William Campbell Gault

• Born: March 9, 1910
• Birthplace: Milwaukee, Wisconsin
• Died: December 27, 1995
• Place of death: Unknown

Type of Plot: Private investigator

Principal Series: Joe Puma, 1953-2003; Brock “the Rock” Callahan, 1955-1992

Contribution

William Campbell Gault was one of the few writers of detective fiction able to take various motifs from the different pulp magazine genres—sports, mystery, science fiction—and blend them into a distinctive style of his own. Gault’s fiction deals with themes of racial, ethnic, and social equality. His most successful fictional character, Brock “the Rock” Callahan, maintains a gruff, no-nonsense demeanor while championing the defenseless.

Gault’s style is tough and fast-paced, true to its pulp-magazine genesis, yet he manages to evoke compassion for and understanding of all his characters. Through former football star Callahan, Gault elaborates on the sports credo of fair play, showing how it can be applied to the urban world of manipulators and murderers.

Biography

William Campbell Gault was born on March 9, 1910, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the second of three children of John Gault and Ella Hovde Gault. His father was a law school graduate but never practiced law, preferring to dabble in real estate. His mother sold cookware door-to-door and, with the family’s savings, later purchased and managed the Blatz Hotel in Milwaukee.

Gault grew up in the Milwaukee suburb of Wauwatosa, where he played some football in high school but reserved most of his enthusiasm for English studies. When he was eighteen, he was married to Julie Barry, and they later had a son, William Barry. In 1929, Gault briefly attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison. During the Depression, he worked as a sole cutter in a shoe factory before comanaging the Blatz Hotel with his mother.

Gault wrote short stories on the side and in 1936 won a fifty-dollar first prize in a short-story contest sponsored by the Milwaukee Journal and the McClure Syndicate. By 1939, he was supporting himself almost entirely from his writing. Eventually, he was divorced from his wife; he maintained custody of his son. In 1942, he married Virginia Kaprelian. The following year, he joined the army; he was assigned to the 166th Infantry and throughout most of his duty was stationed in Hawaii. After his discharge in 1945, Gault toured the West Coast and became enamored of Southern California. Having resumed his writing career, he moved his family (which now included a daughter, Shelly) to Pacific Palisades, a Los Angeles suburb, in 1949.

As the popularity of the pulp magazines declined in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, Gault was forced to supplement his income by working for Douglas Aircraft in Long Beach and then later for the post office in Pacific Palisades. However, he continued to write: In a span of eighteen months, he wrote three novels, all published in 1952; Thunder Road, Don’t Cry for Me, and The Bloody Bokhara. Don’t Cry for Me won the Edgar Allan Poe Award of that year. Following the success of his first three books, Gault was once again able to write full time.

On the advice of fellow mystery writers Ross Macdonald and Michael Collins, both residents of Santa Barbara, Gault and his family moved to Santa Barbara in 1958. Gault continued to write mystery and juvenile sports novels; in the early 1980’s, he served as president of the Private Eye Writers of America and was given that organization’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 1984. He received a Shamus Award in 1983 for The CANA Diversion (1980). He was given a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Bouchercon World Mystery Convention in 1991. Gault died in 1995, at the age of eighty-five, after completing a final short story. “An Ordinary Man” was published in New Mystery Magazine, a publication he helped found in 1990.

Analysis

During the sixteen years in which William Campbell Gault produced more than three hundred short stories for the pulps, he developed a distinctive voice. Gault took to heart the advice of William Saroyan: “If you can’t write well, write fast.” Over a period of time, Gault learned to do both. At first, he wrote mainly for the sports pulps. To keep the stories coming and the plots fresh and varied, Gault ventured into other genres—mystery and science fiction—and then began combining genres. Later, he began to address themes of personal concern to him, particularly issues of ethnic and racial prejudice. One of Gault’s first recurring characters, for example, was Sandy McKane, a private detective of Hawaiian descent. Other stories dealt with juvenile delinquency, with young, streetwise protagonists with questionable morals who in the end redeem themselves.

As Gault gained confidence as a novelist, he decided to create a series character who would be a vehicle for these concerns. Brock “the Rock” Callahan emerged as one of the most distinctive and fully realized characters in detective fiction. He is a character with a strong moral code, one forged out of his well-documented past. He was born in Southern California and reared in Long Beach; his police officer father was killed by a hoodlum when Callahan was a boy. Callahan attended Stanford University on a football scholarship and was graduated near the top of his class. After college, he joined the army and was involved with the Office of Strategic Services for three years. Subsequently, he signed with the Los Angeles Rams and played guard for nearly a decade, earning awards and accolades for his outstanding achievements. When he retired from football, he chose to open a detective agency in Beverly Hills, believing that his reputation as a star athlete would attract clients and win him friends on the police force.

Callahan is very much aware of the question of his credibility, his ability to perform adequately as a private detective with no real formal investigative training:

Well, what had I brought to this trade? Three years in the O.S.S. and my memories of a cop father. Along with a nodding acquaintanceship with maybe fifty lads in the [Los Angeles Police] Department. That didn’t make me any Philip Marlowe.

Work alone wouldn’t do it, nor determination; I was a fraud in my chosen profession. So many are, but that didn’t make me any more admirable.

What keeps Callahan dedicated to his new profession is his past. He grew up fatherless because of a hoodlum killer. He knows at first hand how crime can devastate the lives of the innocent. He also knows, through years of playing professional football, the importance of being treated equally and fairly, of being judged by one’s actions and performance and not by one’s social or ethnic background. Callahan feels compelled to apply the sports credo of fair play to his new profession. He wants to protect the lambs from the lions, to make sure that the innocents have a chance to survive despite the manipulators and murderers who pervert society’s rules to their own advantage.

Callahan carries the aura of the sports world wherever he goes. It defines him more than any other characteristic. He is linked to his sports past and is proud of it, although he never indulges in sentimental memories. The sports references are used to clarify a point or give a fuller dimension to a character or a situation. Many of Callahan’s clients are sports heroes, former teammates, or friends of sports figures, yet rarely is the sport itself used as the central focus of the story, and macho posturing is avoided. Callahan is well aware of the reputation most sports figures have of being brainless hulks. It is almost an obsession with him to shatter the stereotype of the stupid jock; this concern fuels his desire to establish a reputation as a competent and intelligent detective.

Gault, through Callahan, challenges stereotypes, prejudices, and hastily formed judgments. Callahan has a gruff, aggressive manner that usually antagonizes the person he is confronting, whether it be an officer, a client, or a criminal. The tension created through these abrasive confrontations leads to deeper character revelations. Few of Gault’s characters can be pigeonholed as true villains—even murderers are often portrayed with some sympathy.

Gault’s characters tend to tangle first and to display mutual affection and admiration later. This pattern holds in Callahan’s dealings with the police. It is used even more effectively in his relationship with Jan Bonnet. They meet in the first book of the series and immediately develop a prickly fondness for each other. Jan is a strong, independent businesswoman, hardly a lamb in need of protection. She owns and operates her own interior decorating business with a wealthy Beverly Hills clientele. Callahan, smitten by her intelligence, beauty, and no-nonsense approach to life, proposes marriage on several occasions. Jan refuses, however, spouting her disapproval of his profession and his lack of financial sense. She is infuriated by the fact that he is willing from time to time to take on a case free of charge.

Dead Hero

Although Gault attempts to present Callahan and Jan as equals, a double standard exists: Callahan becomes sexually involved with various women throughout the series, yet it is implied that Jan remains faithful to him. This double standard is vividly illustrated in Dead Hero (1963). Having learned of a friend’s wife’s infidelity, Callahan expresses outrage to Jan, who replies, “Men—you smug monsters. If a man is unfaithful, he’s just a red-blooded live wire to the boys. But if a woman is, she’s a tramp. To hell with men and their idiotic world.” Callahan explains, “Men and women are different. . . . I mean a man is—emotionally constituted so adultery has less meaning for him; it doesn’t degrade him as much as it can a woman.”

Yet despite this deeply ingrained attitude, Callahan is open-minded enough to realize that his former teammate is too intolerant of the wife’s adulterous behavior. “You know you’re in love,” Callahan reminds him. “You can’t make a career out of being an outraged husband. . . . And remember you’re a father as well as a husband. And before you were married you were an All-American blonde-chaser.”

As a private detective, Callahan must examine an issue from every angle to get at the truth and solve the mystery. In so doing, Callahan, along with the reader, becomes more tolerant toward behavior that at first seemed repugnant and characters who at first seemed despicable. Callahan’s nickname, the Rock, is used ironically. He is tough when he must be, but he is also one of the most tolerant and compassionate of all fictional private detectives.

County Kill

One of the best books of the series, one that expertly interweaves all Gault’s favorite themes, is County Kill (1962). It begins with Callahan’s accepting as a client a child, a twelve-year-old runaway who seeks help in finding his father, Skip Lund. Callahan finds Lund, who in turn hires the detective to investigate the murder of one of his business partners. Later, Callahan discovers Lund’s business: drug smuggling. The drug dealers, however, prove to be the most noble characters of the story. They are smuggling heroin and distributing it to local addicts at low cost to keep the addicts from committing crimes to support their habit, to help rehabilitate them, and to prevent organized crime from infiltrating the area. Most of the addicts are poor Hispanics.

The strongest character in the book is Juanita Rico, the proprietress of a bar in the poor district of San Valdesto; she is the brains behind the drug operation. Skip Lund, a man of humble beginnings who has married into a rich family, risks destroying his marriage to help oppressed members of his community. Callahan mixes and sympathizes with both rich and poor: He wants Lund to reunite with his wife so that their son will have a proper upbringing, but he also feels for Juanita Rico and her cause. Eventually, the murders are shown to have nothing to do with drug dealing or social inequality; they are motivated by matrimonial jealousy and infidelity.

The Callahan Series Resumes

After the publication of Dead Hero in 1963; Gault stopped writing detective stories for seventeen years; in 1980, he resumed the Callahan series. In these later novels, Callahan and Jan are married, his financial problems having been solved by means of an inheritance. They both are retired and have moved to San Valdesto; after a taste of retirement, however, both become bored and resume their careers.

Because he is wealthy, Callahan can now afford to investigate cases without charging any fee and without bringing down Jan’s wrath. Private investigation has become for him a hobby instead of a profession, and, as one critic put it, he has become “a relentlessly nice man.” Even so, the writing remains tight and the stories well plotted, with compelling themes and well-realized characterizations.

The CANA Diversion

In the first novel of the resumed series, The CANA Diversion, Callahan investigates the disappearance of a former Beverly Hills detective, Joe Puma, a character who had already appeared in his own long-established series. Puma is a tougher, more volatile character than Callahan, more rootless and less predictable. Like Callahan, he hates injustice. He is quick with the sarcastic remark but also quick to apologize. Puma claims to have only two weaknesses: women and food. Essentially, he is Callahan’s spiritual twin. Both come off as tough and sarcastic to police, clients, and hoods, but later, as their professionalism and honesty become apparent, they earn admiration from all. In 2003, many of the older Joe Puma stories were collected in The Marksman, and Other Stories.

There is at times a poetic quality about Gault’s writing. It springs from his quick pacing, his ability to mix the essential qualities of a good detective story—tension, toughness, a bleary-eyed view of society, and a logically constructed murder plot—with a dignity that is genuine and heartfelt. It is a unique style—poetic pulp—and it makes Gault’s contribution to the detective genre an important one.

Principal Series Characters:

• Joe Puma is a private investigator based in Beverly Hills. He is a tough, hot-tempered Italian and a ladies’ man who enjoys playing the field. He has a passionate hatred of criminals but an equally passionate respect for professional honesty and integrity.
• Brock “the Rock” Callahan is a private investigator and a former guard for the Los Angeles Rams. He is touchy about his sports past and can be brutish when his reputation as an honest and competent investigator is questioned. Underneath the hulking exterior is a sensitive and compassionate man.

Bibliography

Baker, Robert A., and Michael T. Nieztzel. “The Rock-Like Knight: Brock Callahan.” In Private Eyes: One Hundred and One Knights—A Survey of American Detective Fiction, 1922-1984. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1985. Critical essay focusing on Gault’s best-known detective.

Landrum, Larry. American Mystery and Detective Novels. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1999. An important resource for understanding the development of the genre in the United States. Mentions of Gault are brief but instructive.

Locke, John, ed. Pulp Fictioneers. Silver Spring, Md.: Adventure House, 2004. A fascinating compilation of firsthand accounts of working and writing for the pulp-fiction industry in its heyday. Provides background for understanding Gault.

Steinbrunner, Chris, and Otto Penzler, eds. Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976. Given the period of Gault’s greatest productivity as a writer, this old but reliable resource is still one of the best places to go for contextualizing his work.