simple tex shell command

["benjamin.friedrich" <benjamin.friedrich@gmail.com>]

Dear all,

I am a lisp newbie;
I want to define a short-cut in my .emacs which automatically runs
latex on my thesis,
i.e. something like this

(defun tex-thesis () "latex my thesis" "latex \\nonstopmode\input -src
E:/thesis/thesis.tex")
(global-set-key [f4] 'tex-thesis)

How should this read as correct lisp code?

Thanks,
Ben

P.S.
I tried
(setq tex-main-file "E:/ben/thesis/thesis.tex")
but then c-c c-f 'latex-file will always latex the thesis, even if I
happen
to work on a tex-file that does not belong to the thesis.