Husband-and-wife detecting teams have always been popular among American mystery writers, starting with Frances and Richard Lockridge and Kelley Roos in the early 1940s, soon followed by Margaret Scherf and Richard Powell among others. And, no, we’re not forgetting Nick and Nora Charles from Dashiell Hammett’s 1934 novel, The Thin Man, but Nora stuck her nose in crime mainly in the movie versions. In the book, she functioned primarily as Nick’s drinking buddy while lending a little moral support. Not that the wives in these early series did all that much actual detective work; that chore still fell mainly to the guys.

During this era, the Brits, for the most part, preferred to separate the sexes when it came to crime. The classic exception, of course, is Agatha Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence Beresford who debuted in the 1929 short story collection, Partners in Crime. Christie apparently considered using a husband-and-wife team a bit of a lark because thirteen years would pass before she finally gave them a novel-length case in 1942’s N or M?

Then in 1948 Delano Ames, a transplanted Yank, came along and presented us with that most delightful of all British detecting couples, Dagobert Brown and Jane Hamish (later Brown) in 1948’s She Shall Have Murder. Unlike their counterparts in America, the Browns were pretty much intellectual equals and if Jane rushed into places no smart woman would go... well, she knew that, thank you, but someone had to do it. And, besides, why should Dagobert get to have all the fun? Ames produced a Brown nearly every year until 1960 when he moved to Spain more or less permanently and began a four-book series featuring Juan Llorca of the Spanish Civil Guard.

Ames was born in Mt. Vernon, Ohio, on May 29, 1906, where his father, Benjamin, worked on the local newspaper. His family roots ran deep in American history. His maternal grandmother (for whom he was named) Elizabeth Delano could trace her ancestry back to Richard Warren and the Mayflower. His great-grandfather was Columbus Delano, who was interior secretary to President Grant. Other more distant relatives who were descended from the same original settlers include Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Ulysses S. Grant, Conrad Aiken, and Alan B. Shephard.

In 1917, the family moved to New Mexico, the locale for the second Jane and Dagobert mystery, Murder Begins at Home (1949). It is said that Ames attended Yale but if he did, it was an unmemorable sojourn, as no record of his academic life could be found in the Yale archives. In 1929 Ames married Maysie Grieg, a fledgling writer five years his senior who eventually was to gain fame as a highly successful author of lighthearted romances. The young marrieds took up residence in Greenwich Village, then, as now, a bohemian haven. It was there that Ames published his first novel, a philosophical look at the Greek gods entitled A Double Bed on Olympus, in 1936.

After he and Maysie divorced in 1937, Ames moved to England where he met and married Kit Woodward, his second wife. During the war, he worked for British intelligence, though he also took part in the invasion of North Africa in 1942, helping to wrest control of the beach, as he put it, from a “reception committee of small children waving Allied flags.” He also participated in the far more hotly contested landing at Salerno in September 1943, after which he received his official call-up papers which had been forwarded from England by his wife.

After the war, according to a bit of tongue-in-cheek autobiography, he “translated an erudite history of keyboard instruments from the French, and believes that at least 100 copies were sold.” He then retired to Somerset and wrote She Shall Have Murder before moving back to New Mexico. Eventually, Ames was to divide his time between London, Paris and “an unspoiled Spanish fishing village.” In addition to his books featuring the Browns and Llorca, he wrote one thriller in the Sexton Blake Library, The Cornish Coast Conspiracy, in 1942. Two of his plays were produced on the West End, one was televised and one was “stopped by the Lord Chamberlain.” Ames offered no explanation as to why. He also translated several Larousse encyclopedias and dictionaries from French into English. His final novel, The Man with Three Passports, was published in 1967 and his last published work, an introduction to a book of photography of Spain, appeared in 1971. He died in Madrid in January 1987 at the age of eighty.

While Ames professed to be interested in “almost all fields except work,” he managed to produce a significant body of work. Certainly, his Jane and Dagobert Brown books deserve to be rescued from biblioblivion. One suspects that there’s more than a touch of Delano Ames in Dagobert, whose eccentricities and enthusiasms are both the bane and delight of Jane’s existence. It’s been reported that the paucity of information on Ames is because family members feel that his work should stand on its own merits. If so, they need have no fears.

Tom & Enid Schantz
May 2008