Joe Puma is no ****-up

The Thrilling Detective Web site calls William Campbell Gault's Joe Puma "the fuck-up as P.I." I don't see that based on the five stories collected in Joe Puma, P.I.  

The same site says Ross Macdonald dedicated his last novel to Gault. That makes better sense. The stories have the same bitter attitude toward wealth, especially unearned, not to mention a whole lot of Chandlerian knightliness, plus compassionate description and dark, hard-boiled observation in about equal measure. We know that Puma is a knight, because he tells us in "Stolen Star" that "I was no knight."  As for the rest, we get:

• "I can never find the proper comment for the wailings of the wealthy. I tried to put some sympathy into my smile."

• "She lived in a beach shack south of there, out of the high-tax area."

• "It was a clear and beautiful day, a day for loafing, but I didn't have a rich or talented wife."

• "And if I told Duffy ... who would benefit? Not Gina Pastore and not Mrs. Alan Engle.  Justice might, but justice was only a word. The other two were people."

• "Money is only unimportant when you have a bank full of it."

• "You have to believe in somebody, Miss Pastore."

• "There was one suit, right out of a Fresno bargain emporium..."

• "His clothes were a bit frayed, but he wore them well."

• "Charles smiled and said nothing, as good bartenders do."

• "He had the kind of a face that looked naked without a number under it."

• Of a high-class pimp who has gone into the movie business: "If a man can afford it, buying a small studio is a fine way to keep supplied with dames."

One odd bit was the description of "a short, fat man, and his language seemed a little pompous," odd, because Puma, in his role as narrator, says things like "We're all victims of our own environment to a degree, you know" and "Her toughness was not inherent."

Gault, writing these stories in the late 1950s, also peppered them with self-conscious popular culture references before the practice became widespread ("Sam reads too much Mike Hammer," "The rube sees too many movies.").

So, maybe I'll read some Ross MacDonald.  But first, some current crime writing from a country that figures in the Old Norse sagas.  

© Peter Rozovsky 2011