William Ard (1922–1960)

This hard-boiled detective novels concerns Lou Largo, hired by a casino owner to find some business associates he says stole a million dollars from him.

In the first chapter of this book, our hero loses thousands of dollars at a crap table. He meets a college student who wants to be his unpaid intern in order to collect research for her courses. He turns her down and takes a lovely casino employee who throws herself at him back to her place for sex. The prospective intern follows them and show more waits, eventually saving Largo's neck from a gangster (ex cop) type who is suddenly after him. She then takes him home--after he passes out, she gets naked and climbs in bed with him just to see how it feels (she is a virgin and knows that he just had sex with the other woman).

Later, the target of his investigation also throws herself at him, even after hearing him have sex through the walls of a motel. The ladies just can't get enough of Lou Largo.

Man alive, this one really lays on the cheese when it comes to the hero being a stud. It's kind of par for the course for some of these old potboilers but I can see how it would turn some readers off. It was a bit much for me at first but eventually I realized that this was a super fun cheese-fest.

The rest of the plot is fairly standard stuff but it moves quickly and excitingly enough. show less

A fairly typical hard-boiled detective yard, full of tough guys and gorgeous gals.

A private eye investigates the murder of a fellow detective from his agency, leading to an investigation into a stolen shipment of diamonds and their distribution at a private club. Along the way he deals with the murdered man's sleazy wife and beautiful sister along with numerous hoods, cops and the boss who mentored him.

A brisk 128 pages, this is a fun ride--nothing new but a simple tale well told, though show more the ending definitely feels rushed. show less

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 show more 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. show less