EDWARD S. AARONS – Girl on the Run. Gold Medal #424, paperback original; 1st printing, August 1954. Reprinted several times, including d1772, 1967.

   My chronology may be a little bit off, bit I believe this is the book Aarons wrote just before beginning the series he’s most famous for, the Assignment series starring rugged CIA agent Sam Durell. It shows, too, since it contains much of the same style, settings and overall flavor of the series books that came next.

   Something changed for Aarons as a writer in the early to mid-50s. After a short career writing for the pulps, mixed in with a number of ordinary detective thrillers written as Edward Ronns and taking place on the US, his books shifted their focus to that of international intrigue, mostly for Gold Medal. These later books are always filled with local color and details of life abroad that only someone who’d been thee could know (or so it seems), and his heroes are always convincing.

   And although the problems his heroes run into do have far-reaching international significance — in this case either the treasure or the uranium deposit that Harry Bannnock’s French girl friend’s father has discovered will help restore France’s place in the community of nations — it is on the personal level that Aarons’s stories make their greatest impact. Aarons was no John le Carre or Len Deighton, with massive plots and counterplots that overshadow everything else in the tale, but I still read Aarons’s books, and I haven’t been reading theirs.

–Reprinted and slightly revised form from Mystery*File #16, October 1989.