The Dead Don't Care (1938) by Jonathan Latimer

Jonathan Latimer was an American writer who began his career as a journalist at the Chicago Herald Examiner and the Chicago Tribune, but turned to writing hardboiled crime fiction in the 1930s and worked as a screen writer in Hollywood – penning episodes for Columbo, Markham and Perry Mason. The capstone of Latimer's writing career are definitely his traditionally-structured, hardboiled and alcohol-fueled mystery novels often laced with impossible crimes and some screwball comedy.

Three years ago, I read two of Latimer's hardboiled whodunits, Murder in the Madhouse (1935) and Headed for a Hearse (1935), which take place against the somber backdrop of a private sanatorium and the death-house. They're pretty dark, grim hardboiled private-eye novels, but competently plotted, complete with locked room puzzles, and some memorable set pieces. The scenes with the condemned men in the death-house immediately come to mind.

So a return to Latimer was long overdue and settled on the fourth entry in the Bill Crane series, entitled The Dead Don't Care (1938), listed in Locked Room Murders (1991) as having no less than two impossible crimes – an inexplicable poisoning and the miraculous disappearance of ransom money. Regrettably, it turned out to be one of those cases in which both the author and detectives phoned it in.

The Dead Don't Care calls two private-eyes, Bill Crane and Thomas O'Malley, from rain-swept streets of New York to "the languorous perfection" of Key Largo, Florida.

Union Trust Company are the trustees and legal guardians of the heirs to the Essex fortune, Camelia and Penn Essex, who hired the two detectives from New York to ferret out the person who has been sending Penn threatening demands for money. The letters tell the young man the time has come to pay his debts and instructs him "to get fifty thousand dollars in unmarked bill," which are all signed "The Eye." These letters also present a quasi-impossible problem, because their delivery appear to defy any logical explanation. Ten days ago, Penn put five-hundred dollars in his wallet for "a fling at the Blue Castle," a gambling house, but, when he opened it to buy some chips for the roulette game, a letter fell out – which makes for an interesting premise. However, the solution to the letters disqualifies them as impossible problems.

Once again, the premise is pretty solid with the mysterious deliveries of the threatening notes and even our detectives receive a couple of them. Telling them to get out or "the gators back in the swamps will be fatter," but the pacing completely goes to pieces with Crane and O'Malley spending most of their time on drinks, food, gambling and women. Crane and O'Malley actually managed to turn a paid job into a busman's holiday without any of that pesky extra work. Not even the kidnapping of Camelia was able to fasten the pace of the story or give the plot any sense of urgency. Mind you, Crane didn't think "the average kidnaper was above a little rape." What a useless detective!

Thankfully, the two previously mentioned impossibilities turned out to be the only bright spots in an otherwise overly indulgent, mediocre and underwhelming mystery novel.

Firstly, Crane spends the night with an exotic dancer, Imago Paraguay, but the following morning, she lies dead next to him in bed with "a faint, bitter odor" on her cerise lips – she has been poisoned. The door of the bedroom was bolted on the inside and the balcony looked out over "an impossible jump." Someone must have been in the bedroom with them, because this person had stolen Crane's pants! This is Latimer's best locked room-trick to date with a more tricky method and a potentially good clue, but a certain something had to be shown or mentioned to have made the "two small scars" on the box of veronal a proper clue. Still, this the most inspired aspect of the plot.

The second impossibility centers on the delivery and miraculous disappearance of the ransom money. Penn is instructed to put fifty thousand dollars in unmarked bills, wrapped in oil skin, in a carton box and leave it under a bridge, but the location is kept under observation by the police. Somehow, the carton box disappears as if it was taken by an invisible man! A good attempt was made here to misdirect the reader, but the explanation was still disappointingly simple. And confirmed what I had been fearing from the beginning.

The Dead Don't Care has officially replaced Ellery Queen's The Spanish Cape Mystery (1935) as the most transparently plotted detective novel from a highly regarded Golden Age mystery writer. I suspected this exact solution very early on in the story, but tried other combinations with the same motive, because it was way too obvious. And yet, this was the conclusion Latimer had the nerve to serve his readers after making them sit through all that hedonistic bullshit!

So, all in all, The Dead Don't Care is one of the worst hardboiled (impossible crime) novels populated with shallow, immature characters, a paper-thin plot and sparse detective work by holidaying detectives. The Dead Don't Care and neither should you.

Out of His Mind

"I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity."

- Edgar Allan Poe

Back in February, I reviewed Jonathan Latimer's Headed for a Hearse (1935), a hardboiled locked room mystery, which I erroneously labeled as his first foray into the genre, but the always helpful comment section pointed out several sources that list Murder in the Madhouse (1935) as the first entry in his five-part Bill Crane series – which was published in the same year as Headed for a Hearse. It’s an understandable mistake to make, right? So lets try this again!

Jonathan Latimer began his writing career as a reporter for the Chicago Herald Examiner, but eventually left the newsroom behind to become a novelist and scenarist in Hollywood. As a screenwriter, Latimer wrote episodes for Perry Mason, Columbo, The Lone Wolf and adapted several hardboiled novels for the big screen, which included Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key (1931) and some of his own work – e.g. The Lady in the Morgue (1935). But he's primarily remembered by the mystery readers of today for the darkly humorous, alcohol fueled hardboiled and sometimes slightly controversial screwball novels about Bill Crane.

Connoisseurs of the private-eye novel will likely point out that Latimer's greatest contribution to the genre was in a far more serious vein, Solomon's Vineyard (1941), but that's a story for another day. So, lets finally take a look at Latimer's debut novel!

Murder in the Madhouse opens with Bill Crane in the back of an ambulance, hands cuffed, en route to a private sanatorium. Crane is being brought in on account of his delusions, "a fixation that he's a great detective," but not any old detective. Oh no! Crane has laid claim to the name of Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin and gave "a demonstration in elementary deduction" upon his arrival, which immediately caused friction between Dr. Livermore and Dr. Eastman – who run the entire sanatorium. It would not be the last exhibition he gave of elementary and advanced feats of deduction.

Of course, the delusions of Crane are simply a ruse to get into the place and the reason for his presence is an undercover assignment: one of the sanatorium's patients, Miss Van Kamp, sent a distressing message to her brother and he hired Crane to find out what has happened.

Miss Van Kamp was in possession of a small strongbox, stuffed with "about four hundred thousand dollars worth of bonds," but equally important is that the box contained one of two keys necessary to open a safety-deposit box in New York City. A deposit box holding an additional eight hundred thousand dollars in cash, jewelry and bonds, which makes for a grand total of 1.2 million dollars! Obviously, people have been lured onto a path of crime for a fraction of that kind of money and someone was more than just tempted, because the strongbox went missing from its hiding place, but the purloiner is willing to a go a lot farther than mere thievery to became a millionaire – which becomes evident when a body is found underneath Miss Van Kamp's bed.

A good and kind man, named Pittsfield, who "thought he was Abraham Lincoln," was found strangled to death in Van Kamp's room. He would not be the last: the murderer switched from a black woolen cord to bone-handled knives and this enabled the guilty party to stack-up several bodies over a relatively short period of time. Crane has to figure out who's currently in possession of the strongbox and is willing to kill for it, while keeping up the pretence of being mentally slightly off balance and has to do so among potential suspects who genuinely are unbalanced. There are also the doctors and staff members to consider!

The combination of the setting and Crane's situation made for both an interesting and engaging detective story, but the plot and story-telling is also flecked with hints of the books relationship with the Hardboiled School – even revealing it as an early ancestor of the contemporary crime novel. As Latimer's profile on Thrilling Detective state, he was dogged by controversy, because he dared to dare the reader by showing them the grimier side of life, which even today seems to be able to shock and titillate some people.

There are, of course, the spots of physical altercations, but they're par of the course for a hardboiled private-eye novel. I don't remember ever reading one without several characters getting punched, kicked and bruised. However, here we also have one of the patients getting bloodied in a third-degree by the orderlies of the sanatorium. A gross abuse of power which is also present in the way the doctors conduct themselves. Who initially refused to alert the authorities about the murders that were taking place in the sanatorium, but that's just the surface stuff.

The same orderlies, who also drove Crane around in the ambulance, were overheard by him in the first chapter bragging how great an ambulance is to pick up "babes," because you don't have to pay for a hotel room and how the best part is "that they can scream their damn heads off" and "nobody will pay any attention" – which sounded kind of rapey. There were a number of references and descriptions to the consumption of illegally obtained moonshine, which was topped off with a spot of casual racism.

So I can imagine Murder in the Madhouse would have some modern readers sprinting to the nearest designated safe-space and fling themselves on the first therapy dog they find there. But if you have the historical awareness that the early twentieth century wasn't like a Walt Disney movie, you can probably handle Latimer's crime-fiction. And there's a small bonus for the readers who can make it to the end of the book.

Murder in the Madhouse is mentioned in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes (1991), but the impossible situation does not occur until the very end of the book. The seemingly impossible murder is used as way to identify the guilty part and expunge any possible doubt about the guilt of this person. I’m not going to reveal too much about this situation, but it does involve a body being flung from an upper-floor room that had only one, high up and seemingly inaccessible window. It was the room where the murderer was being detained. So that was nicely done, I thought.

Murder in the Madhouse was engagingly written, competently plotted and found an original way to introduce a series characters. The final explanation missed the ingenuity of many of Latimer's Golden Age contemporaries, but, as I said before, it was a competently done and not every hardboiled writers constructed his plots like an old-fashioned whodunit – and I prefer my hardboiled detective stories to have a plot. So I should try and refrain from complaining and simply end this review by saying I enjoyed this outing even more than Headed for a Hearse.

Life Ticks Away

"Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not. Time takes it all, bears it away, and in the end there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and sometimes we lose them there again."

- Paul Edgecomb (The Green Mile, 1999)

In my previous blog-post, I reviewed The Green Ace (1950) by Stuart Palmer. The plot of the book focused on proving the innocence of an inmate of the death-house, a week before his scheduled execution, which heavily influenced my decision on what to read next – namely Headed for a Hearse (1935) by Jonathan Latimer. It offers a much darker treatment of the race-against-time plot device that Palmer toyed with in The Green Ace.

Professionally, Latimer and Palmer had more in common than just being writers of crime and mystery novels: they were both worked as screenwriters in Hollywood where, reportedly, they collaborated with a colleague of theirs – "Craig Rice," the Queen of the Screwball Mystery. However, that's where the commonalities end. Latimer's work has some of the structural framework of the classic whodunit and several of his novels are listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes (1991), but everything in between is firmly rooted in those mean streets of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. I guess Latimer could be considered, content-wise, to be a literary ancestor of a contemporary hardboiled enthusiast of locked room mysteries, Bill Pronzini. Anyhow...

Headed for a Hearse, also published as The Westland Case, opens in "the dim cavern" of Robert Westland's condemned cell in the death-house – where he awaits his execution for the murder of his wife. A reviewer on the GADWiki observed that the book actually consists of two separate stories: a hardboiled mystery that's closely intertwined with a short story about Westland in the condemned cell. I agree with that observation, because, despite the interlacing characters, they read as two completely different stories.

Westland shares his looming fate and final dwelling place with two other prisoners: Dave Connor, a labor racketeer, who bumped off "a couple of New York torpedoes hired to fog" him, but the place where he unloaded his gun turned out to be swarming with cops – which, retrospectively, was not the best place "for fogging those Canzoneri brothers." The prisoner is a whimpering, crying and borderline psychopath, named Isadore Varecha, who gutted a prostitute and now spends most of his time on his cot muttering "Jesus Christ" and "I don’ wanta die."

They have to deal with an unpleasant prison guard, Percival Galt, who enjoys taunting the prisoners, such as spilling a meal on the cement floor and saying he "can't help it if a prisoner throws his food into the hall," which reminded me of Percy Wetmore from The Green Mile (1999).

Initially, Westland acquiesced in the hopelessness of his situation and was prepared to die on the electric chair, but a semi-anonymous letter gave him a change in attitude. The letter, initialed "MG," is from someone who had no business being in the building at the time of the murder, but if something can be fixed, so he doesn't "have no trouble," he’s willing to the D.A. what he knows. There is, however, a minor problem: all of this happened a week before Westland is strapped to the hot-seat! So Westland engages a high-price attorney, Charley Finklestein, but the evidence is stacked against him.

Westland lived separate from his wife, Joan, but still retained a key to her apartment, which becomes a huge problem when her body is found there – shot through the back of the head. The only door giving entrance to the apartment had to be broken down and was outfitted with "a special lock" of "the kind that doesn't snap," but "has to be turned with the key." There were only two keys that fitted the lock: one of them was found inside the apartment and the other was in constant possession of Westland. All of the windows were locked from the inside and twenty-three floors from the ground. The small package entry in the kitchen was not big enough to have even allowed a trained monkey passage. What was really damning is that the neighbors heard the report of a gunshot at the time Westland admitted he was in the apartment.

It's this package of evidence that send Westland en-route to the death-house. So Finklestein decided to fly-in a pair of private-investigators from New York, Bill Crane and Doc Williams, to reevaluate the evidence against the condemned man – before his time is up and they do so in typical hardboiled fashion. They got shot at from a car with a sub-machine gun, which leads to them roughing-up a suspect. There are several additional murders. They royally water themselves with drinks, take big meals and occasionally leer at women.

However, there's also some genuine detective work on the part of Crane, which confirmed the traditionalist streak his plots reportedly contained. Crane provides a cleverly old-fashioned, but false, explanation for the problem of the locked apartment with a ball of string and a pin. This false explanation echoed the trick from L. Frank Baum's "The Suicide of Kiaros," which is an inverted locked room tale from 1896 and collected nearly a century later in Death Locked In: An Anthology of Locked Room Stories (1987). Unfortunately, the solution to the impossible crime aspect was disappointingly simple and routine. A type of "trick," or "misdirection," I have seen too often and I can honestly (and arrogantly) say I preferred my own explanation. But what can you do?

Crane also finds the proverbial needle in a haystack with the assistance of a long, expensive cab-ride and even more expensive professional diver. It's an investigative operation that has put "more men to work than Roosevelt's recovery program."

All of this tallies up to an interesting, often fun and occasionally even stirring, but ultimately uneven, debut novel. The gap in quality between the excellent death-house scenes and the investigative parts of the novel are hard to miss, which makes the somewhat disappointing conclusion to the case extra noticeable. Overall, Headed for a Hearse is not a bad book. It's just not a masterpiece of its kind.

Nevertheless, I'm glad I finally got to sample Latimer, but I wish I had started with Murder in the Madhouse (1935) or The Dead Don't Care (1938). They seem like interesting combinations of the hardboiled narrative with a classic locked room problem at their core. So I guess those are for a later date.