Jonathan Wyatt Latimer was born October 23, 1906, in Chicago, Illinois. Graduating from Knox College, he became a journalist, meeting gangsters like Al Capone and Bugs Moran, before turning to fiction in the 1930s with a series featuring private eye William Crane. After serving in the Navy during World War II, Latimer moved to California where he worked as a Hollywood screenwriter. He wrote with a rare combination of hardboiled action and screwball humor, scripting many famous crime novels into such classic films as The Glass Key, The Big Clock and The Night Has a Thousand Eyes. He also wrote about sex in a refreshingly frank manor, resulting in a bowdlerized first U.S. printing of Solomon's Vineyard as The Fifth Grave. Latimer moved from film to TV writing in the late 1950s, with 32 episodes of Perry Mason to his credit. He died of lung cancer in La Jolla, California on June 23, 1983.