William Campbell Gault, who Bill Pronzini called in his introduction to Gault's Dead Pigeon (1992) "a legend in his own time," had four distinct literary careers. In the 1930s and 1940s he wrote about three hundred short stories, mostly for pulp magazines, and then in the 1950s he made a successful transition to mystery novels, mostly about hard-boiled private detectives. In an interview with David Wilson in the 6 June 1982 Los Angeles Times , Gault explained the appeal of the hardboiled detective: "It's the individual man . . . It's a revolt against the corporate and the conglomerate man, just one dirty guy doing a seedy job in a miserable world." In the early 1960s through the late 1970s he left mystery writing to concentrate on young-adult sports books but then, after a hiatus of almost twenty years, he returned with The Bad Samaritan (1982) for another decade of mystery writing.

William Campbell Gault was...