Ard, William (pulp fiction writer)

 
(1922-1960) Also wrote as: Benn Kerr, Jonas Ward

In a 10-year fiction writing career that ended with his death from cancer at the age of 37, William Ard produced a large and strong body of work. Ard could write tough, he could write tender, and he could write lyrical. He held his own in the bustling, competitive world of 1950s genre writers, and if he did not quite reach the level of the greats of that time, he showed the potential to do just that. His private-eye heroes were as tough as Mickey spillane’s but had a rueful humanity worthy of Raymond chandler. His lowlife urban settings were every bit as depressed and seedy as those of David goodis, and his vision of a corrupt world could be as corrosive as Jim Thompson’s. In addition, and in contrast to his noirish detective fiction, Ard also wrote spare and beatific westerns and created one of the classic western heroes, Tom Buchanan.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Ard attended Admiral Farragut Naval Academy in Florida and took a degree from Dartmouth College before beginning a six-year stint as a copywriter for the Buchanan Advertising Agency and later for the New York division of Warner Bros. With the acceptance of his first novel, The Perfect Frame, published by Mill and Morrow in 1951, Ard happily quit his corporate job and began turning out novels at the pace of two to three per year. The Perfect Frame introduced Timothy Dane, Ard’s archetypal Manhattan private eye, a tough ex-marine with a law degree. Six more Dane thrillers followed, including the gripping Hell Is a City (1955), in which Dane tries to protect a Puerto Rican boy who has saved his sister from rape by killing a vicious cop. A kind of noir anticipation of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, (1987) Hell vividly details an almost entirely corrupt New York in which cops, journalists, and politicians exploit the incident for their own vicious purposes.

In addition to the Dane topics, Ard wrote numerous stand-alone noir thrillers and several sleazy lowlife melodramas, some of them under pseudonyms. In 1956, Fawcett Gold Medal brought out Ard’s first western, The Name’s Buchanan, written under the pen name of Jonas Ward. Tom Buchanan (the name a tribute to Ard’s old advertising agency) is a big, low-key, laughing drifter, from nowhere special, going nowhere in particular. In the first novel Ard cribbed from Hell Is a City’s plotline, with Buchanan having to save a Mexican boy who has shot the powerful gringo who tried to rape his sister. Ard completed four more Buchanan novels before he died,assigning it to several other writers through the years (including John jakes). The first topic was filmed as Buchanan Rides Alone (1958), starring Randolph Scott and directed by Budd Boetticher; many consider the movie one of the best westerns of the ’50s.

Works

  • All I Can Get (1959);
  • Cry Scandal (1956);
  • Diary, The (1952);
  • Don’t Come Crying to Me (1954);
  • Girl for Danny (1953);
  • Hell Is a City (1955);
  • Like Ice She Was (1960);
  • Mr. Trouble (1954);
  • Naked and the Innocent (1960);
  • No Angels for Me (1954);
  • Perfect Frame, The (1951);
  • Private Party (1953);
  • Root of His Evil (1957), also published as Deadly Beloved Sins of Billy Serene (1960);
  • .38 (1952), also published as You Can’t Stop Me;
  • When She Was Bad (1960)

As Ben Kerr:

  • Blonde and Johnny Malloy, The (1958);
  • Club 17 (1957);
  • Damned if He Does (1956);
  • Down I Go (1955);
  • I Fear You Not (1956);
  • Shakedown (1952)

As Jonas Ward:

  • Buchanan Gets Mad (1958);
  • Buchanan Says No (1957);
  • Name’s Buchanan, The (1956);
  • One Man Massacre (1958)

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