A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Overview
by Invoice Pronzini
WILLIAM CAMPBELL GAULT – The Hundred-Greenback Woman. PI Joe Puma #6. Dutton, hardcover, 1961. Signet S2205, paperback, 1962.
Sports activities — specifically soccer, boxing, and golf — play sturdy roles in lots of Gault’s mysteries. Ex-jock Brock Callahan solves pro-football-related crimes in Day of the Ram and Useless Hero (1963). One non-series e-book, Truthful Prey (1956), revealed underneath the pseudonym Will Duke, has a {golfing} background; one other, The Canvas Coffin (1953), offers with the combat sport and has a boxer protagonist. The Hundred-Greenback Woman likewise offers with the seedy world {of professional} prizefighting.
This novel can also be the seventh and final to characteristic Gault’s different collection character — and second non-public eye -Joe Puma. Puma is harder than Callahan, extra of a loner, however imbued with the identical human qualities; Anthony Boucher wrote of him, “He’s large and muscular and can provide and take punishment; he drinks and wenches and has his personal concepts about skilled ethics. However Gault has created him so firmly and elegantly that he’s a person and never a pornographic puppet … an comprehensible and never too completely happy man, typically likable, typically exasperating and at all times actual.”
Puma made his first look in a pseudonymous e-book — Shakedown (1953), as by Roney Scott — however it wasn’t till 1958 that he emerged in full model; his first two main instances, Finish of a Name Woman and Night time Girl, have been revealed that 12 months by Fawcett Crest, and three others adopted in 1959-60. The Hundred-Greenback Woman is Puma’s solely hardcover look.
Employed by Terry Lopez to maintain her younger boxer husband from being compelled by his unscrupulous supervisor, Gus Galbini, to throw a combat, Puma is nearly instantly plunged right into a homicide investigation when Galbini turns up useless. Galbini’s spouse additionally hires him: She has particular causes for wanting to seek out out who killed her meal ticket.
Quite a lot of hoodlums and delightful girls complicate issues and lead Puma on a dangerous course to the (stunning) id of Galbini’s killer. The Dutton version’s mud jacket blurb calls this “a narrative of violence and dying at ringside, replete with motion and colour and filled with the genuine environment of life within the ring and life within the underworld.” For as soon as, mud jacket blurb will not be solely correct however justified in its reward.
Gault additionally introduced Joe Puma again in The Cana Diversion,however he introduced him again useless: The central premise of that novel is Brock Callahan’s seek for Puma’s assassin. These of us who preferred Massive Joe in addition to we like Callahan, if no more so, might by no means fairly forgive Invoice Gault for thus cold-bloodedly knocking him off.
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Invoice Pronzini & Marcia Muller and revealed by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Field, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Household Belief.
