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Timothy Dane #7
Hell is a City
HELL IS A CITY is one of the best hard-boiled crime novels from the Mickey Spillane age and shows what a loss it was to mystery fans when the author, William Ard, died very young. In the introduction, Francis M. Nevins places this novel as perhaps Ard's best. Written in 1960, it features Timothy Dane, Ard's smooth lawyer/detective fighting a corrupt city about to explode.
154 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1956
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18 people want to read
About the author
William Ard
83 books11 followersaka 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 4, 2025
William Ard’s longest running series stars ace reporter Timothy Dane. “Hell is a City” (also published as “The Naked and the Innocent”). Ard apparently severed tendons in his right hand during World War 2 while in the Marines. From 1950 onward for ten years, he worked full time as an author, publishing 32 books, all typed with only two fingers on his right hand. He died of cancer at the ripe old age of 37 in 1960. Hell is a City, first published in 1955, featured Ard at the height of his writing prowess.
“Hell is a City” could be a novel about none other than New York City and Ard’s New York features hardboiled corruptness permeating through every pore. A cadre of crooked politicians are in an no-holds-barred election campaign when one of their own, NYPD vice cop Gordie Wells, is gunned down in a run-down motel. The politicians want to turn Wells into a hero extraordinaire and want the papers to tow the party line.
But Wells was no hero. He was as corrupt and dirty-handed as any and was pretty much running the gambling and whoring in his part of town. Dane, who works as a private eye on the pay of the Evening Standard for publisher Milt Weston, gets hints that not all is as portrayed and that Wells was a dirty cop who was using his badge to force Rita into shedding her clothes in a motel room only to get her brother Jamie off from a trumped-up narcotics charge. Rita Calyero was a walking doll as they say on television and Jamie suffers because his sister is a beautiful girl who every two-bit hoodlum and corrupt cop wants to make.
The problem that the Spanish-Irish Calyero siblings have is that once Jamie pulls the trigger, no one is going to believe a pair of young hoodlum cop-killers:”The man didn’t snarl quite all that. The roar of the gun overrode even that thunderous voice and the bullet smashed his massive jawbone. A second slug pierced his throat, and a third, and then the neon went out for three seconds while the young man in the doorway emptied his gun with only one more true hit. But by then he was firing at the fallen target of a man already dead.” What are we going to do, Rita asks and Jamie can only respond that there is no where to turn because they will come after him, “every cop in every city, every cop in the whole country.”
Dane is, we are told, tall, broad-shouldered, and conservatively dressed. He has a direct look in his wide-spaced eyes and the purposeful stride of lawman on official business. He uses these qualities to slyly pretend (without actually saying so) to be a local officer and gets into the crime scene before any other reporter. As a bail bondsman later notes, Dane is a nice-looking young fellow with good manners and is soft spoken so when he says he is working on a case, everyone just assumes he is working for the city even if he isn’t.
The bulk of the story is Dane on the run from everyone, trying to protect these innocent-eyed kids who were caught in a nasty trap. It is told not only from Dane’s point of view, but also numerous others with a constantly shifting point.
“Hell is a City” could be a novel about none other than New York City and Ard’s New York features hardboiled corruptness permeating through every pore. A cadre of crooked politicians are in an no-holds-barred election campaign when one of their own, NYPD vice cop Gordie Wells, is gunned down in a run-down motel. The politicians want to turn Wells into a hero extraordinaire and want the papers to tow the party line.
But Wells was no hero. He was as corrupt and dirty-handed as any and was pretty much running the gambling and whoring in his part of town. Dane, who works as a private eye on the pay of the Evening Standard for publisher Milt Weston, gets hints that not all is as portrayed and that Wells was a dirty cop who was using his badge to force Rita into shedding her clothes in a motel room only to get her brother Jamie off from a trumped-up narcotics charge. Rita Calyero was a walking doll as they say on television and Jamie suffers because his sister is a beautiful girl who every two-bit hoodlum and corrupt cop wants to make.
The problem that the Spanish-Irish Calyero siblings have is that once Jamie pulls the trigger, no one is going to believe a pair of young hoodlum cop-killers:”The man didn’t snarl quite all that. The roar of the gun overrode even that thunderous voice and the bullet smashed his massive jawbone. A second slug pierced his throat, and a third, and then the neon went out for three seconds while the young man in the doorway emptied his gun with only one more true hit. But by then he was firing at the fallen target of a man already dead.” What are we going to do, Rita asks and Jamie can only respond that there is no where to turn because they will come after him, “every cop in every city, every cop in the whole country.”
Dane is, we are told, tall, broad-shouldered, and conservatively dressed. He has a direct look in his wide-spaced eyes and the purposeful stride of lawman on official business. He uses these qualities to slyly pretend (without actually saying so) to be a local officer and gets into the crime scene before any other reporter. As a bail bondsman later notes, Dane is a nice-looking young fellow with good manners and is soft spoken so when he says he is working on a case, everyone just assumes he is working for the city even if he isn’t.
The bulk of the story is Dane on the run from everyone, trying to protect these innocent-eyed kids who were caught in a nasty trap. It is told not only from Dane’s point of view, but also numerous others with a constantly shifting point.
Displaying 1 of 1 review