Mon 6 Oct 2014
MIKE MORAN – Double Cross. Popular Library 494, paperback original, April 1953.
A recent review on this blog of William Ard’s Hell Is a City produced some opposing opinions on his work, but neither the review or his discussion brought up the fact that Mike Moran was one of Ard’s pen names. (Ben Kerr was mentioned, while Thomas Wills was also not.)
This was Ard’s only use of Mike Moran as a name to hide behind — for what reason he or someone thought he needed one is a question for which no one living may know the answer — and while I have some good things to say about it, I also have to admit that it’s a wildly uneven piece of work.
Tom Doran is the PI who tells the story. He’s an independent operator, but when the head of the agency he sometimes works for sends a case his way, he’s happy to take it. He’s hired to be a bodyguard for a boxer whose sparring partners have all been frightened off the job while the fellow and his trainer are in training camp preparing for a big fight.
Besides an ugly cook who takes a decidedly bad attitude toward Doran, there are two beautiful women involved, the first the boxer’s live-in girl friend Velma, a would-be singer with the morals of a bunny rabbit; the second, the blonde who owns the farm where the entourage has set up camp. Her name is Janet Pearce, and before you know it, she and Doran have taken up housekeeping together.
It’s that kind of PI story. The opening scene is very tentatively written, and even when the actions of the cook are explained later on, they still don’t make a lot of sense. Nor do those of any of the bad guys, were you to sit down and try to do so, as I am invariably wont to do, even for inexpensive PI fiction, as this one was when it first came out.
On the other hand, once the characters are introduced and the story is well on its way, it’s smoothly told and very easy to finish in a mere two hours or less. (It helps that it’s only 128 pages long, a mere bagatelle by today’s standards.)
October 6th, 2014 at 3:25 pm
There are hundreds of reasons for using pseudonyms from hiding your identity on something you are ashamed of to starting a new series to not letting one publisher know you are working for another.
My guess here would be Ard did not want his hardcover publisher knowing he was doing paperback originals at that point or felt there was some aspect of the book he did not want associated with his name. From your description of it the book sounds as if he might have knocked it off pretty quickly and just didn’t want to be branded as its author.
October 6th, 2014 at 4:41 pm
I didn’t mean to say that there weren’t plenty of possible reasons, only that no one is likely to know the real one. Your guess in your second paragraph sounds like a likely candidate though.
But he did do A GIRL FOR DANNY for Popular Library as another paperback original, also in 1953, and under his own name. This all the while other books were being published in hardcover by Rinehart in the time period from 1952 to 1959. (His first book, THE PERFECT FRAME, was published in hardcover by Mill in 1951.)
I don’t know much about Ard’s personal life, but I think I remember reading that he and and wife often needed money quickly. That he knocked this one off in a hurry would be a fairly solid wager, based on my reading of the book.