Overlooked Films: William Campbell Gault's DEAD END FOR DELIA (1993)

In the premiere episode of Showtime's Fallen Angels, Gary Oldman stars in this Gault tale from the November 1950 issue of Black Mask.

Forgotten Books: THE CONVERTIBLE HEARSE by William Campbell Gault (1957)

This is the third book in the Brock Callahan series, and the third Brock Callahan I've read within the last thirty days. As I hope I conveyed last week, I enjoyed Day of the Ram quite a bit, so dived right into this one. Maybe I shouldn't have.

The Convertible Hearse is a good enough book. Brock digs into the murder of one of L.A.'s sleazier used car salesmen, continues his love/hate relationship with police and his hate/hate relationship with hoodlums, and continues to find himself not quite suited to his new profession of private investigator. In other words, it's more of the same, only this time without the pro football angle that made Day of the Ram so interesting. The only new thing here is that Brock's girlfriend Jan gets pissy early in the book and stays that way until late in the book, giving him another reason to feel sorry for himself.

My problem with Brock, I suspect, is that he's not Robert B. Parker's Spenser, and after umpteen readings of that series I tend to judge all other detectives against Spenser's standard. On the Spensermeter, Brock is just too polite, too cautious, too serious and too unsure of himself. You know, more like a real human being.

For me, that problem is easily solved. I'll just read another Spenser book (again). Maybe two. Then something completely different. And one of these days, when I'm in the mood for a nice guy detective again, I'll hunt up my copy of the next Callahan book.

Forgotten Books: DAY OF THE RAM by William Campbell Gault (1956)

A couple of weeks ago I re-read Ring Around Rosa (aka Murder in the Raw), the first appearance of private investigator Brock Callahan, and complained because he was grabbing his ankles and taking too many whacks from the police. That's HERE.

Well, Brock returns in Day of the Ram, and while his nose is still a little brown for my taste, he's showing signs of improvement. Plus, as the title - and the cover - indicates, this one is directly involved with Brock's former profession as a guard for the L.A. Rams. So I have to give Day of the Ram at least a thumb and a half up.

Football has changed a little since 1956. Brock tells us that lineman like he was are are bit players who make no more than a living wage. And there’s this observation about the players in general: 

Some of them earned less here, as pros, than some of the others had earned as amateurs in college.

Along with the football, Gault paints a great picture of L.A. in the fifties. Here's a sample:

Somebody had described Los Angeles as a dozen shopping centers in search of a town. It isn’t quite that. Areas have names of their own out here, but Hollywood is still Los Angeles and so is Westwood. And so are Brentwood and Bel-Air. But not Beverly Hills or Culver City or Santa Monica; they are distinct and separate municipalities, island surrounded by the creeping fungus that calls itself Los Angeles.

Another nice passage: 

Ned Allen had said “this town,” but that’s just a phrase. He meant the Los Angeles area - all the town roughly identified as “this town” of Los Angeles. It’s really not a town at all, but a collection of attitudes. 

The paperback cover tells us Brock is tough, but he has some odd ways of showing it. After an encounter with an insensitive bartender, he pays for his forty-cent beer in five pennies and “the dirtiest coins I could find.” And when his girlfriend's neighbor's doberman barks at him, he spits in the dog's face. Yeah, he's got a long way to go, but that's an improvement over Ring Around Rosa.

There are some nice touches of the times. His former teammates kid him about his new profession, calling him "Dick Tracy" and "Fearless Fosdick." He overhears a man half-joking with his wife: "Some day, Alice - pow!" And when he's jailed by a detective with a bad case of B.O. The detective asks:

     “Anything witty to take back to the boys in the squad room, Callahan?”

     I smiled at him through the bars. “I’m glad I use Dial. I just wish that everybody did.”

And here's a cool tip of the fedora to Raymond Chandler:

     The Chief of the Santa Monica police was certainly a dandy. A little man with an unctuous voice, looking at me across his big, expensive desk, and sadly shaking his head.

     “What else could we think, Mr. Callahan? A respected businessman in our community claims you came in brandishing a weapon. Whose story would you believe, if you were in my position?”

     “Since when is a bookie joint a respected business?” I asked him.

     He frowned at me, horrified. “Evidently you don’t know our little town.”

     “I read about it,” I said, “but the writer called it Bay City.”

     “There’s no gambling here, not while I’ve been chief.”

     “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus,” I said humbly.

Next up in the Callahan series is The Convertible Hearse. I believe I'll take it for a test drive.

Your weekly round-up of arcane literature is at pattinase. 

Forgotten Books: RING AROUND ROSA (aka Murder in the Raw) by William Campbell Gault

This is the book I planned to re-read and review a month or so back for the FFB '50s Extravaganza. Due to brain fade, that didn't happen. But the book remained on my desk, eyeing me accusingly, until I broke down and picked it up.

William Campbell Gault is a special name for me. He was the first contemporary author who made me want to hunt down and read all of his books. This was back in my grade school days, and the books had titles like Dirt Track Summer and Mr. Quarterback. At the time, I had no idea he was also writing adult mysteries. If I had, I probably would have been reading Brock Callahan and Joe Puma books (instead of Mike Hammer) - when I was ten.

Ring Around Rosa (1955) introduces Callahan, an L.A. Rams lineman turned private eye. Sadly, the book is better known by its silly and inappropriate paperback title, Murder in the Raw. Jeez, I enjoy a lewd title as much as anyone, but this one is inappropriate because no one is murdered in the raw. That's false advertising.

Anyway, Brock Callahan figures he still has a couple of years left in football, but his knee has been bothering him, so he decides it's time for a new career. Because he'd spent three years in the O.S.S. during the war, and his father was a cop, he decides he's cut out to be a private detective. And since he has a lot of fans and friends in L.A., many of whom are cops, he figures Beverly Hills is the place to start. The events in Ring Around Rosa give him plenty of reasons to doubt both decisions.

Gault's prose stands up well against other hardboiled writers, but the actions of his characters don't always ring true. The problem is that his characters may be a little too realistic for the genre. We expect hardboiled dicks to play it cagey with the cops, shielding their clients and never revealing their sources. We expect, for the most part, an adversarial relationship with the police.

Well, Brock Callahan is on the receiving end of that adversarial relationship, but can't seem to dish it out. The police are arrogant, condescending, secretive and suspicious of him, but when they demand to know who his clients are, he spills his guts, not batting an eye when they get the third degree. When witnesses tell him secrets they withheld from the police, he rats them out as fast as he can, regardless of consequences. And astonishingly, none of them seem to bear a grudge for this betrayal. Maybe this is how real people act (at least some of them), but it's not what we expect in detective stories.

Other characters tell Callahan he's too naive for the job, and they're right. Over the course of the book he does wise up a little, but never enough. The cops keep dissing him, and he keeps taking it. Maybe that was Gault's intent - to keep the readers coming back to find out if he ever pulls his head out. In any case, the readers did keep coming back. Brock Callahan rolled on into thirteen more books, the last published in 1992.

Does Callahan ever grow into a true hardboiled dick, or is he doomed to remain a dimwitted (but somewhat realistic) boy scout? Looks like I'll have to re-read more of the series to find out. Next up in Day of the Ram. I'll keep you posted. 

Forgotten Books: DON'T CRY FOR ME by William Campbell Gault (1952)

Damn. There’s a lot to like to about this one.

When I was a kid, William Campbell Gault was my favorite author. I lapped up every one of his hot rod and sports adventures at school and local libraries. So when I grew up (sort of) and got into hardboiled mode, I was glad to discover he’d also written a bunch of mystery novels. Since I was mostly into detectives, I read all his Brock Callahan and Joe Puma books, and simply accumulated the non-series books.

So I’m pretty sure this was my first reading of Don’t Cry for Me, and my reaction was Geez, what took me so long? Gault’s writing here is more adult, more literary and more creative than I remember from his detective series. His narration is consistently fresh, and kept on surprising me - even late into the book. Don’t Cry for Me is so good on so many levels it’s hard to know where to begin.

Our protagonist is Pete Worden, once a star tailback for USC, now a down-on-his-luck gambler and an embarrassment to his respectable brother John. Though now in his thirties, Pete has never grown up and apparently never held a job. He has the love of a smart, patient and smokin’ hot woman, and isn’t quite sure what to do with it.

As the story begins, Pete’s gambling connections get him into even more trouble than usual, as he finds a dead drug dealer in his apartment and becomes a murder suspect. So yes, this is a mystery, but it’s much more like a mystery that could win the Edgar for Best First Novel today than back in 1953, when it did. The major characters are complex and unpredictable - just like real people - and drive the story in unexpected directions.

One of those characters seems to be a stand-in for Gault himself - a pulp writer who reads great literature and aspires to write it. He’s first mentioned thusly:

    My neighbor and occasional friend, Tommy Lister, writer for the pulps. Science fiction and sports and murder and the range; you name it, he’ll write it. Three months of champagne, Tommy had had, at MGM and how many years of beer? Good boy.

Lister is throwing a party, and the talk sounds like something out of Will Murray’s book Wordslingers (reviewed HERE):

    The murmur next door rose and fell, pulsating, in cadence - the pulps will never die, the pulps are dead, the pulps will never die, the pulps are dead, the pulps will never die, di da da da, di da da da, di da da da - 
    In tune with the universe, in cadence with the infinite, together and alone.

When his girl asks what Lister has written, Pete responds:

    “Oh, This Way to Mars and Deadeye Dick’s Last Dish of Prunes and Tinsel Tailback. He’s prolific and varied, a real master.”

And Pete describes him like this:

    He was about five feet high, and thin. He had big brown eyes and the complexion of an infant and mind like Einstein, though he peddled it at two cents a word. Tommy Lister.
    His heroes are big and strong and fear no living or dead thing.

I met Gault once, and though he no longer had the complexion of an infant, the rest doesn’t sound far off.

Another character in this book, Art Shadow, writes for western pulps. Makes me wonder: Did Gault write for them too? I have at least one science fiction pulp with one of his stories, but never thought to look for him in westerns.

There’s a good deal of literary name-dropping here, guys like Saroyan, Fitzgerald and Capote, and Gault can’t resist having fun with it. At one point, one of the earthier characters asks a literary snob if he thinks the Bears will beat Detroit. After an uncomfortable silence, Gault delivers this line:

It was seconds before they got back to the lighter air, to Kafka and Gide and Roney Scott. 

I had to smile. “Roney Scott” was an obscure pen-name of Gault’s, employed occasionally in pulps and on at least one novel (reviewed HERE). This was an extremely private joke.

There's a lot of lower-brow name dropping too, such as Buck Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, Ellery Queen and Raymond Chandler. And Gault frequently takes time out to comment on the problems of his times - everything from politics and racism to the encroaching evils of television. I may have the social conscience of a cockroach, but I can still admire it in others.

What all of this adds up to is a great read. You should read it yourself.

More Forgotten Books at pattinase.

Forgotten Books: SHAKEDOWN by Roney Scott (William Campbell Gault)

Shakedown (1953) was William Campbell Gault's first private eye novel, and the first of eight books featuring the rough-around-the-edges womanizer, Joe Puma. But I'm pretty confident in saying that when Gault wrote it, he had no intention of turning Puma into a series character.

Joe Puma bears all the earmarks of a use-once-and-dispose detective. Like the dark heroes of novels by James M. Cain, Harry Whittington and Charles Willeford, Puma is far more interested in sex and money than he is justice - or the welfare of anyone but himself. The story, too, bears little resemblance to the average private detective plot. Though it begins with a murder, the lead-off killing has its roots in Puma's earlier illegal activities, and he's quickly sucked into a complex con game with three other unsavory characters, each of whom hopes to cheat the other three. And just for kicks, there are prostitutes and lesbians thrown into the mix.

Then there's the pen name, Roney Scott. Gault used this a couple of times in the pulps, when he had two stories in the same issue of a magazine. In this case, I'm guessing it was more of a stylistic decision. He'd already written two stand-alone mystery novels under his own name, and would follow this one with three more. All of those were more traditional - or at least more sedate - mysteries. And those first two novels were published in respectable hardcover, while this one seemed more of a throwaway as an Ace Double original.

Shakedown gets off to a daring start simply by revealing the details of Puma's previous case. Here's a Hollywood story that would have made Spicy Detective's Dan Turner blush:

     Rickett had a yen for sweet young stars, and Bea Condor had been one of those. Rickett, it seemed, was overendowed and Bea had suffered. He'd taken her to a quack, and she'd died. 
     Enter Target, who had a string of call girls for the money trade. Target had sworn on the witness stand that Bea was one of his girls and that she was famous for a trick involving the disappearance of a beer bottle. That took care of the dead girl's reputation, though there wasn't a shred of truth in any of it.

An unusual murder weapon, don't you think?

One more thing. Though it's not a big deal in the story, we learn that Puma played three years for the L.A. Rams. Gault would re-use that resume in 1955, when he introduced his best known character, straight-arrow detective Brock Callahan in the novel Ring Around Rosa (aka Murder in the Raw).

Joe Puma, meanwhile, did not resurface until 1956, in a series of stories published mostly in Manhunt, and finally resumed his novel career in 1958 with End of a Call Girl.

Forgotten Books? Me too. Lots of 'em. Refresh your memory at pattinase.