A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Assessment
by Invoice Pronzini
WILLIAM CAMPBELL GAULT – Loss of life in Donegal Bay. PI Brock (the Rock) Callahan #10. Walker & Co., hardcover, 1984. Constitution, paperback, 1987.
William Campbell Gault bought his first quick story to a pulp journal in 1936; practically half a century later, he’s nonetheless writing fiction of the identical top quality that has marked his lengthy and prolific profession. He has revealed greater than 300 quick tales and novelettes — thriller, fantasy, science fiction, sports activities — and a few sixty novels, half of that are thriller/suspense and half of that are juvenile sports activities books.
Gault’s most enduring fictional creation is ex-L.A. Rams soccer participant turned non-public eye Brock Callahan, hero of 11 novels so far. The primary within the collection, Ring Round Rosa, was revealed in 1955; six others adopted it over the following eight years. Gault deserted detective fiction in 1963 to focus on the extra profitable juvenile market, and didn’t return to a lifetime of fictional crime till the early Eighties, when the juvenile vein had been performed out. Callahan was given a brand new life as properly, in a pair of paperback originals revealed by the short-lived Raven Home; one among these, The Cana Diversion, was the recipient of the Personal Eye Writers of America Shamus Award for the Greatest Paperback Unique of 1982.
Loss of life in Donegal Bay is Gault’s first hardcover thriller in additional than twenty years, an excellent higher novel than Cana Diversion and pretty much as good as the most effective of the early Callahans, Day of the Ram (1956), The Convertible Hearse (1957), and County Kill (1962). Callahan, because of a considerable inheritance, is now married to his longtime girlfriend, Jan, an inside decorator, and semi-retired within the seaside group of San Valdesto (Santa Barbara, the place Gault himself lives).
However he’s bored and has saved a hand within the detective enterprise by grooming a protege, younger Corey Raleigh. When Corey is employed for a surveillance job by con man named Alan Arthur Baker, Callahan worries that the child has gotten in over his head and subsequently units out to do some snooping on his personal. Among the many individuals he encounters within the swanky former artists· colony of Donegal Bay are a conniving real-estate salesman, a few children who run a bait store, an ex-pug bar proprietor, a secretive former maid, a gorgeous lady with a shady previous, and an eccentric millionaire who lives in a medieval fortress full with moat and drawbridge.
The homicide of a vagrant opens up a Pandora’s field of blackmail, narcotics, infidelity, and extra murder earlier than Callahan, with Corey’s assist, untangles all of it and arrives on the resolution.
Wealthy in incident, written with wry humor and sharp remark, peopled with plausible characters, that is William Campbell Gault at his finest.
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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.
