Review: Death in a Lighthouse - Edward Ronns (Edward S. Aarons)

Back in the Sixties, I was a big fan of the Sam Durrell/Assignment series of espionage novels by Edward S. Aarons. I read most of them until the series ended with Aarons’ death in the mid-Seventies. (There were some ghosted books after Aarons passed away, but I never read any of them as far as I recall.) Over the years I’ve also read stand-alone mystery and suspense novels of his published by Gold Medal and other publishers. He was a very solid author, always entertaining.

I didn’t figure I’d ever read his earliest novels, though, since they were fairly obscure. Published by lending library publisher Phoenix Press under the pseudonym Edward Ronns, they’re fairly hard to come by. But then wouldn’t you know it, the fine folks at Stark House have reprinted Aarons’ first two novels, DEATH IN A LIGHTHOUSE and MURDER MONEY. I’ve just read DEATH IN A LIGHTHOUSE and found it something of a surprise.

The Sam Durrell novels and Aarons’ later stand-alones aren’t exactly humorless, but they’re pretty straightforward and not exactly a laugh a minute. DEATH IN A LIGHTHOUSE, though, has a frantic, almost screwball quality to it, especially in the first half. Journalist Peter Willard wakes up after having amnesia for three years. He quickly discovers that during those years, he lived a dangerous life as a gangster and gunman known as The Deuce. He was part of Aces Spinelli’s mob, a gang that’s actually bossed by a masked criminal mastermind known as The Cowl. Now, with his memory back, Willard is a danger to The Cowl and his men, so they’re out to get him. There are also a couple of beautiful women involved, Willard’s former fiancée who is now engaged to his ne’er-do-well brother, and a redhead who’s a stranger to him but who seems to have been involved with The Deuce. Aarons piles on the shootouts, double-crosses, captures, and escapes in a breakneck fashion that’s very reminiscent of the pulps. The first half of this novel easily could be mistaken for a “Book-Length Novel” by, say, Norman A. Daniels that was published in THRILLING DETECTIVE.

Then, so fast it’ll give you whiplash, the scene shifts and DEATH IN A LIGHTHOUSE becomes an Impossible Crime/English Country House novel, only instead of an English Country House, a seemingly impossible murder takes place at an estate on the New Jersey coast that has an abandoned lighthouse on it. And darned if Aarons doesn’t do a good job with a very different second half of this book, too. The Cowl is still around, by the way, but by the end of the novel he reminds me more of an Edgar Wallace villain than a pulp mastermind.

So, basically, what you’ve got here is a bit of a kitchen sink book as Aarons throws in plenty of colorful characters and bizarre twists and tone shifts and somehow makes the whole thing work as a coherent whole. If you’ve never read Aarons before, don’t think this novel is typical of his later career, but you can still read it with great enjoyment. If you’re already an Aarons fan, DEATH IN A LIGHTHOUSE may make you scratch your head a little in surprise, but that won’t keep you from having a fine time reading it. I certainly did, and I’ve been reading the guy’s books for 60 years now. The DEATH IN A LIGHTHOUSE/MURDER MONEY double volume is available from Amazon in e-book and trade paperback editions. I hope to get to the other half of it in the near future.