Sweet Wild Wench, by William Campbell Gault

Last summer, during my interview with Hard Case Crime editor Charles Ardai, I asked him to identify his five favorite classic crime and mystery fiction covers. His final selection was the beguiling front (shown above) from the 1959 Crest paperback edition of William Campbell Gault’s Sweet Wild Wench, the fourth of Gault’s eight novels featuring Los Angeles private eye Joe Puma. That illustration of an indiscreetly inviting and underdressed blonde is credited to American artist Robert K. Abbett, who I’ve already written about twice before on this page (but whose work deserves many more showcasings). And it nicely represents the story inside, which has much to do with Puma’s reputation as a “dame chaser.”

The tale starts out pretty tame. Puma, a big, Italian-descended guy with a fast-boiling temper and a kid brother prone to questionable behavior, has recently seen a slowdown in his business. So he goes to work temporarily for District Attorney Sam Griffin, who wants him to look into a local religious cult called the Children of Proton. It seems the cult has convinced a deep-pocketed young woman to contribute heavily to its cause, and her more conservative, widowed father isn’t pleased with her choice of charities. The woman’s name is Eve Deering, and as a teaser on the back of Sweet Wild Wench explains, “She was slim and she was stacked and the gold of her hair matched the gold of her bank account.” Eve is certainly generous with her apples, and just about everything else, so it’s no wonder Puma has a devil of a time concentrating on the case. But concentrate he must, especially after another private investigator, Burns Murphy--who’d been looking into the Children of Proton himself--is shot to death behind his steel desk. The cult leader discovered the corpse, or so he claims: he is now Suspect No. 1. It falls to Puma to resolve the mystery of Murphy’s killing, while also contending with an increasingly unpredictable Eve Deering--and juggling her with another “special friend,” Adele Griffin, who also happens to be the D.A.’s sister.

Of course, that balance is hard to maintain at times--such as when our hero follows Eve to her apartment for questioning, which turns into something entirely different after she suggests they dance:

Her body was firm but yielding; her breasts needed no artificial support. They were taut against my chest.

She danced well. With grace and instance response but still with enough individuality to make her presence felt. Her mouth was close to my ear and I thought she nibbled.

It’s the booze, Puma, I told myself. You’re imagining things; it’s wishful thinking.

And then one of her sharp teeth sent pain dancing through the ear lobe and I knew it wasn’t the whisky; it was the wench. I stopped dancing and found her mouth and her body melted into mine and she whimpered.

Over the course of this adventure, Puma’s willingness to use people--and be used himself--will be tested. So will his loyalty and his appetite for playing politics. There are clear compensations for his being foolish, and only costs to his being blind.

Sweet Wild Wench doesn’t break any new storytelling ground or reinvent the American private-eye legend. It is not a work that you should feel poorer for never finding the time to read. Still, it’s a solid early effort by an author who no less an authority than Bill Pronzini once called, in his introduction to a collection of Gault’s short fiction (Marksman and Other Stories, 2003), “a writer of the old school, a consummate professional throughout a distinguished career that spanned more than half a century.”

William Campbell Gault was born on March 9, 1910, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He later “studied at the University of Wisconsin before going into the hotel business,” as William L. DeAndrea explained in his Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994). “He was part owner and manager of the Blatz Hotel [opposite City Hall] in Milwaukee from 1932 to 1939.” However, Gault didn’t figure to devote his life to the hospitality industry. In the mid-1930s, according to Pronzini, “he entered a story called ‘Inadequate’ in a Milwaukee Journal-McClure Newspaper Syndicate short story contest. The judges found it to be anything but inadequate, awarding it the $50 first prize. Spurred on by this success, he wrote and placed several more stories with the McClure Syndicate, then in 1937 entered the wide-open pulp field with the sale of a drag-racing story, ‘Hell Driver’s Partnership,’ to Ace Sports.”

In 1942, Gault married Virginia Kaprelian and started a family (they would eventually have two children together). He finally checked out of the hotel biz, and instead picked up a job operating a shoe-sole cutting machine. Most of his energy, though, he devoted to fiction-writing. During World War II Gault put in a couple of years (1943-1945) with the 166th Infantry, but subsequently returned to his typewriter. He was a prolific scribbler, contributing several hundred stories to a wide range of pulp magazines, from those specializing in detective fiction to others directed at audiences craving romance, science fiction, and soft porn. Gault even freelanced for The Saturday Evening Post and McClure’s, and by the late 1940s his yarns--a number of which starred a Duesenberg-driving dick named Mortimer Jones--featured prominently in Black Mask.

“It was a great time,” Gault told an interviewer in the early 1980s. “We had a chance to learn our trade. The early pulp writers pre-empted Hemingway. The unfortunate thing was that Hemingway could write and they couldn’t. They got away from that florid prose of the Victorians to straight, almost journalistic writing. That’s why they don’t have to give you a Dickens description. They say three things and you know the character.”

After the Second World War Gault joined the westward migration to Southern California, took up residence in the L.A. district of Pacific Palisades, and began palling around with other writers such as Ray Bradbury, Henry Kuttner, Dennis Lynds, and Fredric Brown, the last of whom would become an early champion of his literary endeavors. With the era of pulp magazines waning, Gault switched to composing novels. The first of many stories he would write for juvenile readers, Thunder Road, was published in 1952, along with his initial plunge into the mystery-fiction genre, Don’t Cry for Me. Writing about that latter book in The Rap Sheet, author-editor Ed Gorman praised Gault’s real-seeming characters, people who debated books and politics, and who worried about news of atomic bomb tests; and he heaped particular congratulations on Gault for his ability to get inside the head of his disillusioned protagonist, Pete Worden, whose neighbor has been murdered. “The narrative is so intimate,” remarked Gorman, “it sounds like a man talking to his shrink. Or going to confession.” Others were impressed with Gault’s efforts as well. Don’t Cry for Me won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel.

Building on that triumph, Gault churned out more than half a dozen other standalone crime novels during the 1950s, all of them profuse with details of what life was like in the postwar, spotlight-sprouting City of Angels--the sports, the culture, and the kitsch. Among the works he produced during that decade were The Bloody Bokhara (1952), his only Milwaukee-set novel; a much-lauded boxing mystery titled The Canvas Coffin (1953); Square in the Middle (1956), and Death Out of Focus (1959). In a retrospective on Gault’s career, published in the Winter 2008 issue of Mystery Scene magazine, critic and novelist Jon L. Breen drew attention as well to 1954’s Run, Killer, Run (otherwise known as The Sweet Blonde Trap), if only because it’s “a rare third-person Gault novel” that “illuminates his political stance: Republican, socially concerned, anti-McCarthyite, a consistent voice for non-simplistic morality.”

Series gumshoe Joseph Puma debuted in Shakedown, a 1953 paperback mystery that Gault (bowing to the demands of his hardcover publisher) had released under the pseudonym “Roney Scott.” Just two years after that, in Ring Around Rosa (aka Murder in the Raw), the author introduced readers to another L.A. peeper, Brock Callahan. Those two protagonists were similar in many respects, both of them former jocks and lapsed Catholics. But Puma was neither as well educated nor as good-looking as Callahan, and he tended to take on a lower class of clientele. Puma was often on the payroll of professional wrestlers, prostitutes, and other questionable sorts; Callahan--a Stanford University football standout nicknamed “The Rock,” who went on to nine years of renown as a lineman with the Los Angeles Rams, until age and redundant injuries drove him from the gridiron into the grittier existence of a confidential dick--worked for faded film idols, corporate heavyweights, and sports stars. Also different were the two protagonists’ associations with guns (Puma carried one, Callahan usually did not) and their attitudes toward marriage. Joe Puma seemed intent on wedding money--and lots of it--while the more traditionally minded Brock Callahan insisted on being the breadwinner. Callahan was also the guy with the steady relationship. In his first outing he met a prosperous interior decorator named Jan Bonnet, with whom he remained throughout the series, despite their regular fights and Callahan’s periodic contemplations of infidelity. (“Don’t get me wrong; no woman can buy me with her body. But only a prude would discourage them from trying.”) Although Bruce F. Murphy, in The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery (1999), stated his preference for the Puma books over the Callahan stories, “if only because they do not have Callahan’s petulant and quarrelsome girlfriend, Jan,” I think the ups and downs of the Brock-Jan romance make it more credible, and certainly less cloying, than the comparable union between Robert B. Parker’s Boston gumshoe, Spenser, and psychiatrist Susan Silverman.

Critics appreciated Gault’s fiction-writing “voice” and his series leads, especially Callahan, who The New York Times called “surely one of the major private detectives created in American fiction since Chandler’s Philip Marlowe.” Yet after the publication of The Hundred Dollar Girl (his final Puma novel) in 1961, and the Callahan book Dead Hero in 1963, Gault abandoned detective fiction. He was making a much better income penning sports-related stories for boys, and those juvenile books stayed in print longer. Besides, Gault groused, “You can’t write 25 or 50 classic mysteries. It’s not possible.” He definitely needed to a break.

As it turned out, his break stretched for most of the next two decades. Not until 1980 did the public receive Gault’s eighth Brock Callahan novel, The Bad Samaritan. And that book marked more than just one new beginning. In an earlier work, Vein of Violence (1961), Callahan had helped his aunt Sheila solve a murder and had befriended her new husband, Texas oil millionaire Homer Gallup. In The Bad Samaritan we learn that Aunt Shiela is gone and Callahan has inherited enough money to set him up comfortably for the rest of his days--sufficient funds, too, to convince him that he can finally swap rings with Jan, which he does. As the sleuth remarks, “Hard work, honest dealing, persistence, intelligence--and being Aunt Sheila’s nephew had finally earned me the financial security that is every American’s birthright.” By then, Callahan and his new wife have also forsaken Los Angeles for the quieter California coastal town of “San Valdesto,” a thinly camouflaged Santa Barbara, to which Gault had moved long ago.

After years of grilling suspects, commiserating with the loved ones left behind by murder, and nursing a recurring ulcer, The Rock has supposedly withdrawn from the gumshoe game. He now owns a nice abode with a live-in housekeeper who makes great Irish stew. He has a regular golfing schedule, time on his hands for invigorating six-mile runs, and lots of dough he can use to treat his friends to lunch. But as he notes in The Dead Seed (1985), “Retirement was not the blessing I had imagined it would be.” So it doesn’t take much to interest this former football guard in one case after another, whether it involves violent hillbillies, loopy religious cultists (a recurring theme in Gault’s fiction), or plans to construct a nuclear power plant in San Valdesto. That last plot complication comes from his 1982, Shamus Award-winning novel, The CANA Diversion, an out-of-the-ordinary tale in which Callahan investigates the disappearance--and later the slaying--of his fellow private eye, Joe Puma. (The two protagonists had previously crossed paths in a 1986 short story, “April in Peril.”)

Having reintroduced Callahan in The Bad Samaritan, the author proceeded to enlist him in six more adventures, concluding with 1992’s Dead Pigeon. But Gault’s last published novel was in fact a non-series, non-mystery called Man Alone (1995), which Breen recalls had originally been “written in 1957 and admiringly rejected for commercial reasons by his publishers.” The author died in 1995, at age 85, though his last short story, “An Ordinary Man,” didn’t appear until the following year in New Mystery Magazine.

Gault seems to have been not only well-respected as an author (in 1984 he received The Eye lifetime achievement award from the Private Eye Writers of America), but well-liked as a person. In his later years, he contributed columns to Mystery Scene, working with editor Ed Gorman. Gorman has since described Gault as “the sweetheart of sweethearts,” and in his blog a couple of years ago, he recounted his “favorite Bill Gault story”:

[It] came one night when we were talking about his old friend John D. MacDonald. They were friends from the pulp days but had had a falling out over the Vietnam war. Bill was against it, John D. for it. They didn’t communicate for several years. But around the time of this phone call they’d started corresponding again and Bill was very happy about it.

So we’re rambling on and Bill said, “You know how much money John made on those Gold Medal paperbacks? One hell of a lot. And you know what he did with it?”

Now, being the low-born type I am, I was ready for some gossip. He bought fourteen-year-old hookers? He spent it all on his heroin addiction? He was helping to fund a violent overthrow of the government?

“No,” Bill said in an accusatory way, “he invested it!”

I laughed my ass off. He sounded like one of my uncles back from the war. Now, why would a regular fella invest his money when he could blow it on booze and broads and a little gambling now and then?

As many Rap Sheet readers probably know already, Gault had another friend, too, with the last name of Macdonald. As Robert L. Gale explained in his 2002 book, A Ross Macdonald Companion, Gault met author Ross Macdonald (né Kenneth Millar), the creator of Los Angeles private eye Lew Archer, “at a party in San Diego in 1951 given by E.T. Guymon Jr., an avid collector of detective books. Gault moved from Pacific Palisades to Santa Barbara in 1958 and joined with Macdonald and others at regularly scheduled writers’ lunches. In 1976 Macdonald asked Gault to suggest changes in The Blue Hammer at proof stage. Gault hesitantly did so and was pleased to note that passages he thought should be deleted were gone. Grateful, Macdonald dedicated the novel to Gault.” It’s testament to Gault’s political open-mindedness that he and the considerably more liberal Macdonald should have become good friends.

I can only share regrets voiced by Pronzini, Gorman, and others that William Campbell Gault--whose books are sufficiently captivating that you’ll want to read more than one at a time--has largely been forgotten, most of his work long out of print. Breen captured the novelist’s significance nicely in Mystery Scene when he wrote: “Gault was one of the strongest voices in genre fiction for ethical behavior and racial and political tolerance. His voice was so distinctive, few fans would fail to recognize it in a blind test. Artificial distinctions of genre aside, he was a serious writer, as concerned with social issues and non-simplistic morality as with telling a fast-moving story. Quite a few writers could plot, pace, and people a mystery as well as Gault, but not many could reach a reader as deeply on a gut level.”

If you stumble across a copy of Sweet Wild Wench, or Don’t Cry for Me, or any of Gault’s other 30 adult novels, take my advice: Pick it up. Buy it. Read. I won’t insist that you thank me right away.

READ MORE: “William Campbell Gault Interview” (Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine); “A William Campbell Gault Intro,” by Ben Boulden (Gravetapping); “Don’t Call Tonight, aka End of a Call Girl (William Campbell Gault, 1958),” by Jure P. (Alpha-60 Books).

The Fun Never Stops

If you’ve been following Killer Covers since its inception more than a year ago, you might like to know that I have updated a few of the older posts with additional artwork. Rather than throw up a new piece in this blog every time I discover another book jacket related to a theme or to somebody about whom I have previously written, I generally just go back and add to the original post.

Should you like to investigate these developments, some of the older posts that have received new artwork since their original publication are those covering artist Ernest Chiriacka, leggy covers, sideways-oriented book jackets, peeping tom fronts, summertime-appropriate covers, and suburban scandal covers.

Check ’em out again when you have a free moment.

This Makes My Week

Let me send out a special thank-you to renowned American author and editor Ed Gorman, who wrote recently in his blog:

As much as I enjoy The Rap Sheet, I have to say that J. Kingston’s Pierce’s other website runs a very close second. Each week Killer Covers deals with paperback writers and artists of various stripes. Because Jeff does so much homework I always learn something new even about people I’d been reading about for years. If you haven’t logged on yet, now’s the time.

Coming from such a distinguished critic, this means a lot.

Brown Out

Novelist Carter Brown died 25 years ago this week--which was a pretty slick trick, since he had never actually existed. At least not as a separate corporeal entity.

The author’s real name was Alan Geoffrey Yates, and he was born in London, England, on August 1, 1923. Yates served with the Royal Navy during the Second World War, and after the fighting and dying was done, he signed on as a sound recordist at a British film company for two years before moving to Australia in 1948. In Sydney, he worked as a public relations staffer and salesman for what was then known as Qantas Empire Airways, but also tried composing short stories for magazines such as Thrills Incorporated, and novel-length “scientific thrillers” for Horwitz Publications, a local book publisher (founded in 1920, and evidently still in business). His early literary efforts were intended for Australian readers. But Yates’ career trajectory and audience changed dramatically in 1951.

Toni Johnson-Woods, the author of Pulp: A Collector’s Book of Australian Pulp Fiction Covers (2004), tells of Yates’ transformation in an article available on the Web:

The persona ‘Carter Brown’ started modestly enough in the Sydney offices of Horwitz Publications in 1951. The company published locally written fiction, specifically comics and soft-covered genre novels--in common parlance, ‘pulp fiction.’ In 1939 the Australian government had established tariffs on American imports that effectively banned American pulps, and local publishers and writers stepped in to fill the fiction void. This produced Australia’s richest publishing decades, 1939-1959; when the prohibitions were lifted in 1959, the local industry died overnight. In its heyday, Horwitz Publications printed up to forty-eight comics and around twenty-four fiction titles--with print-runs of up to 250,000--each month. After the phenomenal successes of the pulp fiction writers James Hadley Chase and Mickey Spillane in the United States, the editorial team at Horwitz decided to exploit Australian readers’ appetite for faux American ‘gangster’ fiction and approached Alan Geoffrey Yates ... [Yates] was asked if he would be interested in writing a mystery series as ‘Peter Carter Brown’; he signed a thirty-year contract which required him to produce two novelettes and one full-length novel a month, and for which he was to receive a guaranteed weekly advance of 30 [pounds sterling].

In September 1951 The Lady Is Murder, by Peter Carter Brown, appeared in Australia; seven years and millions of copies later, Horwitz Publications sold the overseas rights to reprint Carter Brown novels to an American publisher, Signet. Over a period of thirty years, from the early fifties to the early eighties, Yates wrote approximately three hundred Carter Brown novels. In the process, he became Australia’s best-selling novelist: Signet claimed international sales of eighty million copies, and the series was translated into more than a dozen languages.

Three hundred books? That’s approaching Georges Simenon’s phenomenal output. It’s no wonder, then, that although Yates enjoyed his increase in pay (£30 was almost double his Qantas salary), he found his writing pace for Horwitz rather grueling. Just looking at the lists of works he churned out in 1951-1956, 1957-1963, and 1964-1985 might make a normal wordsmith dive to join the dust bunnies under his bed. As Johnson-Woods explains in another essay, this one available on the Mystery*File site:

In 1955 Yates wrote 20 books, the following year 25 appeared--like [fellow Aussie pulp fiction writer Gordon Clive] Bleeck he was writing a new novel every fortnight. In 1960 Lyall Moore of Horwitz calculated that Yates had published about eight million words: “but to get there he has probably written twice the number.” Given Yates’ ability to write 40,000 words overnight, Horwitz were confident when they signed a contract with Signet for Yates to produce one new novel per month. He had been writing that for the past several years.

Who didn’t see that no one could plot, write, and edit one 127-page novel a month? Especially when the writer lives in Sydney, has to submit his mss [manuscript] to local editors (at Horwitz), who then edit and send [it] off to Signet. Signet editors then revised the mss and sent [it] back to Horwitz for approval; Horwitz sent the material back to Yates. It was a pretty straightforward but time-consuming [arrangement]. Often Yates’ material did not receive his approval, naturally. Soon Yates was behind and more than a little peeved. Signet had made “a new novel a month” the cornerstone of their Carter Brown publicity. The Signet archives are filled with correspondence that reflects the constant treadmill of late mss and attempts to fill the voids.

As a result of this regimen, the Carter Brown books were pretty uneven in quality. At their best, they could be likened to novels produced by such contemporaries as Richard S. Prather, Frank Kane, Harold Q. Masur, and Robert Leslie Bellem. Yet William L. DeAndrea, in Encyclopedia Mysteriosa, characterizes them as “fun and forgettable.” A number of the Carter tales were standalones; but Yates also served up several continuing leads, among them Hollywood private investigator Rick Holman (“savior of blackmailed film starlets”), New York-based detective Danny Boyd, hard-drinking Southern California homicide cop Al Wheeler, and “torrid blonde private eye” Mavis Seidlitz. These revolving protagonists helped to differentiate the books from one another; the plots themselves might have worked fine with any of Yates’ sleuths at the helm.

Even at the height of their popularity, recalls novelist James Reasoner, the Brown books “didn’t get much respect.” (This, despite the fact that one of Yates’ editors at Signet was the now-famous litterateur, E.L. Doctorow.) That lack of acclaim hardly mattered, however. The books “just sold and sold and sold some more,” Reasoner notes. At various stages, Signet claimed to have 20 million, 40 million, and 50 million Carter Brown books in print. During the 1960s, every drug store, bookstore, and newsstand seemed to have been invaded by slim paperbacks with the byline “Carter Brown” angled across their tops. And it’s said that Brown/Yates was an even bigger sensation in Europe than he was in the United States.

Ignoring his British roots and his residency Down Under, Yates set his stories in America, mostly in California. And he attributed his publishing success to his ability to “think like an American,” even though he never quite understood exactly how to use Yankee slang.

Reasoner, meanwhile, credits the popularity of these works to their provocative plots and racy dialogue. “The fact that they were often pretty funny, sometimes had surprisingly complex mysteries, and read extremely fast probably had something to do with it, too,” he remarks. It hardly seemed to matter to readers that, as the Web site Books and Writers points out, “The plots have turns that are not very believable. In one story a nightclub is used as a distribution center for drugs. The stripper hides heroin into her G-string and swaps it during her performance for a buyer’s tie in which the payoff is sewn into the lining.” In another book, Good Morning, Mavis (1957), the curvaceous Ms. Seidlitz “travels to New Orleans, where she is kissed several times during Mardi Grass festival and proposed [to] once. Her client is killed and becomes a zombie--or so Mavis believes. She is kidnapped by a monk and a jester and then saved by an undercover detective from the district attorney’s office.” So long as Yates stuffed his yarns with “action, wisecracks, coarse humor, [and] plenty of voluptuous un- and underdressed sexpots,” to quote Art Scott, readers forgave him his literary faults.

What really helped the Carter Brown novels to leap from shelves into the deep pockets of lonely men and teenagers who hadn’t yet experienced any of the acts so available to Yates’ protagonists, though, were their covers. Those covers promising wanton redheads and winsome nymphomaniacs. The covers with the busty women challenging their bikinis’ architecture, and young lovelies with smoky looks and impossibly long legs and nothing but the barest suggestion of fabric (at best) to conceal their shapely asses. The covers with the spicy, playful titles: The Bump and Grind Murders, Nymph to the Slaughter, Nude--With a View, The Pornbroker, Blonde on a Broomstick, The Plush-Lined Coffin, The Myopic Mermaid, The Girl Who Was Possessed. The covers by American artists such as Ron Lesser, Barye Phillips, and Robert McGinnis. Especially Robert McGinnis, whose Carter Brown book fronts became as recognizable as those he illustrated for Brett Halliday, M.E. Chaber, and Edward S. Aarons. (The cover atop this post, from Long Time No Leola [1967], is an excellent example of McGinnis’ art.) The best of the Brown jackets appeared during the 1960s; a decade later, new editions were carrying much less eye-popping photo fronts.

I won’t try to feature all of the Carter Brown jackets below; instead, here are some samples of the myriad editions that have been published around the world (click on the covers for enlargements):

(Interested in seeing more? Click here, here, and here.)

While Alan G. Yates never attained the critical respect enjoyed by Thomas B. Dewey, Talmage Powell, John D. MacDonald, or others; and he never had the impact on the genre that somebody like Mickey Spillane did, he was at least acknowledged for his immense body of work. In 1997, the Crime Writers’ Association of Australia bestowed upon him its Lifetime Achievement Award. Unfortunately, Yates wasn’t around to receive that honor. The man once known as Carter Brown died on May 5, 1985.

READ MORE: “Toni Johnson-Woods on the Carter Brown Mystery Theatre” (Mystery*File); “Fiction: Carter Brown--None But the Lethal and The Tigress,” by Bryin Abraham (Mostly Crappy Books); Bookgasm’s Bruce Grossman has reviewed a number of the Carter Brown novels; and don’t forget to check out The Nick Carter & Carter Brown Blog.