Jim Steele
Created by Dana Chambers (pseudonym of Albert Leffingwell, 1895-1946)
Who is this bozo? Judging from the too-cute-by-half monicker and the great pulp-style illos on the American mass market paperback editions, full of guns, booze and babes, you'd certainly be forgiven if you thought JIM STEELE was some two-fisted brawling tough guy P.I.
But you'd be wrong.
By his own account, in The Blonde Died First, "I am not a professional detective. Not even an amateur detective, really. I write radio thrillers rather successfully. It just so happens I have been pitchforked, literally, into situations which had got out of all control, and have been lucky enough to get surprisingly good breaks in straightening them around... I have, be it stated without either pride or regret, a quite insatiable intellectual curiousity."
So, actually Jim-Boy is really just a self-consciously he-man version of Murder, She Wrote's Jessica Fletcher, and his adventures are related in a faux-hardboiled style that is often unintentionally hilarious ("pitchforked, literally"? OUCH!) It's that, more than his real name (Albert Leffingwell) that makes me suspect that Chambers may have actually been an Englishman and, like many of his fellow countrymen crime writers of that era, was merely trying to sound "American."
Steele worked out of the Big Apple, but his first case, 1939's Some Day I'll Kill You took him to Connecticutt, and his last bow, 1946's The Case of Caroline Animus, had him rambling around Miami.
He appeared in seven novels in the thirties and forties were all originally published by The Dial Press, and must have been quite polular at the time, all being reprinted numerous times by assorted paperback publishers such as Handi-Books, Jonathan Press and Popular.
Chambers wrote for many of the crime pulps of the time, and also wrote thrillers as Giles Jackson.
NOVELS
Report respectfully pitchforked (literally) by Kevin Burton Smith.
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