William Ard's You’ll Get Yours

William Ard was an ex-Marine and ex-Hollywood publicist who was a successful writer of hardboiled mysteries in the ’50s. After his death in 1960 at the age of 37 he was rapidly forgotten. Most of the many books he wrote are now hard to find and only a couple have been reprinted. You’ll Get Yours, which he wrote in 1952 under the name Thomas Wills, has been re-issued by Black Gat Books.

It opens with a murder. We know who the murderer is and we know who the victim is but we don’t know why the person was murdered. We will find out. We do know there’s a dame involved. It all started when New York private eye Barney Glines was hired by artists’ representative Archie St George to recover some very valuable jewellery, stolen from Kyle Shannon.

Kyle is an actress and she’s about to become the hottest thing in Hollywood. The studio has built her up as a poor kid lucky enough to be discovered quite by accident so they don’t want the public to know that she’s actually a rich girl whose daddy left her a fortune. Those jewels have to be recovered discreetly. The thieves have in fact offered to return the jewels for twenty grand, but what Barney doesn’t understand is why the thieves want him to be the go-between.

The first complication is that Kyle is Archie St George’s woman but as soon as Barney lays eyes on her he wants her. He wants her real bad. The fact that Kyle dislikes him on sight could present something of a challenge. And why does she dislike him?

The second complication is that it wasn’t just jewels that were stolen. There were some photos as well. And the negatives. Nudie pictures. Not quite the thing that an aspiring Hollywood star would want to have made public.

Getting the jewels back is easy but the pictures are not with them. Maybe the thieves din’t steal the photos. Maybe they did. Maybe someone else did. But did anyone else even know about those naughty pictures?

Stripper Gaye Dawn may have the answers. She’s a junkie, which can make persuading her to co-operate easier, or more difficult.

And people start to turn up dead.

Barney Glines is an honest private eye. His approach to the job is to work with the police. He’s kept his nose clean. Now he doesn’t care about anything except Kyle. Solving the case is now just a means of getting her. So now he’s prepared to cut a few corners, not always a good idea for a private eye. He still has friends on the force which comes in handy when he’s arrested for murder.

Kyle is a nice girl but she’s the worst thing that ever happened to Barney Glines. She’s not a femme fatale but she has the same effect on Barney, plunging him into a disastrously messy situation that he would have been wise to keep out of. Nice girls can lead men to destruction, if they’re the wrong nice girls. Especially nice girls who belong to other men,

This is classic hardboiled stuff with a generous helping of noir on the side.

William Ard clearly had the potential to be a major hardboiled writer. His prose is energetic and he certainly knows how to pace a story. If you’re a noir/hardboiled fan You’ll Get Yours is worth checking out. Recommended.