I’VE COME TO RESPECT HARRY NILE, Jim French’s radio detective of the noir variety. Harry has appeared here at SimanaitisSays twice already, in “Harry Nile, Seattle P.I.,” and in “Turing’s Bombe: Holmes Meets Harry Nile,” the latter, during WW II when “The Old Man” at Bletchley Park owes his longevity to a magic elixir of Royal Jelly. All in good classic sleuthing.
Here in Parts 1 and 2 today and tomorrow, Harry is involved with a wide variety of the era’s cars.
An ex-cop from Chicago, Harry opens his P.I. shop in Los Angeles, later to move north to Seattle. Initially with a security job during WW II (much to his frustration, he’s turned down for military service), Harry commutes from his Boyle Heights digs to an Alhambra fabrication shop involved in war work and then continues what sleuthing he can find on weekends. A born-again West Coaster, he’s very much into cars.
Harry’s Ratty Prewar Coupe. Harry dubs his 1937 Ford coupe “Tondelayo” honoring Hedy Lemarr’s role as a “notorious bauble-craving seductress” in the 1942 drama White Cargo.
Like all good Americans, Harry is conserving tires and mechanicals of Tondelayo, which carries an “A” gas-ration sticker “worth 3 gallons a week,” says Harry. Indeed, Wikipedia notes that this most common of gasoline rations was worth 3-4 gal./week. Once employed by A-1 Fabricators involved in military work, Harry could have applied for a “B,” worth up to 8 gal./week.
Harry’s Tondelayo was nowhere as pristine as this Deluxe Five-Window Ford V-8. Image from Unique Classic Cars.
Other Automotive Makes. Jim French Production writers worked plenty of period automotive lore into Harry’s adventures. One episode is centered around a missing Cord.
1937 Cord 812. Image by Stephen Foskett at Wikipedia.
Generally, big-buck heavies in the Nile adventures drive Packards and the occasional Cadillac convertible. FBI agents seem to favor black Buicks. Cops have Ford V-8s, albeit none so ratty as Tondelayo.
A young punk in “The Proximity Fuse,” Harry’s first success as the A-1 Fabricators security officer, drives a Willys-Overland. By the end of WW II, Willys had also produced 56 percent of the 647,870 military Jeeps; Ford (43 percent); American Bantam (the Jeep’s designing firm producing the rest).
American Bantam, by the way, was headquartered in Butler, Pennsylvania, destined to be remembered for an entirely different reason.
Tomorrow in Part 2, Harry drives Dorothy’s Derby Bentley. He and pal Murphy go shopping to replace Tondelayo.
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025