Brock gets caught in a dangerous triangle between a jockey, a mobster, and L.A.’s finest blonde Gloria Malone is a big woman with a little husband, and a problem only Brock Callahan can solve. Her jockey beau, Tip, has fallen in with a half-reformed gangster, and Gloria fears trouble for the pint-sized horseman. But as Brock quickly finds, L.A.’s criminals have more to fear from Tip than he does from them. The short man has a long mean streak, a girl on the side, and a couple of illegitimate children to boot. Even his horses don’t like him. Brock isn’t surprised when someone decides to end the little gremlin’s racing career once and for all—with a carving knife. The world of horse racing is buried under a layer of grime that’s thicker than the Santa Anita racetrack’s mud after a thunderstorm. To penetrate it, Brock will have to take the whip into his own hand and do whatever it takes to stay on the horse.
Brock’s boyhood idol moves in next door before vanishing and leaving a body in his wake In Hollywood’s golden age, there was no finer swashbuckler than Fortney Grange. Decades after he last swung on a chandelier, Grange is nearly forgotten, his legacy surviving only in fuzzy black-and-white on the late-late movie channel. But to Brock Callahan, Grange remains a hero. When his idol shacks up with the aged widow next door, the ex-private investigator is starstruck. It takes a murder for the celluloid sheen to begin to fade. A strange pair of Arizona blackmailers takes up residence in a van outside Grange’s house. Grange and his new lady friend disappear, and a few days later, his agent is found dead. Though it breaks his heart, Callahan is forced to investigate the man who has given him so much joy. And it will take more than swordplay for this aging daredevil to escape the chair.
Brock finds a case that’s too juicy to refuse Brock Callahan was still playing for the Los Angeles Rams when Alan Arthur Baker first conned him. Masquerading as an investment banker, Baker talked the hapless jock out of $5,000, returning it only when Brock threatened to snap his back in half. Years later, Brock is a retired private detective living in the splendor of the Los Angeles suburbs, and Baker needs help tailing his wife, a high-priced call girl who may be in danger. The old grifter is as crooked as they come, but too charming for Brock to say no. Brock puts protégé Corey Raleigh on the case, but can’t help keeping an eye on the investigation. When the boy detective runs into trouble, Brock throws himself into the middle of a mystery involving a retired palooka, a brutal heiress, and the famous estate of one of the richest men California has ever known.
The femme was fatal She was rich, red-haired and ready for anything. Her name was Fidelia and she was a tempting bit of woman even without the three million dollars she was to inherit. Only wherever she went - and she went everywhere - murder seemed to follow. That’s how I came into the picture. My name is Joe Puma. I’m a private investigator. .She hired me to scare off the wolves. I’m big for my age, handy with my fists and a fool for trouble - especially when it looks at me the way Fidelia did. It wasn’t any picnic, though. Three million bucks wrapped in a prize package like Fidelia was powerful bait. Deadly, in fact. But some guys were just too greedy. They wouldn’t give up even if it killed them - or me.
While tangling with radicals, Brock stumbles on a colleague’s corpse Brock Callahan, ex-private investigator, is still not used to wealth and retirement. In fact he is struggling through a game of golf when the clubhouse calls with the curious news that his wife is in jail, pulled in at an anti-nuclear protest. Callahan hires Joe Puma, private detective and onetime peer, to post bail for the budding radical. A few days later, Puma is dead, and Brock begins to wonder where the student movement’s shadowy roots lie. The agitators want to stop the proposed Mirage Point reactor, which sits at the intersection of mob money, corrupt utilities, and the violent rage of the radical fringe. And as Callahan knows all too well, California doesn’t run on nuclear energy; the state is powered by the dirtiest fuel there is—old-fashioned, murderous greed.
Ex-bookie Tom Spears, framed for the murder of his wife, breaks out of prison and heads for Mexico and freedom. En route, he learns that the lawyer (and friend) who defended him has been murdered. He also discovers that his beloved wife had been unfaithful, that his lawyer friend had been one of her lovers, and that his defense had been deliberately botched. Resolving to unravel the mystery, Spears becomes entangled with his former associates and finds himself caught up in the crossfire between rival gambling syndicates.
A golf ace on the verge of glory stumbles over a country-club corpse Denny Burke knows that a golfer’s best resource isn’t a putter or a three iron, but the ability to shut out the rest of the world and focus on the game. Burke has been doing that since he was a kid, rising from poverty to a scholarship at the University of Southern California. After graduation, he takes a job at a country club’s pro shop, to rake in easy money while he considers joining the professional tour. It’s here that he falls in love with Judy Faulkner, and his ability to ignore the outside world disappears. Burke is hunting for a ball in the rough when he finds Bud Venier, priggish scion of one of the town’s wealthiest families, lying dead in the chaparral. As the murder investigation turns the club upside down, Burke doesn’t know if his next stop will be on the pro tour, or in the electric chair.
Get home early tonight. I have a key I stole last time I was there. Don’t keep me waiting. The note was lying on the front seat of my car. It was on an engraved card - scented. Deborah Huntington’s. I got mad. Who did she think she was anyway? I didn’t bother to answer. I knew damn well who she was. She was rich, spoiled and beautiful - and I was bewitched, bothered and bewildered, and just the thought of her next to me had me to my eyebrows in a sweat of excitement. But she was also a suspect for murder. And I was being paid to find the killer. My good sense kept telling me not to go home early or otherwise. So who needs good sense? You can’t take it with you. Night Lady - a smooth, hard blend of hot and cold running maidens, murderers and mayhem starring Joe Puma, William Campbell Gault’s greatest gift to private-eye lovers everywhere.
In his final case, Brock investigates the murder of his troubled college roommate Maybe Mike Gregory was too smart for football. When he and Brock Callahan roomed together at Stanford University, Mike was a second-stringer with the skill to go pro. But he squandered his talent and drifted after college, briefly working as a stockbroker before descending down society’s ladder, becoming a drunk, then an addict, and finally a snitch. The police aren’t surprised when they find him in Santa Monica, face blown off with a sawed-off shotgun, but Brock is puzzled. Even at his lowest, Mike was too smart to go out like that. Though he’s been retired for years, Brock’s investigative instincts kick in at Mike’s funeral. As he plumbs the depths of his old friend’s broken life, he uncovers a toxic cocktail of cultists, mobsters, and corrupt law enforcement. Caught in the middle, this unlucky snitch had nowhere to turn.
She was slim and she was stacked and the gold of her hair matched the gold of her bank account. In a word, she had everything. The trouble was she was too eager to give it away. The money too. I’m Joe Puma. I was hired to investigate some crackpot cult she was playing around with. The crackpots were mixed up with thugs, the blonde got mixed up in murder and I got mixed up with the blonde. And somewhere a mixed-up killer was waiting to strike again.
The fighter had a dream. . . . Some men were sewing a body into canvas. It was on the deck of a ship. There was a big seam up the middle of the canvas, and now only the face was still uncovered . . . ''You want to take a last look, champ?'' one of the men asked. ''We're about ready to dump him.'' The fighter bent to see in the moonlight. The face in the canvas was his own . . . The fighter was Luke Pilgrim, middleweight champion of the world. Luke could handle any man in the ring. He also could handle the hoods who were trying to muscle in on his next fight . . . But there was one thing he couldn't handle - and that was murder . . .
I'm to understand this couldn't be put off until Monday?" His boss, Ryder, nodded. "And no other Security Officer would do?" "No other." Doak rose. "Anything else--_sir_?" Ryder smiled. "Just one. As a guess, what do you think it is, in the old Fisher place, on the Range Road?" "Readers," Doak answered, "or why would the former Senator be so worried?" Ryder chuckled. "I can see them now, in the curtained room, huddling over an old railroad timetable. I think your guess is sound, Doak." He rose. "And there'll be other weekends. That girl can wait. She isn't going to spoil." This is a world where reading is literally a Federal offense. Really.
Newly rich, married, and bored, Brock investigates an upper-class tragedy Private detective Brock Callahan, onetime star of the Los Angeles Rams, is racing toward a touchdown when the morgue’s phone call wakes him up. His only rich relative, Uncle Homer, has just flown through the windshield of his midlife-crisis Ferrari, and Brock will never have to work again. The private detective hangs up his license, marries his longtime girlfriend, and decamps for the California hills—where he finds life among the nouveau riche to be duller than he ever imagined. However, there is one old lady—the quick-witted Maude Marner—who charms the old jock. But the day after she drops hints that she might have some work for him, she is found dead, having choked to death on her car’s exhaust in a gruesome apparent suicide. As Brock digs into the dark corners of upper-crust suburbia, he finds that no matter how you dress it up, murder is always déclassé.
Brock Callahan doesn’t have many fans left from his glory days on the gridiron. As a matter of fact, Warren Temple Lund III may be the last one. So how can Callahan refuse his request for help? It doesn’t matter that Warren is not quite twelve with assets totaling thirty-two dollars. Callahan may have a soft spot for kids, but when he sets out to find his client’s missing father, things get nasty indeed. Nobody - not the local police, the rich mother, nor her live-in-love - wants Callahan mixing in. And if he doesn’t watch his step, Callahan may find himself in a county morgue with a tag tied to his big toe . . .
To hit Brock where it hurts the most, a vengeful stranger targets the people he loves It starts with the dead cat. Ex-private investigator Brock Callahan finds the Siamese by his mailbox, its throat cut, and assumes it is a message from some crook he put away long ago. Soon a letter arrives—“The cat was first. Who is second?”—and Brock knows the threat is no joke. He hires his protégé, the ambitious young detective Corey Raleigh, to help him guard his wife and housekeeper, but Corey has troubles of his own. The kid detective is about to get an inside look at the workings of criminal justice. The cops find Corey not far from Brock’s house—half-conscious with a gun in his hand and a dead man at his feet. It’s an obvious frame-up, but to clear Corey’s name Brock will have to find the real killer, and lock him away before his wife meets the same fate as the unfortunate Siamese.
Buck grew up in the hills of southern Ohio at the same time the automobile industry was adapting cars to large engines and big fins. A guy's car said a lot about him. Most guys had a fast car with loud exhaust and stylish paint. They kept those cars immaculate and tuned up for maximum performance. Buck was no exception when it came to his car. He was different from other guys, though. He got a college education and became a manager in a local automobile-parts manufacturer. He never let bullies shove him around. Bullying was a normal part of growing up in the hills, and most guys tolerated it. But not Buck. He sometimes viciously resisted the bullies, and he was unforgiving. If they got hurt, they deserved it. When he was accused of killing a former bully, he got minimal public support, even though he thought himself the victim. His lawyer warned him to take the situation seriously. He faced an aggressive prosecutor and a good but unpredictable judge. Twists, turns, and sloppy police work jeopardized everything Buck held dear. He prayed truth would prevail.
When some strongarm hoods try to muscle in on the fight game, hefty Joe Puma is hired to find out who's doing the dirty work. What looks like a typical rackets murder turns out to be a dangerous deal for the private eye. He tussles with some trigger-happy punks and a couple of lethal beauties. Then in one quick leap from mattress to mat he finds himself in a clinch with a murderer who's still fighting, still hating, still bent . . . on the kill.
So it’s come to this. Brock “the Rock” Callahan, former gridiron star turned private eye - peeping in bedroom windows. It’s a dirty job, and not the kind Brock would normally take on. If he had a choice. But an old teammate asked him for a favor: following a stray wife. And what begins as a dirty job, gets worse, much worse. Brock becomes a hunted man — and the prime suspect in a savage murder.
She was sitting at the bar, and I could tell she was the kind of woman a married man shouldn’t look at—even once. But I thought I was safe enough—until the third martini. Then all of a sudden my wife and kids seemed very far away. When I woke up the next morning, I had a large hangover, the scent of the girl’s perfume in my nose, and a murder rap around my neck. And I couldn’t remember anything that had happened … except the girl.
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