(1916-1975) Also wrote as: Edward Ronns
Aarons was a writer of lending-library, paperback, and pulp crime and espionage fiction for virtually his entire adult life, taking only a few years off to attend Columbia University and to serve in World War II. His early mystery novels were credited to a pen name, Edward Ronns, and published by the low-rung Phoenix Press. Phoenix’s editorial standards were notoriously even lower than its advances, and Aarons’s work for them was crude, if colorful. In The Corpse Hangs High (1939), for example, private eye “Beauty” Black gets slugged unconscious in a classic sub-Chandler riot of metaphors that verge on the ridiculous: “A red, red nose blossomed before my eyes, spread out until it filled the universe, and then turned rotten and decomposed into a mountain of red worms that wriggled wildly away into the darkness.”
Aarons’s postwar work was better, including tough suspense novels like Nightmare (1948) and Dark Memory (1950). He became one of the first writers to work for Fawcett’s Gold Medal line of paperback originals, beginning in 1952 with a melodrama, Escape to Love. In 1955, Fawcett published the novel Assignment to Disaster, the first in the “Assignment” series, which would last for 20 years and 40 volumes. The series hero was Sam Durrell, a bayou-born (raised on his granddaddy’s paddlewheeler), Yale-educated, patriotic, two-fisted CIA agent, assigned—twice a year by Fawcett Gold Medal’s schedule—to the world’s hot spots, from Karachi to Budapest to the Sulu Sea. At each location Durrell would find a looming threat to U.S. security or world peace, a deadly villain, a beautiful female, and action, action, action. As a spy novelist, Aarons lacked the Continental flair of Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond series, and was certainly not interested in the complex world view represented by later, more literary spy novelists like John Le Carre. If anything, Aarons was a kind of spy fiction Mickey spillane, with hard-boiled prose and an emphasis on brutal violence and torture. But the stories moved swiftly and surely, and many of the settings and plot devices had a news-headline immediacy.
Works
- Assignment—Mara Tirana (1960);
- Assignment—Angelina (1958);
- Assignment—Sorrento Siren (1963);
- Assignment to Disaster; (1955);
- Assignment—Amazon Queen (1974);
- Assignment—Ankara (1961);
- Assignment—Bangkok (1972);
- Assignment—Black Gold (1975);
- Assignment—Black Viking
- (1967); Assignment—Budapest (1957);
- Assignment— Burma Girl (1962);
- Assignment—Carlotta Cortez (1959);
- Assignment—Ceylon (1973);
- Assignment—Cong Hai Kill (1966);
- Assignment—Golden Girl (1972);
- Assignment— Helene (1959);
- Assignment—Karachi (1963);
- Assignment—Lili Lamaris (1959);
- Assignment—Lowlands (1961);
- Assignment—Madeleine (1958);
- Assignment—Maltese Maiden (1972);
- Assignment—Manchurian Doll (1963);
- Assignment—Moon Girl (1967);
- Assignment—Nuclear Nude
- (1968); Assignment—Palermo (1966);
- Assignment—Peking (1969);
- Assignment—Quayle Question (1975);
- Assignment—School for Spies (1966);
- Assignment—Silver Scorpion (1973);
- Assignment—Star Stealers (1970);
- Assignment— Stella Marni (1957);
- Assignment—Suicide (1956);
- Assignment—Sulu Sea (1964);
- Assignment—Sumatra (1974);
- Assignment—The Cairo Dancers (1965);
- Assignment—The Girl in the Gondola (1964);
- Assignment—Tokyo (1971);
- Assignment—Treason (1956);
- Assignment—”White Rajah (1970);
- Assignment—Zoraya (1960);
- Big Bedroom, The (1959);
- Black Orchid, The (1959);
- But Not for Me
- (1959); Come Back, My Love (1953);
- Dead Heat (1950);
- Defenders, The (1961);
- Escape to Love (1952);
- Girl on the Run (1954);
- Glass Cage, The (1962);
- Hell to Eternity
- (1960); Lady Takes a Flyer, The (1958);
- Nightmare (1948)
As Edward Ronns:
- Art Studio Murders, The (1960);
- Catspaw Ordeal (1950);
- Corpse Hangs High, The (1939);
- Dark Destiny (1952);
- Dark Memory (1950);
- Death in a Lighthouse (1938);
- Death Is My Shadow (1957);
- Decoy, The (1951);
- Don’t Cry, Beloved (1951);
- Gang Rumble (1958);
- Gift of Death (1947);
- I Can’t Stop Running (1951);
- Million Dollar Murders (1950);
- Murder Money (1938);
- Net, The (1953);
- No Place to Live (1947);
- Passage to Terror (1952);
- Pickup Alley (1957);
- Point of Peril (1956);
- Say It with Murder (1954);
- State Department Murders (1950);
- Terror in the Town (1947);
- They All Ran Away (1955);
- “Three Doors to Doom” (Dime Detective, August 1939);
- “Totem Pole Murders” (Angle Detective, July 1941)
