Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Clues Detective Stories, March 1941

I don't know who painted the cover on this issue of CLUES. It's okay, but I'm not overly impressed with it. However, I am impressed with the contents. There's a Race Williams novella by Carroll John Daly, a novelette by Norvell Page, and short stories by Lawrence Treat and Edward S. Aarons writing as Edward Ronns. That's a pretty good lineup!

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Clues Detective Stories, November 1938

Well, that's certainly an eye-catching cover. I don't know who painted it, but it would have made me curious about the story, that's for sure. Since Donald Wandrei wrote that cover story, it's probably pretty good. The other authors in this issue are top-notch, as well: Frank Gruber, Cornell Woolrich, Edward S. Aarons (as Edward Ronns), and J.J. des Ormeaux, who was really Forrest Rosaire. I've never read any of Wandrei's Cyrus North stories and don't know anything about the series, but I've always found Wandrei to be a dependable author. I don't own this issue, or any other issues of CLUES DETECTIVE STORIES, for that matter. The Internet Archive has some of them posted (not this one). I ought to give them a try, one of these days.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Detective, January 1945

I don't know who did the cover on this issue of THRILLING DETECTIVE, but how can you go wrong with a good-looking, redheaded female cabbie with a skeleton in the back seat? The best-known authors in this issue (which I don't own) are Edward S. Aarons writing under his pseudonym Edward Ronns, C.S. Montanye, and Allan K. Echols, best remembered for his Westerns. Also on hand are Benton Braden (twice, once under his own name and once as Walter Wilson) and Armstrong Livingston, plus house-name John L. Benton.

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.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Top-Notch Detective, September 1938

TOP-NOTCH DETECTIVE lasted for only three issues, of which this is the first one. That cover has enough going on that I thought at first it might be by Norman Saunders, but it's actually by J.W. Scott. The fact that this pulp didn't last long couldn't be due to the quality of the authors in its pages. This issue features stories by Cleve F. Adams, Arthur J. Burks, G.T. Fleming-Roberts, Edward Ronns (Edward S. Aarons), Norman A. Daniels, Henry Treat Sperry, and Orlando Rigoni, as well as a number of other, lesser-known authors. That's a pretty strong lineup and an indication of a pulp worth reading.

Gang Rumble - Edward Ronns (Edward S. Aarons)

Despite the title and cover painting, GANG RUMBLE by Edward Ronns (Edward S. Aarons) isn’t really a juvenile delinquent novel as we usually think of them. One of the main characters is the warlord of a gang, and there’s a rumble at a bowling alley (although it takes place mostly off-screen), but this is actually a tidy little crime/suspense novel that takes place in about twelve hours, one hot Saturday night in a bad neighborhood in Philadelphia known as the Jungle.

There isn’t really a protagonist in this novel. Instead we have a large cast of characters weaving in and out of the story, including the above-mentioned gang warlord, his toadying sidekick, a hanger-on from a rich family who’s really a brutal sociopath, an old cop with a drinking problem, his beautiful daughter, the old cop’s idealistic rookie partner, a wealthy reformer who wants to clean up the city’s youth gangs, and a scheming underworld boss. Mix them all together and you come up with murder and a desperate hunt for a killer, with some torture and rape thrown in for good measure. GANG RUMBLE, as you might expect, is a pretty lurid book.

It’s also very well-written, and old paperback pro Aarons keeps the pace rocketing along. I had no idea what was going to happen next and kept flipping the pages to find out. If there’s one flaw in this book, it’s that the ending isn’t quite as dramatic as it could have been, which actually is pretty common in Aarons’ books, as if he can’t quite bring himself to go all the way over the top.

Despite that, I really enjoyed GANG RUMBLE and give it a high recommendation. As far as I know, it hasn’t been reprinted since being published by Avon in 1958, but Black Gat Books has a new edition coming out soon. It’s an excellent suspense novel and is well worth reading.