WILLIAM CAMPBELL GAULT – Death in Donegal Bay. PI Brock (the Rock) Callahan #10. Walker & Co., hardcover, 1984. Charter, paperback, 1987.

   William Campbell Gault sold his first short story to a pulp magazine in 1936; nearly half a century later, he is still writing fiction of the same high quality that has marked his long and prolific career. He has published more than 300 short stories and novelettes — mystery, fantasy, science fiction, sports — and some sixty novels, half of which are mystery/suspense and half of which are juvenile sports books.

   Gault’s most enduring fictional creation is ex-L.A. Rams football player turned private eye Brock Callahan, hero of eleven novels thus far. The first in the series, Ring Around Rosa, was published in 1955; six others followed it over the next eight years. Gault abandoned detective fiction in 1963 to concentrate on the more lucrative juvenile market, and did not return to a life of fictional crime until the early 1980s, when the juvenile vein had been played out. Callahan was given a new life as well, in a pair of paperback originals published by the short-lived Raven House; one of these, The Cana Diversion, was the recipient of the Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Award for the Best Paperback Original of 1982.

   Death in Donegal Bay is Gault’s first hardcover mystery in more than twenty years, an even better novel than Cana Diversion and as good as the best of the early Callahans, Day of the Ram (1956), The Convertible Hearse (1957), and County Kill (1962). Callahan, thanks to a substantial inheritance, is now married to his longtime girlfriend, Jan, an interior decorator, and semi-retired in the beach community of San Valdesto (Santa Barbara, where Gault himself lives).

   But he’s bored and has kept a hand in the detective business by grooming a protege, young Corey Raleigh. When Corey is hired for a surveillance job by con man named Alan Arthur Baker, Callahan worries that the kid has gotten in over his head and therefore sets out to do some snooping on his own. Among the people he encounters in the swanky former artists· colony of Donegal Bay are a conniving real-estate salesman, a couple of kids who run a bait shop, an ex-pug bar owner, a secretive former maid, a beautiful woman with a shady past, and an eccentric millionaire who lives in a medieval castle complete with moat and drawbridge.

   The murder of a vagrant opens up a Pandora’s box of blackmail, narcotics, infidelity, and more homicide before Callahan, with Corey’s help, untangles it all and arrives at the solution.

   Rich in incident, written with wry humor and sharp observation, peopled with believable characters, this is William Campbell Gault at his best.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.