Who is Charles Latimer from A Coffin for Dimitrios and what is their importance?

Charles Latimer is a detective novelist from England. He began his career as a university professor, but he has since left teaching to become a full-time writer. He is an ordinary and even prosaic man, with a strong sense of right and wrong. Mr. Peters considers the morality in Latimer's novels to be black and white, and even prudishly moral. Latimer must leave his clear-cut world to investigate the murky, criminal underworld of Dimitrios.