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Don't Cry, Beloved
"I know the kind of man you are," she said. "you're mad with the world because your wife ran out on you. And ever since then you've gone your own way, trampling on people. You're a fine, strong, independent animal, but now you're sick and wounded and in trouble and you can't believe it's your own fault. You're blaming me."
192 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1952
12 people want to read
About the author
Edward S. Aarons
264 books17 followersAKA Paul Ayres, Edward Ronns.
Edward Sidney Aarons (September 11, 1916 - June 16, 1975) was an American writer, author of more than 80 novels from 1936 until 1962. One of these was under the pseudonym "Paul Ayres" (Dead Heat), and 30 were written using the name "Edward Ronns". He also wrote numerous articles for detective magazines such as Detective Story Magazine and Scarab.
Aarons was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and earned a degree in Literature and History from Columbia University. He worked at various jobs to put himself through college, including jobs as a newspaper reporter and fisherman. In 1933, he won a short story contest as a student. In World War II he was in the United States Coast Guard, joining after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. He finished his duty in 1945, having obtained the rank of Chief Petty Officer.
Edward Sidney Aarons (September 11, 1916 - June 16, 1975) was an American writer, author of more than 80 novels from 1936 until 1962. One of these was under the pseudonym "Paul Ayres" (Dead Heat), and 30 were written using the name "Edward Ronns". He also wrote numerous articles for detective magazines such as Detective Story Magazine and Scarab.
Aarons was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and earned a degree in Literature and History from Columbia University. He worked at various jobs to put himself through college, including jobs as a newspaper reporter and fisherman. In 1933, he won a short story contest as a student. In World War II he was in the United States Coast Guard, joining after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. He finished his duty in 1945, having obtained the rank of Chief Petty Officer.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 26, 2024
Boris and Natasha Heat Up the Cold War
A compelling Cold War espionage yarn published three years before Aarons introduced his trademark superspy Sam Durrell in Assignment to Disaster.
The setting is Base 4 in remote New Mexico. It's a top-secret facility where research and development are underway in earnest to create and perfect weapons of mass destruction. The human toll of such work is shown in the decadent and dissipated lives of the base scientists and security. Drinking and wife swapping appear to be standard operating procedure. The only entertainment is in Jackson, a nearby former mining boomtown that is transforming itself from a ghost town into a bustling little desert burg with bars, gambling, dens of iniquity, and tourist traps, most of the latter run by local Hopi Indians.
Our protagonist--can't really call him a "hero"--is Security Chief Phil Royce. He's a surly drunk embittered by his wife's running off with a bandleader back east. He came West to forget but hasn't gone far enough to elude the memories that haunt him. He's engaged in a torrid affair with an exotic woman named Sarah Hummer, young and frisky wife of the tired old scientist Dr. George Hummer. She was an easy target for the affections of a lusty prowler like Phil... or was it the other way around?
The base is being buttoned up at midnight for a two-day test of Operation Hellfire, a devastating new weapon. But our testosterone-driven security officer slips out for an assignation with his paramour and that is where the novel really takes off with a plot presaging by six years Richard Condon's 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate and capturing the zeitgeist of McCarthy's Red Scare. This compelling story made the notion of a Red under every bed appear plausible. Those Commies kept turning up in the darndest of places, and that heightened degree of paranoia, coupled with Phil's amnesia, kept the book moving at a gallop.
I say "gallop" because in this high-tech military-industrial complex it sometimes pays to go low-tech. Eluding the Reds, ranch hand Chico wisely suggests he and Phil use horses instead of a car because they will be quieter and can go where cars can't. I appreciated that counter-intuitive thinking. Chico is an unheralded character in the story, and many a daring escape can be credited to a Chico ex machina!
I kept thinking of this novel as a "desert noir" as I read because of the sordid characters, the primarily nighttime settings, the stoic response to murder and mayhem, fallen women, and the requisite bandleader. There's a lot of drinking and smoking going on, and then more drinking. And more smoking. I liked that Chico rolled his own from a pouch of Bull Durham.
Scientists from Base 4 have been disappearing. First Koch and now Strummer. Have they defected? Well, kinda, and with a little help from those fiends the Russkies!
The reveals of the two primary Red spies were not especially surprising, although another reveal caught me flat footed. I was reminded of later spy novels, movies, and television shows about how well-trained Russian agents can credibly pass themselves off as Americans. The 1960 film Man on a String and the Mission: Impossible episode "The Town" sprang to mind on several occasions.
I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and consider it "unputdownable," meaning I read it regularly at night before bed but found myself taking it off the nightstand during the day to sneak a chapter. It often came to mind during the day, and I would eagerly anticipate picking it up again. It was a quick read in that Aarons knew how to keep a story lean and mean and to keep it moving briskly along.
Aarons also knows how to keep the suspense taut. I had to resist glancing ahead during the traffic stop scene where Phil and Sarah are in a line of cars inexorably approaching a military roadblock. And again in Joe Gregory's nightclub as the MPs are going room to room rousting all suspects. If not for audacious Agnes--one of my favorite characters--Phil would not have slipped the net.
Why does everyone want Phil Royce? Well, unbeknownst even to himself, he stole Strummer's device with the inhibiting factor that can put the brakes on Operation Hellfire and replaced it with a useless lookalike. In other words, Operation Hellfire is almost certainly to get out of control and live up to its diabolical name, with no way to stop it. Royce "remembered his dream of a cloud of destruction, spreading far and wide over the land. He shook with horror. There would be thousands of deaths, hundreds of thousands, perhaps: a national disaster. It would be his fault, his responsibility. He was the dupe who had made this man's scheme possible. Death and destruction of the innocent, in a fiery cloud beyond control that would shock and paralyze the nation. He shuddered again" (pp. 138-39).
A chapter later Aarons' crisp writing captures Phil's determination to fight on and to race against the clock ticking down to doomsday: "Death walked through the land, and he alone knew it was coming. By this time tomorrow it might be over for all of them, and the memory made him brush aside his thoughts of Lanny Hogan and personal matters. He looked at Ellen and thought she had never been more beautiful. He didn't want her to die. He felt a deep wave of bitter grief at the thought of how the innocent might suffer, and that emotion gave way to the pounding anger that had brought him along this far (pp. 154-55).
Aarons does a fine job balancing Royce's determination to save the world, to save his relationship with Ellen, and to save his own skin, which is in the crosshairs of both the Red spies and the United States military!
The book suffers few weaknesses. One would be overplaying Chico as Phil's guardian angel always on the spot in a pinch, and a bigger one was the credulity-stretching reveal that local Hopi woman Rose Arrow was Phil's ex-wife Ellen's roommate at Wellesley. C'mon, Ed, that was a coincidence even Dickens would have disbelieved, but I rolled with it. Somehow Aarons had to get Ellen to appear in the middle of nowhere with her bandleader husband Lanny Hogan in tow.
There is romance and reconciliation, but not enough to justify the novel's Harlequinesque title, Don't Cry, Beloved. I have to believe that was the publisher's demented decision, and I fear many adventure, suspense and spy fans spun the drugstore spinner rack right past this book based on that turgid title. Yeah, my Fawcett Gold Medal copy pictures a man gagged and tied to a chair with a woman standing triumphantly behind him (a scene not found in the book, by the way), so maybe that cover art and the blurb promising "a masterful story of atomic espionage" overcame initial resistance and sold a few copies. Me, I would have pictured Phil and Agnes facing the MPs and titled it Man on the Run to complement Aarons' 1954 novel Girl on the Run.
I'm committed to reading what I've dubbed Aarons' "Love Trilogy" comprised of this book, Escape to Love, and Come Back, My Love, all penned in the early fifties before he embarked on the Assignment series in 1955. Did he write a fourth book with "love" in the title? If so, I'll read it. I'll read anything Aarons wrote.
PS for Assignment Series Fans: Was there any telegraphing of Sam Durrell in these pages? Not that I detected. Phil Royce was a former OSS agent, but that never came into play here outside a passing reference early on. Here Phil is not the spy, only the dupe misused and abused by spies. Colonel Moretti can, however, be credibly considered a forerunner to corrupt authority figures like Swayney.
PPS for Marvel Comics Fans: Unconfirmed intel suggests Base 4 was a decade later placed under the command of General Thunderbolt Ross and rechristened Hulkbuster Base.
A compelling Cold War espionage yarn published three years before Aarons introduced his trademark superspy Sam Durrell in Assignment to Disaster.
The setting is Base 4 in remote New Mexico. It's a top-secret facility where research and development are underway in earnest to create and perfect weapons of mass destruction. The human toll of such work is shown in the decadent and dissipated lives of the base scientists and security. Drinking and wife swapping appear to be standard operating procedure. The only entertainment is in Jackson, a nearby former mining boomtown that is transforming itself from a ghost town into a bustling little desert burg with bars, gambling, dens of iniquity, and tourist traps, most of the latter run by local Hopi Indians.
Our protagonist--can't really call him a "hero"--is Security Chief Phil Royce. He's a surly drunk embittered by his wife's running off with a bandleader back east. He came West to forget but hasn't gone far enough to elude the memories that haunt him. He's engaged in a torrid affair with an exotic woman named Sarah Hummer, young and frisky wife of the tired old scientist Dr. George Hummer. She was an easy target for the affections of a lusty prowler like Phil... or was it the other way around?
The base is being buttoned up at midnight for a two-day test of Operation Hellfire, a devastating new weapon. But our testosterone-driven security officer slips out for an assignation with his paramour and that is where the novel really takes off with a plot presaging by six years Richard Condon's 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate and capturing the zeitgeist of McCarthy's Red Scare. This compelling story made the notion of a Red under every bed appear plausible. Those Commies kept turning up in the darndest of places, and that heightened degree of paranoia, coupled with Phil's amnesia, kept the book moving at a gallop.
I say "gallop" because in this high-tech military-industrial complex it sometimes pays to go low-tech. Eluding the Reds, ranch hand Chico wisely suggests he and Phil use horses instead of a car because they will be quieter and can go where cars can't. I appreciated that counter-intuitive thinking. Chico is an unheralded character in the story, and many a daring escape can be credited to a Chico ex machina!
I kept thinking of this novel as a "desert noir" as I read because of the sordid characters, the primarily nighttime settings, the stoic response to murder and mayhem, fallen women, and the requisite bandleader. There's a lot of drinking and smoking going on, and then more drinking. And more smoking. I liked that Chico rolled his own from a pouch of Bull Durham.
Scientists from Base 4 have been disappearing. First Koch and now Strummer. Have they defected? Well, kinda, and with a little help from those fiends the Russkies!
The reveals of the two primary Red spies were not especially surprising, although another reveal caught me flat footed. I was reminded of later spy novels, movies, and television shows about how well-trained Russian agents can credibly pass themselves off as Americans. The 1960 film Man on a String and the Mission: Impossible episode "The Town" sprang to mind on several occasions.
I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and consider it "unputdownable," meaning I read it regularly at night before bed but found myself taking it off the nightstand during the day to sneak a chapter. It often came to mind during the day, and I would eagerly anticipate picking it up again. It was a quick read in that Aarons knew how to keep a story lean and mean and to keep it moving briskly along.
Aarons also knows how to keep the suspense taut. I had to resist glancing ahead during the traffic stop scene where Phil and Sarah are in a line of cars inexorably approaching a military roadblock. And again in Joe Gregory's nightclub as the MPs are going room to room rousting all suspects. If not for audacious Agnes--one of my favorite characters--Phil would not have slipped the net.
Why does everyone want Phil Royce? Well, unbeknownst even to himself, he stole Strummer's device with the inhibiting factor that can put the brakes on Operation Hellfire and replaced it with a useless lookalike. In other words, Operation Hellfire is almost certainly to get out of control and live up to its diabolical name, with no way to stop it. Royce "remembered his dream of a cloud of destruction, spreading far and wide over the land. He shook with horror. There would be thousands of deaths, hundreds of thousands, perhaps: a national disaster. It would be his fault, his responsibility. He was the dupe who had made this man's scheme possible. Death and destruction of the innocent, in a fiery cloud beyond control that would shock and paralyze the nation. He shuddered again" (pp. 138-39).
A chapter later Aarons' crisp writing captures Phil's determination to fight on and to race against the clock ticking down to doomsday: "Death walked through the land, and he alone knew it was coming. By this time tomorrow it might be over for all of them, and the memory made him brush aside his thoughts of Lanny Hogan and personal matters. He looked at Ellen and thought she had never been more beautiful. He didn't want her to die. He felt a deep wave of bitter grief at the thought of how the innocent might suffer, and that emotion gave way to the pounding anger that had brought him along this far (pp. 154-55).
Aarons does a fine job balancing Royce's determination to save the world, to save his relationship with Ellen, and to save his own skin, which is in the crosshairs of both the Red spies and the United States military!
The book suffers few weaknesses. One would be overplaying Chico as Phil's guardian angel always on the spot in a pinch, and a bigger one was the credulity-stretching reveal that local Hopi woman Rose Arrow was Phil's ex-wife Ellen's roommate at Wellesley. C'mon, Ed, that was a coincidence even Dickens would have disbelieved, but I rolled with it. Somehow Aarons had to get Ellen to appear in the middle of nowhere with her bandleader husband Lanny Hogan in tow.
There is romance and reconciliation, but not enough to justify the novel's Harlequinesque title, Don't Cry, Beloved. I have to believe that was the publisher's demented decision, and I fear many adventure, suspense and spy fans spun the drugstore spinner rack right past this book based on that turgid title. Yeah, my Fawcett Gold Medal copy pictures a man gagged and tied to a chair with a woman standing triumphantly behind him (a scene not found in the book, by the way), so maybe that cover art and the blurb promising "a masterful story of atomic espionage" overcame initial resistance and sold a few copies. Me, I would have pictured Phil and Agnes facing the MPs and titled it Man on the Run to complement Aarons' 1954 novel Girl on the Run.
I'm committed to reading what I've dubbed Aarons' "Love Trilogy" comprised of this book, Escape to Love, and Come Back, My Love, all penned in the early fifties before he embarked on the Assignment series in 1955. Did he write a fourth book with "love" in the title? If so, I'll read it. I'll read anything Aarons wrote.
PS for Assignment Series Fans: Was there any telegraphing of Sam Durrell in these pages? Not that I detected. Phil Royce was a former OSS agent, but that never came into play here outside a passing reference early on. Here Phil is not the spy, only the dupe misused and abused by spies. Colonel Moretti can, however, be credibly considered a forerunner to corrupt authority figures like Swayney.
PPS for Marvel Comics Fans: Unconfirmed intel suggests Base 4 was a decade later placed under the command of General Thunderbolt Ross and rechristened Hulkbuster Base.
Displaying 1 of 1 review