Elwyn Whitman Chambers (1896–1968) is most remembered today for the many motion pictures for which he wrote screenplays and for which his novels and stories served as the basis. His pulp fiction fell into the familiar wisecracking hard-boiled school and many of his characters, of whatever name, sounded similar.
One of his many detectives is a little different. Katie Blayne, a police reporter for the Sun in an unnamed city, does have snappy dialogue, but it would be a stretch to call her hard-boiled. Among the rivals who work for several newspapers, each trying to get stories before the others, Katie is known as the Duchess, though this is not fully explained. It may have a little to do with her imperious manner, well-earned since she appears to beat the others to the story while helping the police, with whom she has a warm relationship, solve crimes. The Duchess, who could “produce hunches faster than a cigarette machine turns out coffin nails,” is Chambers’s most enduring character, although he produced twenty novels and scores of short stories.
It is Chambers’s screen work that shines more brightly. He wrote the screenplays for such TV series as Surfside 6 and 77 Sunset Strip, as well as numerous films, including Manhandled (1949), a film noir starring Sterling Hayden, in which lowlife Dan Duryea victimizes Dorothy Lamour, and Special Agent (1949), in which William Eythe plays a railroad agent who pursues two brothers who pulled off a huge payroll heist; they are played by Paul Valentine and George Reeves (who later gained fame as television’s Superman). Films based on his novels include The Come On (1956), based on his 1953 novel of the same title, which starred Anne Baxter and Sterling Hayden; Murder on the Campus (1933), based on his 1933 novel The Campanile Murders, featuring Shirley Grey and Charles Starrett; Sinner Take All (1936), based on Murder for a Wanton (1934), starring Bruce Cabot and Margaret Lindsay; and Blonde Ice (1948), based on Once Too Often (1938), with Robert Paige and Leslie Brooks.
“The Old Maids Die” was originally published in the December 26, 1936, issue of Detective Fiction Weekly.