Rita - Ray Gaulden

Ray Gaulden (1916-1984) was once a fairly well-known Western writer, turning out approximately 125 stories for various Western pulps between 1945 and 1960. He also wrote more than a dozen Western novels, including a few under the pseudonym Wesley Ray. One of his novels, GLORY GULCH, was adapted into the movie FIVE CARD STUD. He was born down the road from me in Fort Worth, something I didn’t know about him until I started looking up information for this post.

His only non-Western novel, as far as I know, is RITA, published by Zenith Books in 1959. That’s my somewhat beaten up copy in the scan above. I don’t know the artist, but it’s a pretty effective cover.

The plot is standard 1950s hardboiled. Our protagonist, Joe Duncan (not his real name, as Gaulden quickly makes clear) is on the run with a suitcase full of money he stole from his partner in running a casino in Reno, Nevada. Joe’s wife and the partner were fooling around, so Joe figures he has a right to the money. But he knows he needs to hide out until the heat dies down, so he heads for a little fishing town in the Pacific Northwest where his family visited when he was a kid. He intends to settle down there with his new name and the stolen hundred grand.

Then, wouldn’t you know it, just before he gets there he almost runs over Rita Gale, a beautiful young babe who throws herself in front of his car. She lives in the little town that’s Joe’s destination. One of her brothers is the local chief of police. The other is a brutal, ruthless “special deputy”. Once they figure out Joe is on the lam and may have a lot of loot with him, they’re determined to get their hands on it, even if that means torture and murder.

All the action in RITA takes place in about 24 hours, which is good because I like books that have compressed time frames like that. Gaulden weaves a couple of other strands into the plot, including the local doctor and the doctor’s beautiful wife, but mostly the book is about Joe surviving his various encounters with the vicious Gale brothers. He takes a lot of punishment, too, and isn’t the most effective or likable protagonist, although the Gales are so despicable you can’t help but root for him.

Other than being featured in the title and on the cover and starting the action off, Rita is really a fairly minor supporting character for most of the book. The doctor and the doctor’s wife are more important and are good characters. Gaulden keeps things moving along in the same sort of nice, hardboiled prose you find in his Westerns, and the plot has some clever twists in it. I enjoyed this book enough that I’m sorry Gaulden didn’t write more in the hardboiled crime genre.

Zenith Books, by the way, was a short-lived (1958-60, with only 44 books published) paperback house owned by Martin Goodman, a name familiar to many of you because Goodman had a pulp line in the Thirties and Forties, published Lion Books in the early Fifties, put out many of the leading men’s adventure magazines in the Fifties and Sixties, and was the owner of Timely/Atlas/Marvel Comics for many years. There’s some evidence that Goodman’s brother Abraham actually ran Zenith Books day to day. The line had good covers and published some excellent authors, among them Harry Whittington, Day Keene, Gil Brewer, Tom Roan, Ed Lacy, Henry Kane, William Campbell Gault, and Richard Deming. The fact that it didn’t last long probably had more to do with distribution problems and crowded newsstands than anything else. The few Zenith books I’ve read were all very good, so if you ever run across any of them, odds are they’re worth reading. RITA certainly is.