Bill Crane

To catch a thief, a detective has himself committed to a high-class asylum. The orderlies do not need a straitjacket for Bill Crane. He is not violent, although he does have a bad habit of making embarrassing deductions about the doctors. This sarcastic, hard-drinking man has deluded himself into thinking he is Edgar Allan Poe's great detective, C. Auguste Dupin. For this, he has been put away in a stately mental hospital on the Hudson. But Crane is not as delusional as he appears. Though he may not be Dupin, he certainly is a detective - one of the greatest, and occasionally drunkest, of them all. Sent undercover to investigate the theft of an inmate's fortune, Crane finds the institution not as comfortable as he had hoped. When his fellow patients start dying, he must solve the murders, or risk losing his sanity after all.

Just days from meeting the reaper, a convicted murderer hires Chicago's most hard-boiled PI to save his neck - before the executioner can claim it. Robert Westland's death is just around the corner when he finally decides to fight the murder rap that's sending him to the electric chair. Fingered for his wife's grisly demise, Westland is in a bind, and his last hope is Bill Crane, a booze-soaked detective who's as ruthless with a quip as he is when trawling the streets for Chicago's most brutal criminal element. Crane's got just a few days to suss out the real killer - someone clever enough to off Westland's wife and lock her in a room whose only key belongs to Westland himself. Fueled by an abundance of liquor and a habit of bad manners, Crane sets his sights on a cast of oddball characters among whom hides a murderer. But in 1930s Chicago, everyone's got a secret, and the pressure is on for Crane to separate the dangerous from the truly homicidal before it's too late.

A vanished corpse leads a hard-drinking PI on a madcap chase. More than forty corpses fill the cold Chicago basement, but no crime has been committed here. After all, there are supposed to be bodies in the city morgue. Tonight, one is attracting particular attention: a beautiful young woman whose apparent suicide captured the imagination of every newspaper editor in town. Learning how and why she died is too great a task for any cub reporter. Only Detective Bill Crane is up to the job. A few minutes after Crane wakes from a nap in the morgue, the mysterious woman's body has disappeared. With the howls of the mental patients as a soundtrack, Crane leads the police on a wild search through the hospital and across Chicago, stopping for a nap or a cocktail whenever the situation demands. It may be a matter of life and death, but that is no reason to rush.

In sun-soaked Florida, Crane pursues a kidnapper in between drinks. It does not take much to lure Bill Crane to Florida in the wintertime. The weather would be temptation enough, but the fact that there is money to be made and gin to be drunk makes a trip to Key Largo irresistible. His ever-soused companion, Doc Williams, at his side, Crane sets out south to find out who has been threatening millionaire playboy Penn Essex with blackmail notes, first on his pillow, then in his wallet, demanding $50,000 - "or else." But as Crane soon learns, the threat is not to Penn, but to his sister. When beautiful young Camelia is kidnapped, Crane and Doc look for traitors inside the family circle. Lurching from cocktail hour to cocktail hour, they will do everything they can to find the missing girl, knowing that murderers - and hangovers - could strike at any moment.