The Diary

Timothy Dane #3

by William Ard

I Asked For It!If there's a doorway into Hell, then it has a green sign over it that spells out Harlem's El Blanco Club. But I had to go inside because that's where Ricci Navarro had Diane Rebow's diary - that little book with dynamite on every page. I pushed my way toward a couple at the bar and asked the man where Navarro was. But it was his girl who answered, leaning forward to make sure I didn't miss seeing her voluptuous figure. "Ricci's upstairs," she said. "You want me to take you there, baby?" The guy with her grabbed my arm, and I knew it was going to be much harder getting out of here than getting in...

Paperback

First published January 1, 1952

About the author

aka Ben Kerr, Mike Moran, Jonas Ward, Thomas Wills.

William Thomas Ard has been one of the most elusive writers in the collecting world.

Odd for a man who was one of the most popular hardboiled writers of the 1950s. He was praised by critics from the St. Louis Dispatch to the New York Times.

Few imagined the dark side of the city and the entertainment business better than William Ard. When he turned his gaze west, he gave life to one of the genre's most enduring heroes.

Today his name is all but forgotten. His hardboiled titles are scarce. His paperback titles in fine condition are nearly impossible to find.

While he went by many names, he is essentially a man of two faces. Ard was the creator of hard-hitting detective Timothy Dane of New York and an even harder living and loving detective, Lou Largo, of Florida.

Reviews

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an honest to goodness piece of of pulp fiction, one those books which—in the ‘50s—I sometimes spied on the rack in my father’s grocery store: slim books with garish covers, depicting girls with big breasts … and guys with even bigger guns.

Like almost all these books, Diary (1952) is clearly no work of genius, but it begins well, and ends well too. NYC private detective Timothy Dane is hired by Arnold Rebow of Rebow Enterprises. (“If Rebow Enterprises ever cashed in its government bonds,” Dan tells us, “we’d have to give it the country.”) Dane’s mission: to find and buy back the stolen diary of his wild child daughter Diane. But there’s a little something Rebow fails to tell him. Rebow is being touted by the state political machine as a compromise candidate for governor, and so Dane is not the only one trying to get his hands on the diary.

Interesting premise, and the resolution is satisfactory too, even—at least for me—a little surprising. The problem is the one hundred pages or so that come in the middle. Ard’s plot would make a first class short story for Black Mask, perhaps even an interesting novella, but there just too many aimless conversations and pointless incidents used by Ard to stretch out his tale.

Still … Timothy Dane is a likable and admirable hero—sort of an inferior, East Coast Lew Archer—and Ard’s style is mercifully free of the hothouse metaphors, macho posturing, and prurience that afflict the hard-boiled paperbacks of the ‘50s. Skim a bit in the middle, and you may have yourself a good time.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ard’s second Timothy Dane novel literally begins with his being hired to recover a rich girl’s diary that looks like it might embarrass her father, now an almost-announced candidate for Governor. Dane is brought into this mess piece by piece, not knowing at first who his client is and then not knowing the political implications of the whole thing, at least not told until the bodies started piling up and he was deep in it.

Diane is the little rich girl and she is the classic sexpot eighteen-year-old throwing her arms around any man giving her the time of day whether that’s houseboy and drug supplier Ricci Navarro or Dane himself. Diane is completely irresponsible and a keen source of trouble for her father.

‘If there’s a doorway into hell, then it has a green neon sign over it that spells out El Blanco Club.” That’s where Dane has to go in Spanish Harlem to find Ricci and quickly is out of his element.

Dane has to get this diary to protect Diane’s father, but it seems that everyone in town wants it too, particularly the political opposition. Dane is in the crosshairs and finds unsurprisingly that there is practically no one he can trust on either side not to sell him out to the highest bidder.

In this fast-moving story, we get the lone private eye trying to stay by his code and keep his license, but caught in a world where no one seems to have a code and it’s every man for himself. Ard does a great job at capturing how lonely Dane feels, trying to the right thing in a corrupt world.

[Jack Heath]

Synopsis: Timothy Dane goes into Harlem's El Blanco Club to recover Diane Rebow's diary. Can he get out?