It is with great sadness that I report that Eileen Hendrick passed away October 22, 2008.  Her daughter, Eileen Heishman, was thoughtful enough to email me and give me the news.

Mrs. Hendrick was a wonderful person, full of life, humor and faith.  It was a joy working with her on this site, and sharing her excitement with each photo or document or news and corrections that she sent me.  I’ll cherish our phone conversations and our email exchanges.

A memorial service was held for Mrs. Hendrick Saturday, Nov. 1 in the Faith Methodist Church in Largo, Florida.  As her daughter Eileen rightly pointed out, Saturday was All Saints Day.

My deepest sympathies to Eileen Heishman on her loss, and my eternal gratitude to Mrs. Hendrick for her contributions to this site keeping alive the work of a great writer.

According to William Ard’s Dartmouth transcript, he was born on July 18, 1922. His full name was William Thomas Ard. He listed his father as Robert E. Ard and his mother as Rose Frances Doran. His father worked at Marine Insurance.

In high school Ard took three years of Latin and two years of French.

At Dartmouth, his grades look pretty much like a lot of aspiring writers.

He generally earned A’s and B’s in his major, English, with the exception of his last semester when he took four English classes and earned one A, one C and two D’s. He did earn a B in Public Speaking. He was not strong in the sciences.

His comprehensive exam culminated in a C and his final “standing” or cumulative point average was 2.2. His position in the class was 292 out of 490.

He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in June, 1944.

He listed his nickname as “Bill,” though, according to alumni contributions he was also known as “Willie.”

On July 31, 1945 he married Eileen Kovara. Their son, William was born on November 1, 1950, followed by daughter Eileen on July 8, 1947.

When he filled out the Alumni questionnaire the family was living at 420 Druid Road, Clearwater, Florida.

When he filled out the information for the Dartmouth Alumni Directory in 1956, he listed his occupation as “author,” which began in 1950.

He listed his previous occupations as :

Copywriter, Buchanan & Co. Advertising, 1944-1947

Copychief, Warner Bros. Pictures, 1947-1950

He was a Republican and was a member of Sigma Chi, Dragon, Pelican Golf Club, and Carlouel Yacht Club.

On his form he wrote that he served in the Marine Corps from 1942-1944 as Private First Class. This needs to be checked out since he was a college student during these years.

He listed four persons (including one classmate) who would always know his address as:

John A. Corroon, ‘44

Ken A. Hamlin

George W. Sanders

James Oliver Brown.

The list is interesting in that he later used Ken Hamlin as one of his pen names.

Here’s a copy of Books published exactly as Ard listed them on October 15, 1955 for the 1956 Dartmouth Alumni Directory.

It’s interesting to note that Ard, an avid golfer, ghosted a book for Johnny Farrell entitled If I Were In Your Shoes, published in 1950 by Henry Holt. The book is available through rare book dealers on ebay.

He had two short stories published in 1953 and a television play presented on Fireside Theatre in 1955.

“The World of William Ard, written by Francis M. Nevins Jr., appeared in The Armchair Detective, Volume 15, #2. It’s an extensive work that surveys all of Ard’s work. It’s not only a good introduction to Ard but a timeless reference point.

I don’t know if it’s rare or not but after months of searching, I finally found Guns of Revenge which Ard wrote under the Ken Hamlin pseudonym. No one I’ve talked to in the book business had heard of it. I found it buried on a dealer’s story on eBay. It arrived today.

It’s a Monarch 555, published in 1965 but copyrighted in 1960. I’m guessing this was the last book Ard finished before he died. The publisher or agent apparently held onto it for a few years.

Ard dedicated the book to “C.C. Wintermute, of the West”.

There is also a two paragraph author’s profile which reads:

“Ken Hamlin is the pseudonym of a well known writer of hard cover and paperback books. A graduate of Dartmouth, he saw extensive service with the Marines during World War II.

“After the war he worked as an investigator for a detective agency, then spent three years as a copywriter with an advertising agency before joining the advertising department of Warner Brothers. Subsequently he left Warners to become a full-time writer.”

The time as an investigator is questionable. In an alumni information form, Ard does not mention it and it is not listed in any of the obituaries.

For Hamlin page:

The pseudonym is actually the name of a close friend of the Ards at the time. He has since passed away. For Eileen Hendrick’s recollection, click here.

  This article appeared in The Armchair Detective, Volume 16, Winter 1983, Number 4. This is the second article by Francis M. Nevins Jr., who did an extraordinary service in his research and articles on William Ard.

Apparently feeling more confident with the success of the three Buchanan books, Ard decided to have fun with the fourth installment, Buchanan Gets Mad. A limping horse sets him in the California town of Salvation in which the preacher and sheriff are the same man, Sidney Hallett. Word play abounds in this novel where the streets of Salvation are Genesis and Sinai.

The town is empty and Buchanan stands in the middle of Salvation, wondering: “Where the hell is everybody?”

He hears a voice yelling at a woman: “You are hereby banished from Salvation!” While the puns become a bit overwhelming, it turns out that Hallett does fancy himself god of this town which he created. He now directs “people’s very existence.” In fact by the end of the book we see that Ard has created a demented precursor of Jimmy Jones and David Koresh.

While Hallett is probably a pun on “Hell,” the sheriff’s deputy is Hynman, which is an inverted “Hymn-man”

Buchanan winds up on the wrong side of the establishment and takes a bullet in the ribs. In the course of trying to save heroine Ellen Booth and Juanita, a Mexican girl, he gets beat up and finally thrown in jail to await hanging on a trumped up charge. He maintains his easy going persona throughout.

By now, Ard has begun to add dimension to the affable hero. We get a look at the dark side of Buchanan when Hynman comes into the jail to rape Ellen who is in the next cell. Buchanan grabs the deputy by the throat and begins choking him to death with the matter-of-fact philosophy, “He knows he’s got this coming.” He has no more feeling for killing a man than shooting a rattlesnake. It’s only a woman’s pleas that stop him.

Unlike Dane and Largo, Buchanan is fairly pure. At the ranch of the main female character, he finds a woods and spring and bathes. He later falls asleep and is awakened by two women bathing nude. Ever the gentleman, Buchanan stays hidden so they won’t be embarrassed. What could have been an implied sex scene instead is one of innocence in a little Eden outside the corrupt Salvation.

While Buchanan does kill a couple bad guys, it’s the villains in the end who wipe out each other, self-cleaning Salvation.

Buchanan’s Revenge, is, as the title implies, a revenge novel. Buchanan searches out a friend who has just been released from jail, rehabilitates him and they begin a shipping business to Mexico. An errant trio from a marauding band shoots the man in the back, killing him and robs the shipment.

This is one of the more uneven books. Buchanan kills two of the men and faces down the entire gang for the third. After he kills the man, he joins the gang as they run contraband into and out of Mexico, holding off the Mexican army.

The book has its charm, though. Buchanan’s duality: the friendly, easy-going cowboy and the deadly, persistent, fearless killer is explored further. And Big Red, a hastily drawn but colorful character, virtually roars off the page and steals the show, especially during the fist fight between the two giants.

Garfield and Silverberg added excellent touches as they filled out Buchanan. In subsequent adventures, he acquires his horse, Nightshade. No horse is as smart or as loyal as Nightshade. He often mentions Luke Short, a gambler and gunfighter who taught him how to play poker. (Silverberg was fascinated with Short and in 1961 had done a study of Short: Luke Short And His Era, published by Doubleday).

At one point he picks up a black friend. Buchanan, throughout all the novels, appreciates those of other cultures as real people and not stereotypes.

Ard and the subsequent authors, stayed with the simple plot premise, as Buchanan says in Buchanan Gets Mad: “I keep starting out for ‘Frisco but somethin’ keeps happening,” The series ended in 1986 with Buchanan’s Stage Line.

As mentioned in the previous post, Buchanan is the affable but deadly loner, moving across the West through pockets of trouble.

The wandering helper of the underdog is a theme so common it long ago passed from stereotype to a main figure in the collective unconscious.

But one characteristic makes Buchanan unique in western heroes. He laughs. This was the genius of Ard’s creation. Up until Buchanan, most western heroes were serious, tight-lipped guys who say little and despite their humility, seem full of themselves.

Buchanan is also a nice man. He minds his own business, isn’t overly ambitious in the usual sense and is the kind of guy who, though he’s six feet six inches, wouldn’t be an imposition if he stayed with you. You like him. You’d feel comfortable sipping a coffee or a whiskey with him.

You so identify with the guy that it’s upsetting when someone comes along and makes this good-humored fellow mad and forces him to shed his gentle air and become reluctantly violent and often deadly.

The guy loves children, treats women with great respect and hates to harm anything, but anyone who makes him really mad usually gets killed.

While Dane skips about at the outside fringes of the law, he still moves securely within his social environment. Buchanan remains outside of society. As in other westerns, we are reminded that “civilization” is in the East. Society in the West lives in the little towns that have sprung up in the westward post Civil War surge. Between them a man travels alone in an existential wilderness where there is no good and evil, only life and death. The hero finds evil in the pockets of society.

Where Dane’s and Largo’s wisecracks have an angry, defiant edge, always taunting the adversary (law or criminal), Buchanan might be flippant but it’s a flippancy from a man secure with himself, a man who knows who he is, has simple but well-defined set of values and wants simply what is right and just.

Buchanan was so real and so popular that he took on an existence of his own, living on after his creator. More Buchanan books were written after Ard’s death than by the creator himself.

Ard fully completed five of the Buchanan novels. The sixth one, Buchanan On The Prod, was his except for last chapter.

Mrs. Hendrick recalls that, Bob Silverberg completed Buchanan On The Prod. Brian Garfield wrote the seventh Buchanan novel, Buchanan’s Gun and William R. Cox wrote rest of the books in the series, Mrs. Hendrick said. The series ended when Cox “started a series of his own and didn’t have time to do any more Buchanan books” Mrs. Hendrick recalls.

Ambling through the wide open West, the pace of the narration, superficially slows. It’s easy to miss the fact that Ard does keep the action moving through his minimalist character sketches and shaved down dialogue. And unlike Dane and Largo, Buchanan does have a past. We find out in Buchanan Gets Mad that the drifter was born and raised on a ranch and his father was killed by bank robbers.

In his 1956 debut, The Name’s Buchanan, the 30-year-old loner is returning from Mexico where he’s spent two years as a mercenary in Mexican revolution. He comes across a beautiful young girl, naked and nearly dead. Maria Del Cuervo has been raped, bashed in the head and left for dead. He takes her back to her to the home of her wealthy Mexican family.

The book is very sympathetic to the Mexican culture. Juan, Maria’s brother, rides to Agrytown to avenge her. Agrytown is owned and run by the Agry brothers. (The name is a pretty obvious play on “angry”). He kills the rapist, the wayward son of one of the town leaders.

Buchanan, who becomes embroiled in the problems, winds up fighting off a lynch mob and killing the sheriff.

As guest of honor at the Del Cuervo home, he fends off the romantic advances of Maria and gives in to the more primitive, lusty advances of an Indian servant.

Ard in fact was fully aware of the duality of the romantic and realistic hero. Maria sees him as a knight. The Indian girl sees a man. Ard neatly slices right down the middle of the two extremes in a speech Buchanan makes to those trying to honor him:

“. . . the truth is, as I know Tom Buchanan, he’s not quite so worthless as Lew Agry painted him . . .and not nearly the man the Del Cuervo family would like to imagine. Buchanan is a bum. He’s a restless, rootless drifter who knows a little bit about everybody else’s business but not one damn thing about his own.”

While Buchanan Says No, published in 1957, is one of the best of the series, it is also the sketchiest. Buchanan is a drifter who is drugged and shanghaied to a cattle drive. When he’s denied his earnings, he goes into the town of Bella to collect. Here he encounters (of course) the evil forces of the bad guys and the temptations (of course) of beautiful women.

No threats, beatings or jail can stop this large, easy striding man from pursuing the men who owe him. In the course of this pursuit he becomes a hero in the town controlled by one man and starts a rebellion.

There is not a bad bone in Buchanan’s body, no dark side. He’s just a cowpoke who wants what’s fair. In the end it turns out that he’s also a very skilled gunfighter. The revealing scene is played so subtly that it seems natural. And whether Ard planned it that way, it opened the way for more Buchanan adventures.

His third adventure, One Man Massacre, appeared a year later in 1958.

Massacre opens in 1857 with Buchanan with an old miner, Fargo Johns. The bitchy, sarcastic Odd Couple interplay between these two characters is both realistic and humorous. Buchanan has been tricked into mining with Fargo.

The plot takes shape when Buchanan, who has nothing, walks from the mountain to Scotsdale where, during a poker game, he’s pulled into a showdown. He kills the man with a borrowed gun.

In fact at this point, Ard amplifies Buchanan’s alienation, underscoring the man’s fate to never be part of society:

“The men’s voices sounded all around Buchanan’s head like so many droning flies, and held about as much interest to him. He was not geared for town life, had no feeling for it, and as he stood here now looking down into a half-empty whiskey glass the big man was asking himself unhappily just what the hell kind of living he was meant for. From the top of the mountains the lights down here had looked warm and inviting, promising a night of companionship with other men….but when Fargo asked him what kind of good time did he have all he could answer was that he had killed a man he’d never even seen before.”

We find the man is part of a gang, imported by leading town light Malcolm Lord to rid the area of squatters under the pretense of killing hostile Mexicans.

Eight gang members attack Buchanan. He returns, wounded, to the safety of the mountain. While he recuperates, the gang lynches innocent Mexicans and sets up an elaborate frame.

Barely healed, Buchanan goes into town and all hell breaks loose.

While heroes have faced huge odds, it’s the way Buchanan goes into the fight that puts him ahead of his time. Read this passage and see if you aren’t reminded of Rambo or Schwarzenegger:

“Buchanan hit him on the point of the jaw and the man went down soundlessly. Two others were attracted by the brief encounter and bore down on him, diagonally. Buchanan bent over the fallen man and very deliberately lifted the .45. The gun in his hand began swinging in a slow arc, exploding six times with a kind of staccato rhythm until it was empty. He tossed it away from him, negligently, took another from the limp fingers of his nearest victim and started walking down the middle of Trail Street. Twenty-one times he was fired at, six times he answered, and when there was nothing left in that gun he borrowed a third.” He goes on to kick in the door of a building and shoot two more men.

The story works on two levels. It’s pure, fast-paced adventure. It also follows the literary formulas of the hero. We have the hero on the mountain, pure, innocent, coming into the din of society, here represented by Scotsdale. The town had been good until Malcolm Lord (you get the play on names by now) imports evil in the form of the gang out of his own greed for more land.

The hero is wounded – a symbolic death –and goes into hiding, to heal or be “reborn.” While he is gone, the evil grows and chaos increases. He returns, eliminates evil and restores order.

Buchanan in this book is not so easy going and friendly.

Buchanan: Part 1

The hardboiled novels met with instant success. While critics seemed to be divided in their opinions of the novels, millions copies sold.

So it’s ironic that this New York native now living in Florida found his most enduring success in a large, laconic cowboy named Buchanan. While Mrs. Hendrick has no idea what triggered the conception of the big loner with the ready smile, it is obvious that Ard was at his creative peak and a western series character probably both sounded like fun and a welcome relief from the hood-infested clubs and back streets of New York and Florida.

It was time for a new pseudonym. Ard, Dartmouth graduate and former ad man, knew the markets. Readers of hardboiled fiction and readers of westerns might have had some crossover, but essentially they were two different audiences.

Readers of westerns were (and still are), primarily the blue collar guy who is discerning, discriminating and intensely loyal. Ard surely knew that the author of New York novels about a tough detective was not going to be accepted as the creator of western adventure. What’s the creator of a pavement pounding gumshoe know about cowboy boots, for God’s sakes?

How do you switch from fedora to 10-gallon and maintain credibility? How easy is it to move from bagels to hardtack? How does an Easterner replace the pasty faces of the nocturnal New York underground with the ruddy, element-hardened men of the west?

Simple. Change your name.

Ard cleverly added a “W” to his last name, hauled Jonas out of the Old Testament and placed in the saddle the big, friendly Tom Buchanan, forever heading in a laconic pace toward San Francisco.The name, of course, was plucked from the Buchanan Ad Agency where Ard began his career.

It is also probably safe to say that Buchanan was an experiment and Ard had little idea that Buchanan would not only command his own series but that the series would outlast every one of Ard’s hardboiled creations.

The character is singular enough to have carved his own niche into the market of series western heroes.

And he’s complex enough to drive the simple plots–a gentle giant of a man of Irish descent, Buchanan is always alone. He’s a peace loving man (age 30, of course) riddled with knife and bullet scars and more to come. Like the Incredible Hulk, he finds himself placed in a situation where he’s pushed to his limits. Nice guy gives way to one huge, remorseless destroyer of evil.

Buchanan seems a natural extension of Zane Grey’s Lassiter and The Virginian. He’s a ragged knight, destined to wander the West’s dusty trails, remaining poor and bound to assist the helpless.

He’s also the prototype Americans love. He’s rootless, free, and he’s happy. Here’s a chunk of dialogue from second book, One Man Massacre:

“Where you from?” he asked admiringly.

“No place in particular,” Buchanan said.

“. . .And where you bound?”

“Same place,” Buchanan laughed.

“You must like it here. . .”

“I like it best wherever I am,” Buchanan replied gently.

Though Dane is the hero of seven novels that vary in pace and polish, he remains among the most forgotten of “eyes.” (Neither he nor his creator are even mentioned in O’Brien’s Hardboiled America.)

Dane begins his career in The Perfect Frame (1951). A former marine, he has a law degree and lives on a third floor converted brownstone apartment on New York’s 53rd St. He favors Seagram’s doesn’t like homosexuals, and hates modern art.

Oh, and as a quick reference, it’s easy to remember the ages of Ard’s heroes. They’re all 30. Young enough to give and receive the physical abuse required but old enough to have some cunning, experience and at least a little wisdom. It also meshes with Ard’s age who was 28 when his first book was published.

While Ard had a good eye for detail of New York’s mobster-infested union scene, Dane’s entree in A Private Party is slightly two-dimensional. He doesn’t enter the plot until third of way through the book and gets overwhelmed by the other characters despite attempts to maintain a presence with his tough guy attitude and physical way of dealing.

Deadly Beloved is one of Ard’s fastest-moving novels, zipping from scene-to-scene in quick lightning bursts, anticipating by two decades the fast-moving edits that TV would grow into. Dane accepts the job of delivering a gambling debt to a Florida gangster who is trying to raise money for guns to arm an army coup in South America. Dane also falls in love with a redheaded exotic dancer who is “owned” by the gangster.

The plot enables the author to take Dane out of New York and down to Florida where Ard himself had recently moved.

Before he knows it, Dane is in the center of an international conflict created by the Florida underworld, a South American revolutionary force, and the CIA. Through it all he manages to unwittingly stop the Latin overthrow, get beat up twice, save a girl named Lisa from rape and murder, release her from the gangster’s contract and deliver the money to the gangster. He also manages to make love to Lisa at least three times.

According to Eileen Hendrick, Ard also had fun with characters’ names, using friends and acquaintances. In Deadly Beloved the main villain, a Florida gangster, is named Johnny Cashman. Young rockabilly Johnny Cash dominated the jukebox and radio at this time. In fact, in 1958 alone he had three #1 hits, “Ballad Of A Teenage Queen” “Guess Things Happen That Way” and “What Do I Care.” (Mrs. Hendrick however, said she is nearly positive that this was just a coincidence, that William almost certainly did not make this conscious Cash connection.

Cashman is also a fairly obvious moniker for a man who has spent his life pulling in money and in this particular case is desperate to collect cash from gambling debts

Ard improved quickly. In the 1954 Don’t Come Crying To Me . (which he dedicated to his wife, Eileen), Dane gets mixed up in saving a baby about to be born to the daughter of a rich powerful man. In one of Ard’s cleverest plots, three men claim to be the father. The novel slows a bit in the middle while Dane is in jail, but we do get insights into the media’s penchant for maximizing news and its voracious, almost vicious appetite for news. Given the media’s over coverage (fed by the public’s insatiable appetite) of selected people and events, this former New York ad man’s description of a trumped up newspaper story, spliced photos and 15 minutes of unwanted fame are as relevant today as they were four decades ago.

For language pundits, one character uses the term “stuffed poobah”. Forty years later, “head poobah” made its rounds in conversations.

Relevancy is balanced by passages that are dated. In one scene a gangster slaps his girl. Dane does nothing, thinking that she brought it on herself.

On the other hand, a moment later, he gives the moll, a complete stranger, his money to go to fly to Florida and hide out.

While Ard did massage his own style, he did not spend much time developing characters or plot subtleties. Dane remains sketchy throughout the novels. Women exist to be rescued (and made love to). Villains are painted with a broad brush. Ard’s goal was speed and action.

Southern Destruction: Lou Largo

Lou Largo saw a slightly briefer existence than his predecessor Timothy Dane. Appearing for the first time in 1959, Largo is a large, massively built insurance company detective. He is named, Mrs. Hendrick said, after Largo, Florida where Ard and his family moved.

Ard completed All I Can Get before he died. Babe In The Woods, published in 1960, was completed by Lawrence Block.

Three other Largo books were ghost written by John Jakes, who, by that time, had established a niche in the paperback world.

“The invitation to write the first book came through my former representatives at the Scott Meredith Agency,” Jakes said in correspondence.

“Scott Meredith explained to me that his (Ard’s) ‘estate’ wanted to continue the Largo novels and would I have a go at the project since I was writing private eye stories and novels of my own?”

The arrangement was as flat fee — 75% to Jakes and 25% to the Ard estate. “It’s possible that the agreement called for payment of royalties but of course in the old paperback days this was standard — no laborer that I knew ever earned a dime beyond the advance,” Jakes said.

“I expect the series ended because publishers were no longer interested, and, from my standpoint, because I really wasn’t interested in this kind of ghosting as a long-term arrangement.”

Jakes also wrote four Largo novelettes which ran in Man’s Magazine:: “ It would appear that “Paula: Target For Tonight ” that ran in the February, 1965 issue, was Lou Largo’s final appearance.

Jakes said he knows nothing of Ard, “other than that he seemed to be on the rise as a writer of private eye novels when he died.”

And So To Bed follows the trend of fast-moving, hard hitting detective novels. In fact Jakes pushed the envelope of hard-hitting scenes about as far as possible for the times. Set in the seedy side of New York, the novel is populated with a huge fat crook, a blind, bitter, used bookstore operator, a prostitute, a peyote popping girl and low life bums who like to shove their shivs into people.

From nearly the first page sex or violence propels the book. Largo is not a philosopher or even a thinker. He’s an imposing machine who charges into trouble. Largo simply does.

In Jakes’ hands, Largo became the Arnold Schwarzenegger of the ’60s, pushing forward, beating and being beaten, killing and nearly being killed, for the sake of justice as he sees it

In the Largo novels, as in the Dane books, the police are roadblocks, buffoons, bullies or helpless cogs in a corrupt city machine. The justice system beyond the police, when it does impose itself, is a travesty. So the hero is left in an urban jungle where night beings — con men, gamblers, jewel thieves, pornographers, blackmailers and murderers –rule until they are killed. Nobody in these novels novel is brought to trial and sent to jail. The bad guys are simply killed.

By the end of the novel Lou Largo has been kicked, punched, beaten over the head, and stabbed by humans and mangled by a killer watchdog.

In an interesting piece of literary trivia, Jakes drops in clues to his own reading habits, making reference to City Lights paperbacks, a line headed by Lawrence Ferhlenghetti which gave exposure to many young beat writers.

He also has fun making reference to a “Henry Miller desk.” A few lines later Largo’s boss says, “You expect me to stay in this air conditioned nightmare?” The Air Conditioned Nightmare was one of Miller’s liveliest and most prophetic works. While Jakes doesn’t remember the references, he did say that he visited San Francisco on business every summer from 1955 to 1960 and browsed in the City Lights shop several times.

A character also makes reference to a paperback book, calling it a “pocket novel.”

Part 3

Fellow collector Jim Parsons threw a monkey wrench into my “complete” list when he came up one day for a book swapping session and handed me the December 1956 issue of Male Magazine carrying the novella “Back Street Doll” featuring Timothy Dane and profusely illustrated by Samson Pollen.

The book, in which Dane takes on a corrupt New York City Hall to save a girl who is the target of a lecherous cop and her framed brother who killed the cop, was obviously hastily written. Characters are only briefly sketched. The skeleton plot is full of coincidences and new characters who happen to appear at just the right moment. One flashback passage is so out of place it is disorienting. Even Dane himself is two dimensional, getting beaten up and carrying the wounded brother from place to place in what becomes an unwitting comedy.

But in nearly every Ard novel there is a scene or insight or descriptive passage that is pure gold. At the end of the book, Ard again sees the future.

The defendant youth is brought to court. The defense attorney, who is destined to become the next New York mayor, in a surprise move brings in the media, including the TV station. Remember, this is 1956.

The attorney knows that when the evidence is read, everyone in New York will understand the corruption of the city government and will bring the administration to an end. Even the corrupt district attorney immediately understands this and refuses to prosecute, instead using his moment in front of the camera to begin campaigning.

Ard fully understood the power of the print media (the subplot is the battle between the newspaper under the corrupt government’s control and the good newspaper out to bring the truth), but more importantly, he foresaw the all pervasive power of TV, the immediacy, the emotional impact and its ability to sway, change and shape public opinion.

Four decades before the event, William Ard described the framework of the O.J. Simpson trial.

Ard returned to his love of theater in Cry Scandal, one of the slower moving but more interesting books. We learn how Dane got his start in the business with a man named Barney Glines. Dane left the partnership when Glines turned to unethical ways of making money in the private investigation business. Now Dane is trying to find him.

The plot revolves around an upcoming Broadway musical opening and a new scandal sheet that mysteriously appears around strategic places in the theater circles, threatening to ruin the careers of various people.

The plot is thin and Ard spends inordinate amounts of time giving long backgrounds to characters for little purpose. Coincidences abound, with someone turning up to save someone else because they happened to be following them–which we find out after the fact.

But the author does provide intimate glimpses into the business which he obviously knew first hand.

Perhaps the most startling insight is into the character of the successful actor’s agent who spends energy to build an actress’s career, then destroys it.

“Could he explain it to her? he wondered. Explain the unexplainable? That for all his work to make her an actress, there was a counter-effort to destroy her? . . .some need to tear down what a person has created. There was much more thrill in destruction.”

What Ard describes is a microcosm of the American psyche, the need to create star, elevate him/her on a high, rickety pedestal, do some worship, then with a kick, watch in perverted fascination as the star falls.

Ard, at times, seemed to probe into the very soul of our society. As a by-product he was able to see society’s future.