To catch a thief, a detective has himself committed to a high-class asylumThe orderlies do not need a straitjacket for Bill Crane. He is not violent, although he does have a bad habit of making embarrassing deductions about the doctors. This sarcastic, hard-drinking man has deluded himself into thinking he is Edgar Allan Poe's great detective, C. Auguste Dupin. For this, he has been put away in a stately mental hospital on the Hudson. But Crane is not as delusional ...

On a mad mission in the African jungle, a photographer loses his wayLew Cable is an impulsive man, lazy and violent, especially when he has been drinking. He is a rotten choice to lead a scientific expedition, but his wife's money convinces the exploration committee that he is the man for the job. Jay Nichols sees right through Cable's bravado, but for the chance to photograph African gorillas in their natural habitat, he is more than willing to sacrifice his pride....

In sun-soaked Florida, Crane pursues a kidnapper in between drinksIt does not take much to lure Bill Crane to Florida in the wintertime. The weather would be temptation enough, but the fact that there is money to be made and gin to be drunk makes a trip to Key Largo irresistible. His ever-soused companion, Doc Williams, at his side, Crane sets out south to find out who has been threatening millionaire playboy Penn Essex with blackmail notes, first on his pillow, the...

A reporter becomes his own story when he wakes up next to a corpseSam Clay wakes with a dry mouth, a hammering headache, and only the faintest memory of what he did the night before. He remembers dancing, jazz, taxi rides, and a brandy-fueled ride on a roller coaster, but he has no idea how he got home, and he is lost as to the identity of the straw-haired beauty beside him. He is just about to introduce himself when he notices the blood on the sheets, the wounds o...

A vanished corpse leads a hard-drinking PI on a madcap chaseMore than forty corpses fill the cold Chicago basement, but no crime has been committed here. After all, there are supposed to be bodies in the city morgue. Tonight, one is attracting particular attention: a beautiful young woman whose apparent suicide captured the imagination of every newspaper editor in town. Learning how and why she died is too great a task for any cub reporter. Only Detective Bill Crane...

In Hollywood, a screenwriter gets involved in an impossible murderIn a steamy tropical jungle, a sinister American woman pushes the natives too far and gets exactly what she deserves: a rusty knife buried deep in her back. At least, that is the way the movie is supposed to end. But when the loathsome starlet Caresse Garnet learns her character is about to be killed off, she refuses to die, forcing the studio to rewrite the ending the night before the scenes are to b...

The job was supposed to be simple, but in this shady midwestern town, nothing is as it seemsHard-living private detective Karl Craven didn't ask for trouble when he arrived in Paulton, Missouri—but trouble found him anyway. First it was his partner, Oke Johnson, shot in the head by a silenced rifle. Then it was the femme fatale Ginger Bolton, who took him for a wild ride his first night in town. But it's Penelope Grayson—the sultry blonde whose uncle hired Craven to...

Just days from meeting the reaper, a convicted murderer hires Chicago's most hard-boiled PI to save his neck—before the executioner can claim itRobert Westland's death is just around the corner when he finally decides to fight the murder rap that's sending him to the electric chair. Fingered for his wife's grisly demise, Westland is in a bind, and his last hope is Bill Crane, a booze-soaked detective who's as ruthless with a quip as he is when trawling the streets f...

'From the way her buttocks looked under the black silk dress, I knew she'd be good in bed'So begins the most hardboiled of Latimer's novels, whose notoriety meant that it was only published in unexpurgated form in the States in 1982, 40 years after its original publication.In this classic noir novel, St Louis private eye Karl Craven, who likes his steak rare, his liquor hard and his women fallen, arrives at the small town of Paulton to protect his wealthy client's daughter ...

With six days remaining until he goes to the electric chair for the murder of his wife, wealthy broker Robert Westland needs help, fast. He insists that he has been framed, and Bill Crane, a private detective with a method and manner all his own, must prove his client's innocence.In a mixture of the humorous and the macabre, Crane's investigation, set against an evocative Depression-era backdrop, turns up more than a few queer characters - including a tight-lipped valet and a dypso...

Perhaps it really started when scriptwriter Richard Blake, finishing last-minute revisions in the early hours of the morning, found the naked blonde on his driveway. Nobody ever saw her again, but she turned out to be a vital clue.The movie's fading star is Caresse Garnet, a woman so universally disliked that you could throw a stone in Hollywood and find somebody who hates her: the producer who knows she's box office poison but can't fire her; the ingénue whose scenes are being cut...

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 Allan 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 surpri...