A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Overview
by Invoice Pronzini
WILLIAM CAMPBELL GAULT – Don’t Cry for Me. Dutton, hardcover, 1952. Edgar Award winner for Finest First Novel. Dell #672, paperback; cowl artwork by James Meese.
Don’t Cry for Me is Gault’s first novel, and one among a number of non-series mysteries he wrote within the Fifties. His fellow crime novelist Fredric Brown had this to say about it: “(lt] just isn’t solely a stupendous chunk of story however, refreshingly, it’s about individuals as an alternative of characters, individuals so actual and vivid that you simply’ll assume you recognize them personally. Much more essential, this boy Gault can write, by no means badly and generally like an angel.” Gault’s different friends, the members of the Thriller Writers of America, felt the identical: They voted Don’t Cry for Me a Finest First Novel Edgar.
This novel (and plenty of of Gault’s subsequent books) superbly evokes the southern California underworld of drug sellers, addicts, hoodlums, racetrack touts, second-rate boxers, and tough-minded ladies with larcenous and/or homicidal proclivities. Its narrator, Pete Worden, is something however a hero; he lives a disorganized and unconventional life, strolling a skinny line between respectability and corruption, trying to find function and id.
His girlfriend, Ellen, needs him to be one factor; his brother John — who controls the household purse strings — needs him to be one other; and a few of his “buddies” need him to be a 3rd. What lastly places an finish to Worden’s aimless way of life is the invention of a murdered man in his condominium, a hood named AI Calvano whom Pete slugged at a celebration the evening earlier than. Hounded by police and by underworld varieties, Worden just isn’t solely compelled into his personal hunt for the killer however compelled to resolve his private ambivalence alongside the way in which.
Don’t Cry for Me is first-rate — powerful, uncompromising, insightful, opinionated, often annoying, and altogether satisfying. An added bonus is an interesting glimpse of the demise of the pulp magazines (the first marketplace for Gault’s fiction for the earlier sixteen years), as seen by means of the eyes of Worden’s neighbor and good friend, pulp author Tommy Lister.
Of Gault’ s different non-series books, the perfect might be The Bloody Bokhara ( 1952), which is ready in Milwaukee and has as its background the distinctive world of Oriental rugs and carpets. Additionally noteworthy are Blood on the Boards ( 1953), which has a little-theater setting; and Loss of life Out of Focus ( 1959), about Hollywood film-making and script-writing.
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Invoice Pronzini & Marcia Muller and printed by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Field, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Household Belief.
