Authors and Creators
William Campbell Gault
(1910-1995)
Also wrote as Roney Scott, Will Duke

William Campbell Gault was a prolific writer of mysteries and books for young people; in a long career, he wrote some of the most interesting private eye novels I have ever read (two series, featuring Brock Callahan and Joe Puma, respectively), nonseries novels, and many short stories for the pulps.

Born in Milwaukee in 1910, his first big break came in 1936, when he began selling short-shots to the McClure Newspaper Syndicate and such soft-porn mags as Paris Nights and Scarlet Adventuress. He soon moved on to sports fiction, an interest that found its way into his private eye fiction. He also was concerned with the problems of youth, and often used ethnic characters in his fiction, treating them with sensitivity and respect, something not exactly common in the genre at the time.

Gault was never particularly flashy as a writer, but in his simple, straightforward style made him one of the most dependable and solid P.I. writers to have written for the pulps (he wrote over 300 short stories for them). 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.

His greatest creation was ex-LA Rams guard turned South California private eye Brock 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 1984's The Cana Diversion, Brock helps out another Gault PI, the troubled Joe Puma, who had his own series back in the fifties and sixties. 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,Armenian gumshoe Pierre Apoyan and Mortimer Jones, a predecessor of Brock's who appeared several times in the pages of Black Mask. 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.

One of my favorite Gault's is sometimes overlooked because it was published under the pseudonym of Roney Scott. The book is called Shakedown, and it marked the first appearance of Joe Puma, a much different Joe Puma from the down-and-out P.I. of the eighties. However, it's a classic noir tale of a P. I. so corrupt that at times we can't even tell whose side he's on. Highly recommended.

TRIVIA

SHORT STORIES

NOVELS

COLLECTIONS

TELEVISION

RELATED LINKS

Report respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.

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