William Ard was born in Brooklyn on July 8, 1922. He was educated at Dartmouth College, and served in the Marine Corps in WWII. He married Eileen Kovara in 1945, and worked in New York City as a copywriter for an ad firm and publicity writer for Warner Brothers. In 1953, they moved to Florida, where Ard devoted himself to fulltime freelance writing. He wrote under a variety of names and created many series characters including private eyes Timothy Dane, Lou Largo, Barney Glines and Johnny Stevens, and gunslinger Tom Buchanan. He died of cancer at the young age of 37 on March 12, 1960 in Clearwater, Florida.