"Dana Chambers" was born Albert Fear Leffingwell on April 24, 1895 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Leffingwell graduated from Harvard in 1916, and served in World War I in France as a member of the Intelligence Department. Upon his return, he began a career in advertising and co‐founded an agency that eventually became part of McCann. Starting in 1938, Leffingwell began writing a series of crime thrillers under the name Dana Chambers, beginning with Some Day I'll Kill You. He wrote 13 novels altogether as Chambers, Giles Jackson and under his own name. Seven of them featured Jim Steele, an ad copy writer turned detective. Leffingwell died on August 14, 1946 in New Haven, Connecticut, from kidney disease.