A reporter becomes his own story when he wakes up next to a corpse.Sam 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 ...

On a mad mission in the African jungle, a photographer loses his way.Lew 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 prid...

In an eerie country house, a cruel old man is decapitated.When Peter Coffin's mysterious great-uncle Tobias summons the family to his manor in the wilds of Michigan, his aunt warns him to stay away. Peter goes anyway, arriving at the edge of the sprawling estate well after midnight. Wading through the muck in the darkness, he passes a fearsome figure on the road, and when he arrives at the front door, he is greeted by cousins bearing shotguns. An ax-murdering madma...

'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 ...

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...

Private eye Bill Crane is back, in his fifth and final case, working and drinking as usual with his old sidekick, Doc Williams, and a new member of the gang, Ann Fortune, who is posing as his girlfriend - and disapproves of his carousing.The trio has been sent to a Chicago suburb to investigate a murder and death threats made to the family of an industrial magnate. Alternately impeded and abetted by the many attractive women of the family, Crane cracks the case in his own inimitabl...

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...

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, Cra...

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...

Private detective William Crane and his constant (drinking) companion Doc Williams travel to Florida to protect millionaire Penn Essex and his sister Camelia from harm. They have been receiving threatening notes, and Camelia is eventually kidnapped and held to ransom.Piecing clues together with the skill of two veteran jigsaw-puzzle aficionados, our heroes follow a trail of blackmail and debt through a sun-soaked landscape to a surprising conclusion.

"MWA Grand Master Block (The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons) adds a generous dollop of eroticism to this ingeniously plotted study in criminality and corruption. Divorced and retired New York cop Doak Miller has moved to a small Florida town and arranged to work as a semiofficial undercover operator for the local sheriff. Posing as a hit man, he meets the wife of a prosperous businessman who first tries to hire him, then seemingly changes her mind. Soon Miller finds himself caught in a web...

John Dies at the End is a genre-bending, humorous account of two college drop-outs inadvertently charged with saving their small town--and the world--from a host of supernatural and paranormal invasions.Now a Major Motion Picture."[Pargin] is like a mash-up of Douglas Adams and Stephen King... 'page-turner' is an understatement."—Don Coscarelli, director, Phantasm I-V, Bubba Ho-tepSTOP.