Gault, pulp, and professionalism

I've read a bit more of William Campbell Gault's Murder in the Raw (or Ring Around Rosa), the American half of yesterday's European/American football crime-fiction double bill.

My compadre Kevin Burton Smith writes on the Thrilling Detective Web site that Gault

"was never particularly flashy as a writer, but his simple, straightforward style made him one of the most dependable and solid P.I. writers to have written for the pulps ... His stories were always good reads, and if there were sharper stylists, there were few who were as consistent. A Gault story is always worth reading."

That observation feels right. The protagonist, Brock Callahan, is a former football player just starting out as a private investigator. He's boiled, but not too hard. He waxes bitter toward a police officer friend, but he never lapses into moodiness, isolation, or self-destruction. The self-deprecating wit never goes over the top; I haven't laughed out loud yet, but I've enjoyed every joke. None has been off-target.

Callahan and his creator walk firmly in the middle of the hard-boiled road, and the book has me considering, for the first time in my career as a crime reader, the delights of competence and professionalism.

Like many pulp writers, Gault wrote across genres. He gave up crime writing for years to write juvenile sports fiction, according to Smith, and also wrote hot-road stories for young adults. His affection for sports and cars shows effectively and unobtrusively here. Not every pulp writer was a Hammett or a hack, and it's nice to see one of the in-betweeners, a solid, highly skilled, competent professional at work.

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Here's a bit I've liked, Callahan questioning a dead man's former business partner about the deceased:

“He’s been described to me as sensitive and talented and bitter and broke.”

“He was bitter. Maybe he was sensitive; I’m not sensitive enough to judge. He wasn’t talented and only a wealthy person would consider him broke.”

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

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