Black Dagger Crime S.
2 total works
'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 this classic noir novel, St Louis private eye Karl Craven, who likes his steak rare, his liquor hard and his women fallen, arrives at the small town of Paulton to protect his wealthy client's daughter from a religious cult. He soon finds himself involved with various unsavoury characters, as well as a femme fatale named Princess, and proves more than a match for the worst of them.
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. Nobody ever saw her again, but she turned out to be a vital clue.
The movie's fading star is Caresse Garnet, a woman so universally disliked that you could throw a stone in Hollywood and find somebody who hates her: the producer who knows she's box office poison but can't fire her; the ingenue whose scenes are being cut to ribbons on her instructions; the director with a wife and a love-nest ...
All these ingredients add up to a story of a murder that couldn't happen - but does.