![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgc0fpnvIChuuSfJZVnWR7ipJbEGH30bLyIqxO_3sdyg0PcRd6IzE-BrMuzfuFYYI643m3L51D8A8hQPL_DoXmRspiCd2qTebbOIGb5TpYSp4EYJ0yiNSihlG0yMmW2w5CscQ8i86P8DVSu/s640/Dames+Don%2527t+Care%252C+1960+-+illus+Sam+Peffer.jpg)
Dames Don’t Care, by Peter Cheyney (Pan, 1960).
Illustration by Sam “Peff” Peffer.
READ MORE: “Cheyney’s Dark Times,” by Michael Keyton
(The Rap Sheet).
The Twelve Days of Christmas, also known as Twelvetide, is a festive Christian season to celebrate the nativity of Jesus. In most Western Church traditions Christmas Day is the First Day of Christmas and the Twelve Days are 25 December–5 January. For many Christian denominations, such as the Anglican Communion and Lutheran Church, the Twelve Days period is the same as Christmastide; for others, such as the Catholic Church, Christmastide lasts a little longer; the Twelve Days are different from the Octave of Christmas, which is the eight-day period from Christmas Day until 1 January. In Anglicanism, the term “Twelve Days of Christmas” is used liturgically in the Protestant Episcopal Church in the US, having its own invitatory antiphon in the Book of Common Prayer for Matins.OK, got all that? Regardless, the 12 days of Christmas idea got into my head as I was thinking about how to celebrate this festive occasion in Killer Covers, and it combined with something my clever niece, Amie-June, has said about the vintage crime-fiction fronts I feature on this page—how the women shown in them are so often “dames.” No, not “dames” in the noble sense of that word, but “dames” in the brassy, confident, take-no-shit-and-you’d-better-like-it sense; in the sense that the women actress Mae West so often played on the silver screen were “dames,” full of “bawdy double entendres, and breezy sexual independence.”
Most writers dream of turning out a novel they can sell in Hollywood and become rich.Born on July 23, 1896, in Emmet County, Michigan—located atop that state’s Lower Peninsula—Dale Baron Van Every subsequently moved with his parents to Southern California, graduated in 1914 from a San Bernardino high school, and went on to attend Stanford University in Palo Alto. According to this short notice, published in the San Bernardino Sun back in 1922, his college education was interrupted by World War I, when he “enlisted with the Stanford ambulance unit, serving overseas for about three years, first in the ambulance corps, later as a commissioned officer in the Convois Automobils and finally closing his European sojourn with an art course at the University of Lyons” in France. With the war at an end, Van Every returned to Stanford, finally won his diploma in 1920, and took a job with the United Press newswire service in New York City. His U.P. assignments included working as a staff correspondent in Washington, D.C., covering the summer activities of President Calvin Coolidge, and serving as the bureau chief in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In April 1922 he wed Ellen Mein Calhoun. The daughter of a Seattle family, she had also matriculated from Stanford, and had for a time been the women’s editor of the Daily Palo Alto. After bringing two children into the world, the couple would divorce in 1935.
Dale Van Every, a top authority on America’s early frontier, did it the other way. He quit a $75,000-a-year job in Hollywood in 1943 to become a historical novelist.
“I was making $1,500 a week—which made me a working picture writer, not a celebrity,” he remarked drily. “My only regret is that I didn’t quit sooner.”
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Dale Van Every, 1928 |
The story begins and ends in Traners Landing, below Pittsburgh [Pennsylvania]. And the central figure is Abel Traner, the only responsible one of the family, who breaks away from responsibility to shift for himself on the river he knows and loves. His adventures included some brushes with Wilkinson, of the grandiose schemes; [as well as] some give and take—mostly take—in acquisition of riches beyond his dreaming, and their equally undreamed-of loss. Of women, [the story’s cast ranges from] the exquisite Madame Baynton, for whom he ultimately paid the price of his own freedom, to the undependable Magda, to Hagar, who won her man, and back to Eather, at home, grown up and ready to give him the security he’d learned to want. Good period adventure.The rear side of the 1959 Bantam edition of The Voyagers (shown on the right) quotes Virginia’s Richmond Times-Dispatch newspaper as promising that among this tale’s attributes are “river pirates, spies, Indian massacres, murders, thefts, chicanery, rapes, last-minute rescues, beautiful and amorous women.” It adds, “The Voyagers has everything.” While
Apparently, Gardner concocted Knife as the second entry in this series, following 1939’s The Bigger They Come; but publisher William Morrow objected to its casting Mrs. Cool, a stout cheapskate of a woman who’d inherited her L.A. detective agency from an adulterous husband, as profane and not above gypping her clients. An Afterword in Knife speculates Morrow might have taken issue as well with Gardner’s portrayal of Lam’s fallibility, something that “brainy little runt” was less prone to in subsequent books. This rediscovered mystery begins with an overprotective mother and her daughter employing B. Cool—Confidential Investigations to look into the presumed philanderings of the younger woman’s spouse, Eben Cunner, who works for an automobile accessories wholesaler. Although Lam, a disbarred lawyer, is still learning the shamus game, he soon ferrets out the fact that Cunner has rented not one, but two, separate apartments under aliases. At one of those he’s been spotted with a comely blonde claiming to be his sister, and at both he has welcomed cops and firemen at odd hours. This is obviously not a simple hot-sheets case, but before our gumshoes can fathom its complexity, Cunner is murdered and suspicion falls on Lam and the chestnut-haired switchboard operator, Ruth Marr, who found the corpse. There are plenty of narrative contortions and distortions of the truth in these pages, but some semblance of justice is eventually reached.Author Jeffrey Marks, who’s spent a great deal of time working on a new Gardner biography, spells out in his blog how his research into the life of that prolific California lawyer turned novelist finally brought The Knife Slipped—“the first new Erle Stanley Gardner novel since 1970”—to bookstores. He adds that “Over my time writing about Gardner, I came to appreciate the Cool/Lam novels more than Perry Mason. That might be sacrilege, but they represent a more hard-boiled, pulp-oriented story. Gardner had plenty of experience with those, writing 625+ shorter works for the pulps. Cool and Lam were the worthy successors to Ed Jenkins and Ken Corning. Gardner could be himself more in these books, and his infectious personality and wit come through in these books.”
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