Mortimer Jones

Created by William Campbell Gault
Pseudonyms include Roney Scott, Will Duke, David Crewe & Ray P. Shotwell
(1910-1995)

Like many of William Campbell Gault‘s private dicks, Los Angeles gumshoe MORTIMER “JONESY”JONES, is just a regular Joe, a beer-drinking guy into sports and cars. He showed up is half a dozen stories in Black Mask in the forties, with a final one wrapping up the series in 1949 in New Detective Magazine.

An obvious dry-run for Gault’s Brock Callahan and Joe Puma, his biggest quirk might be that he drives a Duesenberg, which gave editors an excuse to tag him as “the Duesy-driving dick.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Besides Brock, William Campbell Gault was also responsible for several other one-shot PI’s, who appeared in various short stories, in the pulps and elsewhere, including Honolulu’s Sandy McKane, and Armenian gumshoe Pierre Apoyan, And then there’s perennial fuck-up PI Joe Puma, who appeared in numerous short stories and eight novels.

SHORT STORIES

• “Hot-House Homicide” (September 1946, Black Mask)
• “The Cold, Cold Ground” (January 1947, Black Mask)
• “A Murder For Mac” (March 1947, Dime Detective)
• “The Constant Shadow” (July 1947, Black Mask)
• “The Case of the Sleeping Beauty” (November 1947, Black Mask)
• “Red Runaround” (March 1948, Black Mask)
• “A Bier for Baby” (March 1949, New Detective Magazine)

COLLECTIONS

• Hot-House Homicide (2025) | Buy this book

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.