I love the light-hearted mysteries by Delano Ames, who is a bit of a mystery himself. If you look him up on the Web, you won't find out much. All I know is that he was an American writer and translator who also seems to have had a musical bent and who traveled a lot. His most popular mystery series feature a British husband and wife detective team, Jane and Dagobert Brown. They have a great deal in common with Dashiell Hammett's Nick and Nora Charles , i.e., they are young, attractive, sophisticated and very very funny. They spend their time drinking, smoking and hanging out in bars. They also travel a lot. A few of his books are set in post-war Britain, but many of them take place in other countries, mostly European countries where the couple are staying at some cheap pension when a murder invariably occurs. They proceed to solve it with style.
Dagobert is a charming dilettante who has an aversion to work and flits from interest to interest, most of them obscure and intellectual. I imagine he may be modeled on the author himself. The first person narrator is Jane, his wife, who is certainly as smart and witty as he is. Their conversation is full of light banter; her observations are sharp, sarcastic and funny.
I can't recommend these books enough, but they're hard to find, being out of print. I had to order mine from Abe Books. They arrived from all over the world: little parcels from the UK, Canada and Australia plastered with foreign stamps and wrapped in brown wrapping paper and string. What a pleasure to find one on my doorstep! Unwrapping the package to discover a 1950's hardback inside was even more of a pleasure. My final pleasure was reading it, of course. Thumbing through its browned pages, still smelling of cigarette smoke after all these decades, I imagined a 50's housewife in Sydney doing the same thing.
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