Recently Doug Levin wrote about several books he'd read and
mention
that:
"Jonathan Latimer's _The Lady in the Morgue_ (1936). Great,
great
stuff. One of the best books I've read in the last year.
Not
hard-boiled (so maybe not quite right here), but filled with
tough PI
Bill Crane and his cohorts, Chicago gangsters, and lots and
lots of
booze. It's more along the lines of _Thin Man_ in
tone--screwy, very
funny, great scenes. It begs the hard-boiled definition
question
again, since it's got tough PIs breaking the law, low- life,
a morgue,
etc., but not at all bleak."
In the '30s and '40s when the adjective "hard-boiled" was
first coined
to describe tough crime fiction, Hammett, Chandler, and Cain
were
usually listed in the first tier. Writers like Frederic
Nebel, Raoul
Whitfield, and Jonathan Latimer in the second. In other
words,
Latimer was one of the writers that "hard-boiled" was coined
to
describe. His fiction is tough and colloquial. That it's
also
humorous, and not particularly bleak does not render
it
non-hard-boiled. It just means that it is humorous and
not
particularly bleak.
Side note 1: Latimer may have been the first PI writer who
wrote
tough PI novels that appeared in hardback first, rather than
being
serialized in pulps prior to book publication.
Side note 2: If you like the Crane series, try *Solomon's
Vineyard*,
possibly the best "town-taming" novel (with the clear
exception of
*Red Harvest*) ever. Also, one of the best stand-alone PI
novels. -
Jim Doherty
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