William Ard (1922–1960)

This is a competent, sordid, fast-moving tale of a cop who pretends to have gone bad to infiltrate the mob that killed his commander. The plot is rather simplistic and the book so short that things move way too fast to be plausible, but there are no major holes in the plot, either, which is pretty notable compared to a lot of books of this type. Wills (actually William Ard) writes competently but with no great style or flair--he is no John McPartland or Dan Marlowe, for instance, but he gets the job done. The book is most notable for its overt scenes of sex and depravity (not that the two things MUST be related!) that are more explicit than typical for the era, at least from a semi-respectable publisher. This doesn't make me want to rush out and find any of Ard's other work, although reading about him on the internet makes it clear that this is one of his lesser novels.… (meer)