Sam Durell's Assignment

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Sam Durell/Assignment is a series of detective mysteries by Edward S. Aarons who penned more than eighty novels between 1936 and 1975. The prolific Aarons wrote some of the novel sunder other pseudonyms that included Edward Ronns and Paul Ayres. In addition to his many short stories and novels he was also an active author that penned stories featured in Scarab and Detective Story Magazine. While Aarons wrote novels in several genres, he is for the most part known for the writing of spy thrillers for which the Assignment series is the most known and most popular. The Assignment series are set on location across tens of countries around the globe and have been translated into almost twenty languages. The star character of the Assignment series …show more content…

For college he went to Columbia University and then went on to work a variety of jobs that included fisherman, salesman, reporter among other jobs. He first decided to try his hand at writing when he got into a collegiate short story contest in 1933 which he won. He published his first ever novel Death in a Lighthouse in 1938 which became one of around 30 titles of thrillers and hard-boiled mysteries that he published under the pseudonym Edward Ronns. Many of the novels had Jerry Benedict the newspaper editorial cartoonist as the lead protagonist. In 1941, following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Aarons joined the US military and served in the Coast Guard. After the end of the war, he went back to civilian life going back to Columbia from where he graduated with a bachelors in history and literature. Soon after, he was back to publishing the Edward Ronn novels that he did at a good clip of about two to three novels a year until 1962. Form 1955 he started penning the Assignment series under his own name and increased the number of works published a year with up to three novels featuring Sam Durrell published every year until his …show more content…

His grandfather prided himself as being among the last of the riverboat gamblers that looked at the world with unique keen eyes. Durell went to Yale in his late teens and from there joined the intelligence services having already become fluent in several languages. He went on to serve in World War II under the OSS, then to the Pentagon, the State Department and then to the CIA where he rose to K Section sub chief. Sam Durell is an imposing man at more than six feet tall with a lean waist, heavy shoulders, and long fingers that showed him a good gambler. His dark and thick hair and blue black eyes gave him a black look when he was thinking of something dangerous or when he was angry which he often is. His Cajun upbringing gave him an independent streak and a hot temper that surprising made him more effective in his assignments. While he is said to work for the CIA, technically he does not. His real organization is a highly secretive branch under the NSA that is headquartered in some nondescript offices in a residential area of Washington. He has risen to high rank within the organization as a survivor of countless assignments that have made him the enemy of countless foreign intelligence agencies. The dossiers with his name have for a long time been red tagged by the Chinese

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