Latimer, Jonathan -- The Lady in the Morgue (1936)

With intimations of necrophilia and bondage, as well as explicit racism on the part of the "sympathetic" characters, torture and non-stop drinking, this is a rather spicy and unpleasant tale for 1936. I find it interesting that the explicit depiction of sex acts between LIVE people was verboten, but frank discussion about the physical allurements of female corpses evidently made the grade!

Latimer is often paired with Craig Rice as a "zany" hardboiled writer of the period (pre-Solomon's Vineyard), but I would say Rice is the more simply zany, while Latimer is more hardboiled. The humor in this novel is black indeed, having been filtered, surely, through earlier works like William Faulkner's Sanctuary. The lead detectives are an exceedingly callous group of individuals. There's also a nasty racist edge in their treatment of blacks, Filipinos and Italians (though I have to admit the "game" played in the morgue had its lurid fascination).

Buried in all this sensation is a quite solid mystery plot, one that would be at home in a classic British tale, revolving around a woman suicide's corpse stolen from the city morgue. If you can stomach all the rest, you should enjoy The Lady in the Morgue fairly well. If you actually like all the sensational stuff, you have a definite barn burner on your hands.

Curt Evans.