Frank L. Packard

Biography

Montreal, 1877: a boy with American parents takes his first breath on Canadian soil, and by 1897 the same boy—now Frank L. Packard—walks out of McGill clutching a brand-new B.Sc. A year later he is in Belgium, polishing his engineering skills at the University of Liège, before boomeranging back across the Atlantic and trading the St. Lawrence for the Hudson, blueprinting bridges and tunnels as a U.S. civil engineer. Steel rails sang to him. Between shifts in the Canadian Pacific’s repair yards and evenings at an engraver’s bench, Packard began spinning the clang of locomotives into prose. 1906 saw his debut in the pulps; soon the rattle of boxcars echoed through almost every tale he filed. Out of this smoke and steel stepped two enduring shadows: the gentleman cracksman Jimmie Dale—whose masked exploits would fly past the two-million-copy mark—and the wily Shanghai Jim, navigator of the detective underworld. Packard’s pen finally rested on February 8, 1942, in the quiet riverside house at Lachine, Quebec, where he left behind a widow, three sons, and a shelf of adventures still hurtling down the tracks of imagination.