MOUNT VERNON — The husband and wife detective team of Jane and Dagobert Brown were followed for many years by fans of the novelist Delano Ames, who was based in England.
What is less known is that he was born in Mount Vernon, the great-grandson of a political mover-and-shaker. Ames’ famous (and sometimes infamous) forebear was Columbus Delano, Secretary of the Interior under President Ulysses S. Grant, and one of the key players who maneuvered Abraham Lincoln to the front of the Republican party in the 1860 election.
Columbus Delano built a home just south of Mount Vernon in 1871 called Lakeholm, to which he retired after his forced resignation from Grant’s cabinet. The town has since expanded to reach the house, but in the meantime, it has become part of Mount Vernon Nazarene University.
Delano Ames was born on Lakeholm Farm in 1906, the son of Ben Ames, who was the son of Columbus Delano’s daughter Elizabeth. The boy’s mother was Isobell Kirk.
Ames only spent his earliest formative years in Mount Vernon, for the entire family moved to New Mexico in 1917. That proved to be only the beginning of Ames’ wanderings. He went to school on the East Coast, where he met and married an Australian writer named Maysie Coucher in Greenwhich Village, New York City.
Though Ames moved with Maysie to England, they eventually divorced and Ames remarried a woman named Kit Woodward in 1939. All this while, he was beginning to get his career as a writer underway, but no projects caught fire until his first Jane and Dagobert Brown novel, She Shall Have Murder, was published in 1948 and subsequently made into a movie.
Jane is a secretary who dreams of writing murder mysteries, while her eccentric boyfriend Dagobert is the persona-non-grata in a stuffy, aristocratic English family. By the end of the first mystery, they marry.
The books were known for their wry titles, such as Murder, Maestro, Please; or Crime Out of Mind; or even For Old Crime’s Sake. After completing a series of a dozen Dagobert Brown books, Ames decided to write something based in Spain, which he had been visiting more and more frequently as the years went by. Throughout the 1960s, Ames wrote four novels featuring mysteries solved by Juan Llorca, a sergeant in the Spanish Guard. Additionally, he wrote many independent books and translations.
Retiring after the fourth Juan Llorca book, Ames spent his later years in Spain, where it is said that he spent much of his time in a small fishing village on the coast. He died in Madrid in 1987.
