'From the way her buttocks looked under the black silk dress, I knew she'd be good in bed'So begins the most hardboiled of Latimer's novels, whose notoriety meant that it was only published in unexpurgated form in the States in 1982, 40 years after its original publication.
In his first case, William Crane goes undercover in a private sanatorium to solve a theft, and makes no secret of the fact that he believes himself to be a great detective, even presenting himself as Edgar Allan Poe's C.
Private detective William Crane and his constant (drinking) companion Doc Williams travel to Florida to protect millionaire Penn Essex and his sister Camelia from harm.
Private eye Bill Crane is back, in his fifth and final case, working and drinking as usual with his old sidekick, Doc Williams, and a new member of the gang, Ann Fortune, who is posing as his girlfriend - and disapproves of his carousing.
Perhaps it really started when scriptwriter Richard Blake, finishing last-minute revisions in the early hours of the morning, found the naked blonde on his driveway.
In Flower City, a sleepy resort town on Florida's Gulf Coast, wealthy Elizabeth Stegman is murdered in a jewel heist gone bad - her missing jewels insured for 750,000.
For years the Delevan family image reflected only the best of everything - wealth, position, influence, and the kind of expensive good looks that take generations to cultivate.
Alex Doyle is a tough man on a tough assignment in Ramona Beach, Florida - the kind of place that doesn't trust strangers and is policed by a sheriff who echoes the locals' sentiments with a billy club.
On New Year's Eve, solicitor Rosa Epton spends a pleasant evening talking to a man who seems to be finding the date he has brought with him less than satisfactory company.
Relating Sherlock Holmes's part in real-life crimes of the day, Donald Thomas brings the Great Detective to life once again in six narratives that display Holmes at his most determined, inventive and downright devious.
For more than two decades, Sherlock Holmes played a vital, though secret, role in solving the major crimes and scandals of his day - some too damaging to the monarchy, the government or the security of the nation to be fully revealed at the time.
Two petrol bombs thrown on the Cakewalk promenade, a sports reporter and his bike rammed off a cliff, a policeman thrown through a plate-glass display window in the city centre and left to die.
The sensational events of the summer of 1907 - the disappearance of the Ascot Gold Cup from the Royal Enclosure, and the even more astonishing theft of the Irish Crown Jewels from a locked and guarded strongroom in Dublin Castle - remain mysterious but apparently random events.
It is 1936 - the year of the Abdication Crisis - and gangland capo Sonny Tarrant's money-laundering operation is being threatened by three small-time thieves thinking big.
