Sun 16 Sep 2018
A PI Mystery Review: DANA CHAMBERS – She’ll Be Dead by Morning.
Posted by Steve under Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters , Reviews[3] Comments
DANA CHAMBERS – She’ll Be Dead by Morning. Jim Steele #3. The Dial Press, hardcover, 1940. Popular Library #238, paperback, no date stated [1950]. Popular Library Eagle EB-5, paperback, 1953.
The gimmick in this tough guy detective series is that Jim Steele is not a private eye, even though all of his cases, which he seems take on only as favors to friends of friends, are precisely the kinds of cases that PI’s take on.
In this one he’s “hired” to help a wealthy old man to help his daughter get though the trouble she’s obviously in. He’s recently lost two of his other children to accidents, so Steele has no problem in saying yes at the same time he’s tearing up the blank check he’s offered.
In other books in the series Steele’s day job is said to be hat of writing radio thrillers, but in this one, he calls himself only a businessman, but no ordinary businessman gets into the kind of scrape that he does in this one.
Which starts out with a bang. Whatever trouble that Suzy is involved with, there is someone who wants him off the case, and badly. After being shot through the arm Steele is told to get out of town — to take a train to Chicago — and only if he does, will his wife be released. She has been kidnapped and in the hands of the bad guys.
Steele gets on the train, followed closely by someone obviously assigned to keep an eye on him, but he dumps the guy off the train, follows suit and finds the man dead. He has until the train’s arrival in Chicago, which he will not be on, to find whoever has his wife and rescue her.
An action-packed adventure story, in other words. It starts well but gets talky and sags in the middle, before ending up on a higher note, but as a full-fledged detective novel, which in my opinion was not one of the author’s stronger points. This is a case of simply going off in too many directions, in other words, but all in all it’s good enough to tell me I ought to find time to read more of the series, most of which I already own. Unaccountably I have allowed them to sit idle for far too long.
The Jim Steele series —
Some Day I’ll Kill You (n.) Dial 1939
Too Like the Lightning (n.) Dial 1939
She’ll Be Dead by Morning (n.) Dial 1940
The Blonde Died First (n.) Dial 1941
The Frightened Man (n.) Dial 1942
The Last Secret (n.) Dial 1943
The Case of Caroline Animus (n.) Dial 1946
September 17th, 2018 at 4:38 pm
I think I read and liked the first one, but never came across any of the others. As I recall it was a better action adventure book than mystery too, but I had a favorable impression of Steele.
September 18th, 2018 at 3:49 pm
With seven books published in the series, all from the same major hardcover publisher, and many reprinted in paperback, Jim Steele seems to have had quite a following. Today, though, neither he nor author Dana Chambers seem to be very well known, even by fans of vintage mystery fiction.
September 22nd, 2018 at 5:13 pm
I love Dana Chambers. The opening to Too Like The Lightning is one of my all-time favorites. Under his real name, Albert Leffingwell, he also wrote Nine Against New York. Good war/espionage yarn.