Brock Callahan
Created by William Campbell Gault (1910-97)

One of the best, and also one of the very last PI writers to have written for the pulps (he wrote over 300 short stories for the pulps, William Campbell Gault created ex-LA Rams guard turned South California private eye BROCK "THE ROCK" CALLAHAN. One of the first of the compassionate eyes, Brock was also one of first eyes to have a steady girlfriend, (they actually get married in the 1984 comeback, The Bad Samaritan).

In 1982's The Cana Diversion, Brock tries to help out another Gault PI, the troubled Joe Puma, who had his own series back in the fifties and sixties.

In fact, Gault was responsible for several other one-shot PI's, who appeared in various short stories, in the pulps and elsewhere, including Honolulu's Sandy McKane and Armenian gumshoe Pierre Apoyan. Despite his acclaim, Gault in fact stopped writing detective fiction in the early sixties, abandoning it for the far more lucrative field of juvenile sports fiction, and only returned to detective fiction in the eighties.

TRIVIA

• Ross Macdonald, another of the last of the pulpers, dedicated his last novel, The Blue Hammer, to William Campbell Gault.

NOVELS

• Ring Around the Rosa (1955, also known as Murder in the Raw)
• Day of the Ram (1956)
• The Convertible Hearse (1957)....Buy this book
• Come Die With Me (1959)
• Vein of Violence (1961)
• County Kill (1962)
• Dead Hero (1963)
• The Bad Samaritan (1982)
• The Cana Diversion (1982; also featuring Joe Puma)
• Death in Donegal Bay (1984)
• The Dead Seed (1985)
• The Chicano War (1986)
• Cat and Mouse (1988)
• Dead Pigeon (1992)

SHORT STORIES

• "April in Peril" (1986, Mean Streets)

RELATED LINKS

• "The Convertible Hearse" by Bill Gault
  Review by August West.

Report respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. Thanks to Dale Stoyer for this sharp eye..