Shakedown: A Joe Puma Mystery

by William Campbell Gault

A corrupt P.I. will do anything to make a buck and save his own skin
Joe Puma didn’t kill Albert Target, but he is happy the pimp is dead. A small-time creep whose niche was recruiting wannabe actresses, Target perjured himself for Puma’s sake, and the detective was afraid he might decide to talk. The cops know that Puma’s crooked, but they can’t prove a thing. He’s a slick operator with an itchy trigger finger and a flimsy moral code—two things he’ll need if his next case is to end as happily as his last. Fallen starlet Jean Roland comes to Puma with a plan to blackmail her lesbian lover’s father—a dangerous scheme that would put Puma off if Roland weren’t the most stunning woman in Los Angeles. Joe Puma likes money and he likes being alive, but he likes women even more. He’d die for a girl like Jean Roland—but he’d prefer it if someone else died first.

146 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1953

About the author

William Campbell Gault (1910–1995) was a critically acclaimed pulp novelist. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he took seven years to graduate from high school. Though he was part of a juvenile gang, he wrote poetry in his spare time, signing it with a girl’s name lest one of his friends find it. He sold his first story in 1936, and built a great career writing for pulps like Paris Nights, Scarlet Adventures, and the infamous Black Mask. In 1939, Gault quit his job and started writing fulltime.

When the success of his pulps began to fade in the 1950s, Gault turned to longer fiction, winning an Edgar Award for his first mystery, Don’t Cry for Me (1952), which he wrote in twenty-eight days. He created private detectives Brock Callahan and Joe Puma, and also wrote juvenile sports books like Cut-Rate Quarterback (1977) and Wild Willie, Wide Receiver (1974). His final novel was Dead Pigeon (1992), a Brock Callahan mystery.


Series:
* Brock 'The Rock' Callahan
* Joe Puma

Reviews

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shakedown was the very first of Gault's Joe Puma novels, but it has very little to do with the other Joe Puma novels. It seems likely that Gault simply reused the name Joe Puma for his new private eye five years later in End of a Call Girl.

Shakedown is nasty and hardboiled with almost no soft edges. The Joe Puma here is capable of just about anything and little more than a crook, a conman, a conniver, a backstabber, a pimp, a tough guy, a blackmailer, and a witness tamperer. It is the story of a rotten unsentimental guy who thinks he knows a way out a frame up and has no loyalty to anyone. It's a narrative told by a tough guy operator from his perspective and it works real well as a hardboiled story.

[DOLLY · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prodigious job in developing the characters.

[Jim Davis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Weak combination of mystery, noir and hard-boiled detective. Joe Puma was unlikable and I didn't feel any sympathy for the things that happened to him because of his greed.