Former area student became novelist, writer for film, TV

Bill Knight column for Thurs., Fri. or Sat., June 21, 22 or 23, 2018

Jonathan Latimer was a 1929 graduate of Knox College in Galesburg and is remembered in some quarters as “one of the best Golden Age authors of the hard-boiled school you’ve probably never heard of,” according to one critic, and much of this prolific writer’s work is available online and on reruns of CBS’ old “Perry Mason” series cablecast on FETV (Family Entertainment Television) and other networks.

Latimer, who died 35 years ago this week, had a writing career that went from covering Al Capone to working with filmmaker Frank Capra, adapting novels by Dashiell Hammett to penning novels.

After earning his bachelor’s degree from Knox, Latimer biked through Europe, then returned to Chicago, where he worked for the Herald-Examiner and Tribune newspapers, mostly covering crime at a time when there was a lot of it there.

“I knew Al Capone, George ‘Bugs’ Moran and assorted other gangsters, as well as whorehouse madams, pimps, dope peddlers and con men,” Latimer said years later.

He left journalism after writing a news story about FDR’s Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, who liked Latimer and hired him to ghost-write a book. In 1935 Latimer turned to writing novels, starting with a series of mysteries featuring private eye William Crane, where Latimer introduced his distinctive blend of hard-boiled crime fiction and screwball comedy.

“Murder in the Madhouse” was Latimer’s first novel, one of five in the Crane series (also including “Headed for a Hearse,” “The Lady in the Morgue,” “The Dead Don’t Care” and “Red Gardenias”). His first book became so popular that three were made into movies starring Preston Foster as Crane.

Through the 1940s and ‘50s his books also included mainstream novels “The Search for My Great Uncle’s Head” (under the pseudonym Peter Coffin) and “Dark Memory,” and crime novels with protagonists other than Crane: “Black Is the Fashion for Dying,” “Sinners and Shrouds” and “Solomon’s Vineyard,” a rather steamy book suppressed in the United States for a time. (Here’s a hint why: Its opening line start, “From the way her buttocks looked under the black silk dress…”).

After serving in the Navy during World War II, Latimer shifted to Hollywood, where he aimed for realism, as he explained in an interview about his 1948 adaptation of Cornell Woolrich’s best-selling “Night Has A Thousand Eyes.”

“What I hoped to establish,” he said, “was a real sense of terror that these things were coming true.”

Besides “Night Has A Thousand Eyes,” Latimer’s screenplays are impressive: “The Big Clock” (based on Kenneth Fearing’s novel), “The Glass Key” (from Dashiell Hammett’s book), adaptations of “The Lone Wolf Spy Hunt” and “Plunder of the Sun,” “Topper Returns” (an original script), four educational films in Frank Capra’s "Wonders of Life" series airing as Bell Telephone Science Hour TV specials in the late ’50s, which were later used in science classrooms), “The Unholy Wife” (co-authored with William Durkee), and two splendid film noir movies, “Nocturne” (1946) and “They Won’t Believe Me” (1947).

For a while Latimer lived in Key West, Fla., where befriended Ernest Hemingway, and after starting to work for Hollywood, he moved to LaJolla, Calif., where his neighbors included legendary hard-boiled author Raymond Chandler, who also had turned some of his attention to working for the movies.

Latimer eventually settled into a routine of writing for television, contributing more than 30 episodes of “Perry Mason” from 1958 to 1965 (with tantalizing, alliterative titles such as “The Case of the Fugitive Fraulein,” “The Case of the Capricious Corpse” and “The Case of the Lavender Lipstick”).

However, his best scripts may have been “Nocturne” and “They Won’t Believe Me.”

“Nocturne,” produced by Alfred Hitchcock associate Joan Harrison and directed by Edwin Marin, stars George Raft in a story about a determined cop (Raft) who won’t accept that the death of a Hollywood film composer was suicide. He begins looking for “Dolores,” a name in a song by the victim, then discovers the dead man had a list of girlfriends – and that 10 of them had motives for killing him.

“They Won’t Believe Me” is an often-unheralded crime classic starring Robert Young (eventually in TV’s “Father Knows Best”), cast against type as a playboy on trial for a murder he didn’t commit. Also produced by Joan Harrison, the movie was directed by Irving Pichel and co-stars Susan Hayward. Somewhat foreshadowing Latimer’s fascination with trials that he demonstrated in “Perry Mason,” much of it is set in a courtroom, where Young testifies about his innocence – and his adultery, foolishness and stupidity.

That’s a long way from downstate Illinois. (At least, it’s hoped.)