle-mystery and tough-guy conventions by introducing a series protagonist of great intelligence and social sophistication who comes into violent contact with crime. For Crane, pleasure and pain interact as forceful agents by which both conscious and unconscious processes produce enlightenment. The larger world (mostly Chicago) appears irredeemably corrupted. For the detective Crane, the model of order seems to be survival in the hierarchy of the Black Detective Agency, where he is confirmed by bonds of loyalty and good job performance.

Latimer’s experimentation with shifting points of view in the Crane novels and elsewhere anticipates the author’s later fiction, in which he seeks to reconcile the depth of characterization and richness of technique of mainstream literary fiction with the appeal of detective fiction. In these novels, William Crane and crew have been dismissed and replaced by solitary and more introspective protagonists: amateur sleuths whose profession as writers (newspaperman, Hollywood scriptwriter) makes them especially sensitive to the way words shape reality.

Biography

Born in Chicago on October 23, 1906, Jonathan Wyatt Latimer was named in honor of an ancestor who served on General George Washington’s staff. Latimer was educated at a boarding school in Arizona and Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, where in 1929 he took a bachelor’s degree with high honors and earned membership in Phi Beta Kappa. He became a journalist for the Chicago Tribune, and for a brief period he served as ghostwriter for the retired secretary of the interior Harold Ickes. Latimer was married to Ellen Baxter Peabody in 1937, and together they had three children. He was married to Jo Ann Hanzlik in 1954.

While writing the five William Crane series novels, Latimer also launched a career as Hollywood screenwriter. From his detective novel The Lady in the Morgue (1936), he developed the script for the 1938 Universal Studios film of the same title. From 1938 to 1959 he wrote or collaborated on some twenty screenplays for various film companies, including the film noir classics adapted from Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key (1930), Kenneth Fearing’s The Big Clock (1946), and Cornell Woolrich’s The Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1945). The Hollywood period was interrupted by a tour of duty in the United States Navy (1942-1945). During the early 1960’s, Latimer turned to television writing for the Perry Mason series; he wrote forty-five original scripts and fifty adaptations of Erle Stanley Gardner’s books. Latimer’s postwar detective fiction included two novels, Sinners and Shrouds (1955) and Black Is the Fashion for Dying (1959). On June 23, 1983, he died of lung cancer in La Jolla, California.

Analysis

Jonathan Latimer’s detective fiction falls into two groups: the 1930’s William Crane novels and the post-World War II novels. The earlier group reflects the author’s unique merging of puzzle-mystery and hard-boiled conventions to develop stories of wide appeal. The later, and unfortunately smaller, group shows Latimer seeking to build a richness of characterization and complexity of technique into the formulaic detective mystery. Functioning well as rational analysts, the protagonists of these books also tend toward introspection and a sensitive awareness of the complex interrelations of lives as they are touched by criminal behavior.

In the William Crane series, Latimer used a recurring fictional situation. The two detectives, William Crane and Doc Williams, are employed by the Black Detective Agency of New York City and are given assignments by its director, Colonel Black. Only the very wealthy, particularly those possessing old money, seem to apply to the Colonel, who is of the same class as his clients. (He wears English tweeds, drinks aged brandy, and has a dilettante’s interest in Elizabethan literature.) While Crane and Williams carry out assignments in Chicago, Miami, or a New England sanatorium, the Colonel remains in New York City to serve as a guide and a resource through telephone calls and telegrams. Black is present for an investigation only in The Search for My Great Uncle’s Head (1937), a novel that is not part of the Crane series.

Commonly, reviews of the William Crane novels emphasize their debt to the hard-boiled school of detective fiction. (One review of The Lady in the Morgue offered an alliterative catalog of the work’s characteristics: “Rough, rowdy, riotous, rum-soaked, irreverent.”) Yet the novels also have a firm basis in puzzle-mystery convention: the superrational detective and his confidant of lesser mental acuity, the locked-room murder, the searching out of all the clues, and the formal denouement in which the detective offers the analysis his brain has hatched to an assembly of the surviving innocent and guilty. In his special adaptation of these elements, Latimer conceives of an American setting (the seething city of the 1930’s, with polarized ethnic and economic classes) coming into contact with an efficiently managed organization (the Black Detective Agency).

Crimes in these novels have clear references to the dynamics of class, wealth, and power in the United States. Common threads run through the series. A generation of strong men have accumulated great wealth through intelligence, work, and will. Their second-and third-generation descendants, grown decadent and wasteful, conspire to inherit through murder or apparent murder (The Dead Don’t Care, 1938). Alternatively, the virtuous wealthy are preyed on by failed associates (Headed for a Hearse, 1935) or by classless professionals of great intelligence who desire the power that wealth confers (Murder in the Madhouse, 1935, and Red Gardenias, 1939). Often, Latimer’s murderers forge a significant alliance with elements of urban organized crime—represented by ethnic Jews, Italians, and Irish who are willing to kill the original fathers to establish their class and power through the possession of wealth.

The series detective William Crane fits nicely into the milieu of the upper class. His sophistication, wit, and graceful manners allow him to enter easily the boardrooms, estates, and watering holes of the rich. Like the wealthy, he seals himself off from the masses through a condescension toward the lower classes disguised as ethnic humor; in the Crane series, caricatures of Jews, Italians, Irish, and African Americans abound.

Red Gardenias

None of this, however, establishes Crane’s true character. Beneath the surface, the detective is an outsider who identifies with those criminals whom he is hired to thwart. In the last of the Crane books, Red Gardenias, Latimer places the detective in the role of impostor, a role that is implicit throughout the series. In this novel, he is given a false identity (with a classy wife, suburban house, automobile, and maid) as a successful associate of Simeon March, an industrial magnate whose sons are being murdered. Although Crane may recognize the inner virtues of some members of the aristocracy, it is the application of wealth—the fact that wealth creates opportunities—that motivates him.

The Crane novels are a record of the good life of hotels and fine food and drink. Wealthy women walk Latimer’s pages in glorious high style. Although Crane lusts after them, he is also attracted to women of the lower class, as his seduction of the exotic dancer in The Dead Don’t Care and of a gangster’s mistress in Red Gardenias attest. In Red Gardenias, Crane receives for his labors a promise of marriage from an appropriately named woman, Ann Fortune, who is the wealthy niece of his boss, Colonel Black.

The blessing of good fortune that William Crane finally receives is, however, no product of the entrepreneurial genius of the rich fathers. Latimer’s Black Detective Agency is organized on the industrial-management model, a structure that forms the basis for the hierarchy into which the characters fall. The agency is organized like an industrial corporation, with the invested capital of the wealthy (agency clients) flowing into the boardroom (Colonel Black is the chairman of the board), where remote corporate decisions are made for management (Crane), which in turn uses labor (Doc Williams as foreman of contracted labor) by writing job descriptions and allocating resources. Ironically, it is not the service of justice but the satisfaction of Colonel Black that is Crane’s primary objective, as he struggles to strike a balance between the restrictions of the agency’s capital and the demands of the clients.

Headed for a Hearse

The curious mixture of comedy and tragedy in these books also has reference to the detective’s position as mediator. On one hand, the novels abound in a comedy based on class distinctions: the rigid xenophobia and ritual displays of the wealthy confronting the social crudity and physical ugliness of the ethnic poor. On the other hand, this comedy of manners exists in a cultural stew heated by widespread violence. The constant wordplay between Crane and Williams reflects their efforts to construct private meanings that will insulate them from their fears. Violence and death erupt with fearful energy, sometimes taking the innocent, as in Headed for a Hearse, where assassins bring down a black passerby, who “slithered halfway up on the sidewalk, making swimming motions with his legs and arms, and then slid back off the curb into the street.” Latimer controls such horror through gallows humor in the obscenely funny episodes of transporting a female corpse from a cemetery to a morgue in The Lady in the Morgue.

The Search for My Great Uncle’s Head

The last William Crane novel was published in 1939, and Latimer did not return to detective fiction until 1955. The later novels reveal Latimer moving toward greater complexity of narrative structure, with characters of fuller and more persuasive dimensions. Some of this deepening is anticipated in his earlier work. In Headed for a Hearse, Latimer used a shifting point of view in an effort to describe more intimately the experience and personality of three inmates. In The Search for My Great Uncle’s Head, Latimer introduced Peter Coffin, not a professional but an amateur sleuth. A first-person narrative, the novel offers a protagonist of moral and philosophical sensitivities. The amateur detectives of the post-World War II novels are extensions of Peter Coffin. Like him, they are literate men (newspaper journalist, screenwriter) who understand the connection between words and reality. Unlike Coffin and the earlier William Crane, they possess the wisdom of mature middle age.

Black Is the Fashion for Dying

Black Is the Fashion for Dying makes use of a limited omniscient point of view by which various characters respond to the central issue of the mystery—the murder of the actress Caresse Garnet. Owing much to Latimer’s long Hollywood experience, the novel makes persuasive use of detail about filmmaking, but the shifts in point of view detract from the development of the characters.

Sinners and Shrouds

Sinners and Shrouds, however, is a provocative novel; it brings into rich focus themes and characters Latimer found in his earlier work as well as in other detective fiction. The themes of the novel—the past, wealth, gender, kinship, knowledge, and order—are presented through the experience of the reporter Sam Clay, who awakens in a northside Chicago apartment and finds the young woman he has been with murdered. His memory of the immediate past has been erased by an alcoholic blackout. He finds himself the object of the police investigation that he is assigned to cover. Forced into self-examination, he is frightened by what he sees in himself: alcoholism, misogyny, and seething hatred.

Motivated first by the desire to escape punishment, Clay’s detective work becomes self-therapy. He investigates the kinship (real and symbolic) between the murdered girl, himself, and his coworkers. The truth gives itself up obliquely—in letters, yellowed newspapers, telephone recorders, telegrams, folk ballads, and police depositions—as the motif of a ludicrous dream helps establish the atmosphere of the novel.

This surrealism is extended further by Amos Bundy and Miss Dewhurst, whom Clay contacts for help. Their origin is in the detective-confidant, John-Joan pairing of many hard-boiled narratives. Eccentric in dress and behavior, the two seem to be imbued with magical powers of detection. Amos Bundy is linked to the stable past, out of which he appears to have stepped (he looks like Abe Lincoln). Although he speaks and writes in riddles, he leads Sam Clay to the solution. Latimer’s observations about the links between power, wealth, gender, and class make Sinners and Shrouds the capstone of his career.

Principal Series Characters:

• William “Bill” Crane , a private investigator, is an urbanely witty upper-class man who pursues business and pleasure simultaneously. From an alcoholic sleep, he wakes with inspired ratiocination. Although he admits to being repulsed by a violent and grotesque world, Crane is most intent on satisfying his boss.
• Doc Williams sports a waxed mustache and black hair with a streak of white over the left temple. He does the legwork for the Crane-Williams team. Doc’s vernacular speech, casual taste, and street smarts suggest that he comes from a working-class background.
• Colonel Black , owner of the discreet agency for which Crane and Williams work. The colonel is mostly absent except when he is contacted by telephone and telegram for advice and consent. He takes only wealthy clients and is very urbane in matters of dress, food, and wine. He is fascinated with the Elizabethan Age.

Bibliography

Anderson, Patrick. The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction. New York: Random House, 2007. Comprehensive history of the American thriller provides the tools to understand Latimer’s contributions to the genre.

Brubaker, Bill. Stewards of the House: The Detective Fiction of Jonathan Latimer. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1993. Monograph devoted to Latimer’s work and its place within American cultural history, as well as within the detective genre.

Latimer, Jonathan. Interview. The Writer 54 (December, 1941): 370-372. Provides insight into his creative process, as well as his perception of his relationship to his chosen genre.

Latimer, Jonathan. Interview by Jim McCahery in Megavore 11 (October 1, 1980): 16-22. Interview examines Latimer’s writing process and his career.

McCahery, Jim. “Jonathan Latimer’s William Crane.” The Not So Private Eye 1-2 (August/November, 1978): 5-10, 5-13, 48. Profile of Latimer’s most famous character, examining his fictional portrayal and comparing him to other famous detectives.

Moore, Lewis D. Cracking the Hard-Boiled Detective: A Critical History from the 1920’s to the Present. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. Detailed study of both the American and the British versions of the hard-boiled detective; provides perspective on Latimer’s work. Bibliographic references and index.