Jonathan Latimer is not as well known as the other writers in this month's Spotlight, but he was a better screenwriter than any of them, having produced some of the best-scripted noir films of the 1940s.

Latimer worked as a crime reporter in Chicago in the 1930s, covering the exploits of Al Capone and Bugs Moran. Clearly inspired by the work of Hammett and Cain, he began crafting his own crime fiction--a series of novels featuring an often drunk wiseguy detective named Bill Crane. Following Hammett's lead with The Thin Man, Latimer injected a streak of mordant humor into novels such as Murder in the Madhouse, Headed for a Hearse, and The Dead Don't Care. In 1941 he wrote his hard-boiled masterpiece, Solomon's Vineyard, which was packed with so much violence and kinky sex it was banned for decades in the United States. The unexpurgated version wasn't available in the U. S. until more than forty years after it was originally published in England.

In the late 1930s Hollywood bought several of Latimer's books, turning them into B-programmers. In no time, Latimer was working for the studios himself, writing scripts for the Lone Wolf mystery serial and showing his comedic flair in one of the "Topper" sequels. With his adaptation of The Glass Key in 1942, Latimer paid a debt to his mentor by producing one of the best adaptations of Dashiell Hammett's work.

One of Latimer's staunchest supporters was producer Joan Harrison, who hired him to write the screenplays for several projects she produced at RKO. Harrison had been Alfred Hitchcock's personal assistant in England before writing such Hitchcock classics as Rebecca (1940) and Foreign Correspondent (1940). On her own, Harrison became one of the essential producers of film noir. She hired Latimer to write a pair of original screenplays based on unpublished stories, and both--Nocturne (1946) and They Won't Believe Me (1947)--display Latimer's gift for clever plots, unique scenes, and colorful characters.

He quickly became the go-to screenwriter for A-list crime pictures such as The Big Clock (1948), Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948), and Alias Nick Beal (1949), all directed by John Farrow at Paramount. In all, Latimer would write ten pictures directed by Farrow, before leaving features to become one of the main writers of the Perry Mason television series.

I've chosen to show: They Won't Believe Me (1947, screenplay), Nocturne (1946, screenplay).

By Eddie Muller