Mon 2 Feb 2015
EDWARD RONNS – Catspaw Ordeal. Gold Medal #133, paperback original, November 1950. Also: Gold Medal, #766, May 1958.
This was the third book Ronns had published by Gold Medal, the two earlier ones being Million Dollar Murder (Gold Medal #110) and State Department Murders (Gold Medal #117), all three published right after each other in 1950. The first Gold Medal to appear under his own name, Edward S. Aarons, Escape to Love, appeared in 1952, and the first in his long series of Sam Durell spy novels was Assignment to Disaster, came out in 1955.
There’s no spy activity in Catspaw Ordeal, however. It takes place in the wealthy southeastern corner of Connecticut, popularly know as the state’s Gold Coast, where Danny Archer, as in all true noir novels, finds himself in a perfect storm of double (or triple) disasters, none of which (in this case) are his fault. It’s only how he decides to handle them that makes this noir, where he finds himself off stride from the first event, making him an easier victim to the others.
And causing him to make bad decisions. After an argument with his wife who then leaves him, two people from his past unexpectedly enter his life again, one of them the girl he was in love with at one time, the other a good friend whom he presumed dead after an attack at sea during World War II. Turns out that he’s alive, and not very much of a friend any more.
Quite a few bodies turn up in this book, and Archer is hard pressed to stay ahead of the police, who are hard on his heels throughout most of the tale. By the time the ordeal is over, Archer is more than happy to settle down in peaceful but dull suburban life. His restlessness is cured for good.
Even though Connecticut is far removed from the exotic places that Sam Durell’s adventures took him later, the descriptions of the sights and sounds of suburban life are picturesque and very effective. What doesn’t work out quite as well is the mystery itself, as even with most of the threats against having been nullified, the identity of the primary killer remains to be solved.
Ronns puts it off as long as possible (otherwise of course the book would be a lot shorter than it is) but it’s not done as smoothy as it should have been. The book is told in the third person, but solely from Archer’s point of view, and given that Archer knew what we the reader aren’t told at the beginning, it seems as though he should have known the killer a lot earlier than he says he did.
February 2nd, 2015 at 6:41 pm
Aarons is a writer whose work I just liked. I liked his style, his way with words, his descriptive powers, his settings, and most of his protagonists.
As the review suggests he could be a bit careless about the plot (the hero usually has to be a bit dumber than the reader, like Watson, but not that much dumber), not so much loose ends, but a little exasperating.
But for the most part I found Aarons under any name a pleasure to read, professional, slick in a good way, and easy to digest.
Aarons was never filet mignon or a New York Strip, but he was a damn good burger and fries with the works writer. You don’t want steak with every meal.
February 3rd, 2015 at 9:27 am
There are three pulp magazine stories by Ronns at pulpgen:
http://www.pulpgen.com/pulp/downloads/list_by_author.php?page=55
“Murder Buys a Hat” is full of charm.
February 3rd, 2015 at 10:29 am
Thanks for the link, Mike. Ronns wrote a lot of stories for the pulp magazines in the 1940s, and this is one of them. It’s from Thrilling Detective, July 1942.
I’m not sure if the link will work forever, but for now here’s an online list of all of Ronns’s magazine fiction:
http://www.philsp.com/homeville/CFI/s668.htm#A16989