Sat 24 Oct 2009
A 1001 MIDNIGHTS review: EDWARD S. AARONS – Assignment Angelina.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[5] Comments
by Bill Pronzini:
EDWARD S. AARONS – Assignment-Angelina.
Gold Medal #749, paperback original; 1st printing, March 1958.
Like many writers from the period 1920-50, Edward S. Aarons began his career in the pulp magazines. He also wrote three mystery novels in the late Thirties, and several more in the late Forties. But it wasn’t until the paperback original boom of the early 1950s that he achieved major success and recognition, with his “Assignment” series of espionage novels featuring the action-packed adventures of CIA agent Sam Durrell.
Along with exotic locales across the globe, violence is the main ingredient of the Durrell series; a great deal of blood is spilled in a great many different ways, both by Durrell and the various villains he encounters. Assignment-Angelina is typical.
It begins (rather irresistibly) with the coldblooded murders of four men in four different sections of the country: a filling-station owner in, Arizona, a building contractor in Indiana, an advertising copywriter in New York, and a fisherman in Louisiana.
We know from the first who is responsible — a trio named Mark, Corbin, and Slago — but we don’t know why. Durrell’s search for the answer leads him to a beautiful woman named Angelina, who may or may not be an ally, and into the usual muddle of James Bondian political intrigue.
It also leads him from Washington to the bayous of Louisiana (where Durrell is right at home; he is part Cajun) to New York City and ultimately to a mountaintop in the rugged Poconos where the slam-bang finale takes place.
Despite all the violence and melodrama, this and other Durrell novels are compulsive reading. Aarons, was an accomplished writer, with excellent descriptive abilities (particularly in depicting the various locales of his stories) and an expert sense of narrative pacing.
A total of forty Sam Durrell books were produced by Aarons from 1955 to 1975, among the more noteworthy of which are Assignment to Disaster (1955), Assignment Stella Marni (1957), Assignment-School for Spies (1966), and Assignment-Sumatra (1974).
After his death in 1975, a number of additional Durrell novels appeared by Will B. Aarons, said to be his son. Two of Aarons’s non-series books, Escape to Love (1952) and Girl on the Run (1954), are good examples of the paperback-original suspense novels of the early 1950s. A 1948 hardcover, Nightmare, is notable for its high level of tension and drama.
Aarons also published numerous novels under the pseudonym of Edward Ronns, among them Terror in the Town (1947) Gift of Death (1948), and Catspaw Ordeal (1950); most these were later reprinted in paperback under his own name.
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
Editorial Comment: On the primary Mystery*File website there is a long comprehensive overview of the “Assignment” series by Doug Bassett. Following the article is a long list of all the books in the series, plus a full description of the investigation that took place several years ago which finally discovered the true identity of Will B. Aarons. (Follow the link provided.)
Two other books in the Sam Durrell series previously been reviewed on this blog are:
October 24th, 2009 at 7:56 pm
I’ve read all of his Assignment books (“Cong Hai Kill” is my favorite)and a fair number of his singletons. Not one of them has failed to entertain me. Aarons was a superb craftsman who seemed to turn out novels with effortless professional skill.
It doesn’t seem that many people read him these days. That’s a shame, but at least you can still find his books in used stores at affordable prices.
October 24th, 2009 at 10:46 pm
Aarons is a highly skilled writer, and while seldom brilliant, was so consistent that I sometimes think he gets short shrift. While none of the Durrell’s are as good as the best of his fellow spy writers at Gold Medal Donald Hamilton or Philip Atlee, he is never as uneven or annoying as they could be either.
Aarons handled both familiar and exotic locations well, knew how to spin a plot, and in Durrell created an interesting protagonist who was far more than a cardboard cut out. There are lesser Durrell’s, but I don’t think there are any bad ones by Aarons himself.
October 24th, 2009 at 10:52 pm
Dozy —
Aarons had a long apprenticeship writing for the pulp magazines, and some of his earlier books, written in the 1940s, are, well, pulpy. Always entertaining, to be sure, but still with a lot of rough untamed edges.
But once Gold Medal and their line of paperback originals came along, Aarons was right there with them. To me, it was as though he were a brand new writer, relaxed and smooth with a definite flair for dialogue, action and descriptive passages, equally distributed.
Younger readers aren’t reading him, I’m sure, but he won’t be forgotten as long as a bunch of us older guys are still around.
October 24th, 2009 at 10:59 pm
David —
Your comment came in as I was replying to Dozy.
Yes, maybe Hamilton and Atlee were often better than than Aarons, but I certainly wouldn’t disagree with you in saying that Aarons was more consistent.
I think Matt Helm is remembered more today than either Durrell or Joe Gall, but that’s probably because of the Dean Martin movies, as bad as they were. No matter. Helm will stay in our collective pop culture awareness for a while longer yet because of them.
October 25th, 2009 at 5:47 am
Oddly enough, despite some Flemingesque plots in later Durrell books, I always found Durrell and Stephen Marlowe’s Chet Drum more believable protagonists than the cranky old woman Hamilton often made of Helm or the borderline sociopath Joe Gall was. Aarons was a good example of a writer who responded to what Gold Medal was trying to accomplish and polished his skills into a product that was highly entertaining and professional.
Despite the sheer number of entries in the series I never felt like Aarons was cruising on his success or offering less than his best effort, and he managed the transition from a more Spillane influenced to a more Bond influenced Durrell without significantly altering the basic character.
There is nothing as good as Hamilton’s Death of a Citizen or Atlee’s Green Wound Contract in the Durrell oveure, but there’s nothing as bad as Hamiltons’ The Betrayers or some of the later Gall outings there either. In a long running series like this consistency, especially at a fairly high level, is an accomplishment in itself.
I don’t know about his future, but judging by how easy it is to find Aarons books in second hand bookstores I have to think at least a few younger readers will discover Durrell.
One of my favorite non Durrell Aarons books is Girl on the Run, about a hunt for lost treasure in post war France. It shows how skillful Aarons was at this sort of thing and wouldn’t take much to turn it into something of a Da Vinci Code style mega seller today. He reminded me a bit of Frank Gruber in that he seemed able to write in many styles and areas with equal skill.