Fair Prey

by William Campbell Gault, Will Duke (Pseudonym)

A golf ace on the verge of glory stumbles over a country-club corpse.

Paperback

First published January 1, 1956

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

[David Baldwin]

Not much of a mystery: there's no clueing or detecting, and the murder is solved when our hero--more or less out of the blue--simply remembers some relevant facts that point to the killer, facts that were previously wholly unshared with the reader. Pleasant reading all the same!

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gault's most well-known forays into the mystery arena include his Joe Puma and Brock Callahan series. Fair Prey is a standalone mystery that is set in the fancy Pacific Palisades country clubs and features a young caddy from a middle class family and his encounters with the upper class echelon including the family of Judy Faulkner, the girl next door type whose father was a Multi millionaire and another family whose son Bud had dated Judy and was as brash and arrogant as they come. The story involves murder, infidelity, country club gossip and most of all golf. Indeed, there's in depth play by play golf action here.

Denny Burke knows two things, that he wants to become a professional golfer and that he's in love with Rich Judy Faulkner. What really makes this golf-murder story is the narrator's voice that makes it all ring true and Gault found that voice in Denny Burke.

This story is quite a bit different from anything else by Gault that I've read, but it works really well.