The Lady in the Morgue

The Lady in the Morgue

A Bill Crane Mystery

Jonathan Latimer

MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

INTRODUCTION

Screwball.

It's a term best applied to those antic, side-of-the-mouth, quintessentially American motion pictures of the Depression era and after that blew one big, lubricious, democratic razzberry at conventional behavior. With civilized society at home and abroad coming spectacularly and emphatically apart, only two responses seemed remotely appropriate – laughter or tears; and the sassier cinematic artists, refusing to cry in their beer, dropped an egg in it instead. Director Howard Hawks comes immediately to mind, with insouciant offerings like
Twentieth Century
(1934) and
Bringing Up Baby
(1938), fast, flip and steeped in sexual innuendo.

So does writer Dashiell Hammett, whose 1934 detective novel
The Thin Man
became pretext for a scapegrace series of five screen exploits through 1947 of cocktail-bibbing Nick and Nora Charles, whom audiences pronounced outrageous but their creator deemed only smug.

And, perhaps less instantly though every bit as visibly, former journalist Jonathan Latimer (1906-1983), whose tongue remained at once tough-tart and poked firmly in his cheek, not only in bestselling hard and paperback murder tales but a number of slick screenplays as well, one of which became the top treatment of Hammett's
The Glass Key
with Alan Ladd in 1942.

Screwball.

That's Latimer's hand in
Topper Returns,
the Roland Young-Joan Blondell 1941 romp featuring disappearing bodies, cops locked in an ice box and an assortment of secret passages. At one juncture, after a stabbing, a shooting and the dropping of hapless Eddie “Rochester” Anderson through a trap door into the subterranean soup, Topper thinks to use the telephone for assistance. The cord, of course, has been cut.

Young: “This thing is dead.”

Blondell: “It's epidemic!”

Latimer had nothing to do with the shooting script for his own
The Lady in the Morgue,
which by consequence became a routine programmer for Preston Foster in 1938. But, with others, he did write lively action and dialogue for crisp features like
Nocturne
(1946) with George Raft,
The Big Clock
(1947) with Charles Laughton and
Alias Nick Beal
(1949) with Ray Milland. Notes critic Leonard Maltin of Latimer's 1939
Lone Wolf Spy Hunt
with Warren William, Ida Lupino and Rita Hayworth: “an excellent, chic, entertaining film by any standards.”

Which is to say that funny as he was, the inventor of hard-boiled and half-boiled private eye Bill Crane was a steady professional with a pervasive, film-influence emphasis on patter and pace. He may not have taken his subjects seriously, sniping away persistently at starlets, police officers and the fourth estate, but Latimer was quite serious about his craft. Not, one can safely add, about himself.

He clearly was responsible for the authorial jacket blurb that appeared beneath his squinty, cigarette-sucking photo on
Black is the Fashion for Dying
(Random House, 1959). This reads: “Jonathan Latimer was born in Chicago, the setting for his early successful novels. He now lives in California, where he writes movies and an occasional brilliant novel.”

Screwball.

The author graduated from Knox College, Galesburg, Ill., magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. His first job was with the City News Bureau as a police reporter for the Chicago
Herald-Examiner
in 1929, where he remained until 1935. He dude-ranched in Montana, did movie stunt work and provided publicity for former Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, moving on to screenwriting at Paramount and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

During World War II Latimer was executive officer on a destroyer escort doing convoy duty in the Atlantic.

He had two marriages, one daughter and two sons. From 1960 to 1965 Latimer wrote for the
Perry Mason
television series, adapting 50 of Erle Stanley Gardner's books for the show and providing 45 original scripts of his own. He died of lung cancer June 23, 1983, in La Jolla, California.

Latimer's mystery fiction begins black and darkens.
Murder in the Madhouse
(1934) starts in an asylum,
Headed for a Hearse
(1935) in a death-house cell and
The Lady in the Morgue
(1936) in the Cook County slabworks, punctuated by the laughter of an insane woman in the nearby Psychopathic Hospital. The protagonist of these high-spirited grotesques (and star of two subsequent,
The Dead Don't Care
and
Red Gardenias
) is New York agency operative William Crane, who likes women and whiskey and whiskey, and not necessarily in that order. Latimer quotes his hero: “‘Never drink when I'm on a job,' he lied …”

Morgue
moves like a body snatcher berserk upon a skateboard. In and out, over and down the dance hall dives, penthouses and even creaky-door crypts of Depression Chicago heat stalks Crane, customarily oiled, and gum-shoe cohorts Doc Williams and Tom O'Malley, wrapped in the sound of Louis Armstrong and the scent of Guerlain's Shalimar. The book is very much of a place and time. At moments, Latimer's blinkless regard captures photographic scraps of the past, as in this tight snapshot of the contents to a murdered girl's medicine chest:

Tall silver-labeled jars stood next to squat white jars; three Dr. West toothbrushes were sprouting from a red, flower-potlike container; a round cardboard box was half-filled with pale orange dusting powder; loose platinum-shaded Hump hairpins were scattered along one shelf; on another lay a tube of lpana toothpase, a metal-sheathed lipstick …

Pages from a curling and discarded calendar. Too, the lens can move, recording without comment. Witness this Gatsbyesque party vignette:

A girl was dancing on the terrace in an orange-colored chemise. Somebody was smashing crockery in the kitchen. Two men were being dissuaded from fighting. A baby-faced blonde borrowed a dollar from Crane for cab fare home. A couple were necking on one of the davenports. Three men were bitterly arguing politics on the other.

A man in shirt sleeves asked O'Malley if he was having a good time.

O'Malley asked him what the hell business it was of his …

In these segments, some of the laughter stops. But it is never very far away, nor is there much opportunity to muse over matters of heavy import. O'Malley has occasion to recap the breakneck progress of the cockeyed threesome three-quarters of the way through the book. He grumps:

“In two days we start a fight in a taxi-dance joint, find a murdered guy and don't tell the police, crash in on Braymer and his dope mob, bust in on a party, kidnap a gal and rob a graveyard.”

And we haven't even made off with the dead woman's restless remains—yet.

Private eye fiction has traditionally been the literature of exhaustion as readers follow a succession of sleepless knights to their undaunted if fagged-out finishes. Latimer has his fun with this convention. Crane, whom we first encounter flat on his back on morgue bench, head pillowed by a folded flannel coat, spends a good deal of his time prone or comatose, even to ending up under an operating table in Chapter 22; between these bookend respites are sundry other snoozes, a session in the sack, an interview on a davenport, and assorted interludes upon the leather seat of a Packard, a bathtub and a rolling morgue gurney.

It's all that exertion, of course.

Or perhaps the consequence of a relentless inbibition of scotches and soda, single and double martinis, champagne, Planter's punch, Seagram's V.O., stout, Mumm's, Martell's, Bushmill's, Gilbey's, Liebfraumilch, Bass ale and Pilsner.

Crane does disdain the formaldehyde, however.

Too stiff.

William Ruehlmann

Norfolk, Virginia

September, 1987

William Ruehlmann, Ph.D., is an award-winning feature writer for
The Virginian-Pilot
and
The Ledger-Star
and author of
Saint with a Gun: The Unlawful American Private Eye.

Chapter One

THE MORGUE attendant jerked the receiver from the telephone, choked off the bell in the middle of a jangling ring. “Hello,” he said. Then impatiently: “Hello! Hello! Hello!” Wan electric light, escaping like Holstein cream from a green-shaded student desk lamp, made the sweat glisten on his lemon-yellow face. His lips, against the telephone mouthpiece, twitched. “You want Daisy? Daisy! Daisy who?”

Elbows leaning hard on the golden-oak rail dividing the morgue office from the waiting room, two newspaper reporters idly stared at the attendant's white coat. Their shirts were open at the collar; their arms were bare; their ties, knots loosened, hung limply around their necks; their faces were moist in the heat. On the wall beside them a clock with a cracked glass indicated it was seventeen minutes of three.

“Oh, y' want Miss Daisy Stiff,” said the morgue attendant. “She told ya to call her here, did she?” He screwed up one eye at the others. “Well, she can't come to the phone. She's downstairs with th' other girls.”

Ballooning dingy curtains, waves of hot night air rolled in through the west windows, rasped the reporters' faces, made their lungs hurt.

The morgue attendant said, “I don't care if y' did have a date with her; she can't come to the phone.” He chuckled harshly. “She's stretched out.”

The reporter from the
Herald and Examiner
was named Herbert Greening; he was twenty-two years old and he still thought newspaper work fascinating. He was pudgy and when he laughed his plum-purple cheeks quivered.

The morgue attendant held a palm over the telephone mouthpiece. “He says he's worried because some dame he met last night didn't show up for a midnight date.” His laughter ended in a fit of coughing. He put his lips to the instrument. “Buddy, do ya' know who you're talking to?” He coughed again, spat blood-streaked rheum on the marble floor. “This is the Cook County Morgue, and if your Daisy's here you'll hafta come down an' get her.” He flipped the receiver onto the hook.

Fat Reporter Greening was trembling all over now in mirth. “I'd like to see that guy's face,” he said between gasps. “Yes, sir, I'd like to see it.” His hand plopped against the golden-oak rail.

The morgue attendant swung back in his swivel chair, smiled dourly. “I bet I get twenty calls like that a day.” Coughing made his face drip with sweat. “The gals trim some sucker, then give him this number to call 'em. Tell him t' ask for Joan Stiff, or Daisy Still or somethin' like that. We keep changin' the number, but it don't seem to do no good.”

The reporter from the
City Press
was named Jerry Johnson. His face had an unhealthy pallor; his black eyes were set deep in discolored sockets; he was drinking himself to death as fast as he could on a salary of twenty-six dollars a week. He said: “Aw, you wanta keep all them babes down there for yourself.” He lifted his elbows from the oak rail, straightened his back, balanced himself with difficulty, as though the floor were pitching under his feet.