I was in the mood to read a vintage hardboiled paperback, and this is what came to hand. I'd never read any of William Ard's mysteries before, but years ago I read all the Westerns he wrote under the name Jonas Ward. He created the long-running Buchanan series and wrote the first five books featuring the character (one of which was made into a movie starring Randolph Scott). Ard died during the writing of the sixth book, which was completed by Robert Silverberg, and then the series was continued by Brian Garfield (one book) and William R. Cox (all the others), with Jonas Ward becoming a house-name.
But I'm getting off the subject here. I knew that Ard wrote mysteries as well as Westerns and have half a dozen of them on my shelves, including NO ANGELS FOR ME. The hero of this one is New York private detective Luke MacLane, who works for the All-States Detective Agency rather than being a loner PI like so many. But all the other usual elements of the genre are here. The book opens with MacLane identifying the body of a fellow PI for All-States who had been on the trail of some stolen diamonds. Vowing vengeance for his friend's murder, MacLane sets out to track down the killer as well as the loot from the diamond heist. Along the way, assorted beautiful women in varying stages of undress throw themselves at him, he gets hit on the head, drugged, and taken for a ride, and there are double-crosses galore. This sounds pretty hokey and cliched now, but it probably wasn't in 1954, when this book was published. It takes a good writer, though, to overcome the stereotypes and make a book like this hold up today, and Ard wasn't really that good. I wouldn't recommend this book to anybody who is used to reading only current PI novels. As for me, though, I enjoyed it quite a bit. There are some nice turns of phrase here and there, the action scenes are good, and even if beautiful women really don't throw themselves at private eyes all the time, I want to believe they do. I wouldn't hesitate to read another of Ard's mystery novels.
9 comments:
Ard wrote a stunning little novel for Lion under the pseudonym Thomas Wills, called YOU'LL GET YOURS. None of the Ard novels I've read comes anywhere close.
Mike Nevins once gave such a rousing talk on Hell is a City that I rushed right out and bought a copy. Boy, what a mistake!
Bill, HELL IS A CITY happens to be one of the Ard novels I already own, but I may not hurry to read it. I also have several others in the Timothy Dane series. What do you think of his Danny Fontaine novels? I haven't read them, but they have decent McGinnis covers.
Al, I don't have YOU'LL GET YOURS, but I've just ordered a copy of it. Looking forward to reading it.
I love Hell Is a City.
Well, dang, with two such divergent opinions, now I have to read HELL IS A CITY.
Richard Moore is on my side. I have You'll Get Yours, but I've never read it. I also have some of the Danny Fontaine novels. Are those the ones published by Monarch? I think John Jakes and Robert Silverberg wrote a couple of those.
The two Danny Fontaine books were published by Dell. Actually, the first one is a reprint of a hardback with a different title, but I don't have that info handy. The Monarch books are about a PI named Lou Largo, I think. And yes, several of them were ghosted. Jakes sounds right, but I don't know about Silverberg.
Here we go with more information than most people really need about William Ard's books, courtesy of Gary Warren Niebuhr's A READER'S GUIDE TO THE PRIVATE EYE NOVEL:
There are two Danny Fontaine novels, AS BAD AS I AM, published by Rinehart in 1959 and reprinted by Dell as WANTED: DANNY FONTAINE in 1960, and WHEN SHE WAS BAD, a Dell PBO from 1960. Both have McGinnis covers. There are six Lou Largo novels published as PBOs by Monarch. The first two are by Ard, the third one was ghosted by Lawrence Block, and the others were ghosted by John Jakes. I have a copy of BABE IN THE WOODS, the one ghosted by Block, and plan to read it next.
I've read one of those by Jakes and it was great: GIVE ME THIS WOMAN (1962). Quite sleazy and quite violent, and Lou Largo isn't your typical good private eye, but more like a sociopath found in later PI novels.
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