Delano L. Ames, b. 1906, Mt. Vernon, Ohio, U.S.A., d. 1987, Madrid, Spain.
Information about Delano Ames is very hard to come by. His year of birth and middle initial are given in the Library of Congress catalog, but apart from his book jackets almost nothing else is publicly available. He was descended from an old American family; family records and a privately printed genealogy show that his maternal grandmother Elizabeth DeLano was a descendant of Richard Warren, who arrived on the Mayflower. His great-grandfather Columbus Delano was Interior Secretary to President Grant. The Contemporary Authors database reports that he was married twice (to Maysie Grieg, a novelist, and later to Kit Woodward) and attended Yale University, but a search in the Yale archives failed to find him on any lists of enrolled students.
Details of Ames's career have never been made public, and his estate in London has refused requests for information. Late jacket biographies refer to him as "resident in England and Spain, and an American by birth", and Jacques Barzun's reference work A Catalog of Crime, usually complete, reports only his gender (male). So the tongue-in-cheek jacket biography that he wrote for the early-1960s Penguin edition of his mysteries is the only summary of his adventures that I have found; an abridged version follows:
"Delano Ames states that his interests cover almost all fields except work. Nevertheless, before the war he wrote and published several books, ranging from Secret Service stories to a philosophical novel about the Greek Gods. Two of his plays have been produced in the West End, one has been televised, and one stopped by the Lord Chamberlain. ... Joining the army, he took part as a major in the invasion of North Africa in 1942. The beaches were strongly occupied by a reception committee of small children waving Allied flags. Immediately after taking part in the heavily contested Salerno landing in September 1943 he received his call-up papers, forwarded from England by his wife. ... After the war he translated an erudite history of keyboard instruments from the French, and believes that at least 100 copies were sold. After this he retired to Somerset and wrote 'She Shall Have Murder', and then went to New Mexico ... He now lives between London, Paris, and an unspoiled Spanish fishing village. ... "
Several of his translations from French, in particular of Larousse encyclopedias and dictionaries, are in print in the U.S., but most of his novels are not.
His 12 novels about Jane and Dagobert Brown are lighthearted, witty and learned books, full of plays on language and cultural references, especially to music and poetry. The Browns are an English couple who live in southern France, where Dagobert is a sometime researcher and writer; Jane is usually the narrator. She is a common-sensical, down-to-earth sort who is alternately delighted and driven to despair by her husband Dagobert's eccentricities, foibles, and childish enthusiasms, one of which is the detection of crime. Jane often is the one who pulls Dagobert out of some mess that he has landed himself in, in a way similar to Edmund Crispin's Gervase Fen; she frequently fears for their safety (and Dagobert's sanity), but he always manages to land on his feet in the end.
There are 4 novels starring a Spanish detective, Juan Llorca, who is described as a sergeant in the Civil Guard. A look at the index shows that Ames stopped writing Jane and Dagobert novels in 1960 and turned to Llorca instead. I haven't been able to find any of these books in the U.S. in print, libraries, or used bookstores; comments will have to wait until I've read at least one.