Due to some scheduling glitches, for the first time my Book Club will be discussing not one but two mystery novels at this month’s meeting. The first is The Dead Can Tell (1940) by Helen Reilly, and the new edition by Woodside Press beautifully reconstructs the old Dell Mapback cover on front and back, as well as the cast of characters and List of Exciting Chapters that Dell was famous for. Unfortunately, this edition also contains Reilly’s book – which I found unfathomable. And so I will sit silently as the rest of Book Club discusses it. (f you want to read an opinion, fellow BC member Kate Jackson had this to say. (And believe me, I liked it even less than she did!)

But, oh, what a treat we had in store for Book #2!

Under the pen name A. A. Fair, Erle Stanley Gardner wrote thirty adventures about private detective Bertha Cool and her only operative, Donald Lam, a runt who measures 5’6” and weighs 130 pounds soaking wet. I have only read their debut novel, The Bigger They Come (1939), and that was over three years ago. I liked it just fine – fine enough to go forth and scoop up twenty-six more titles, which have languished on my shelf next to my District Attorney Doug Selby collection and just above the Perry Masons. In my defense, the itch to read another Cool & Lam adventure has been hanging about for a while, and so I decided to broach the topic with Book Club, since we all seem to like Perry Mason, to see whether they had a hankering to sample another side of Gardner’s writing.

Good news – Book Club bit! The challenge was that JJ, my good pal who writes at The Invisible Event, has been taking a chronological journey through the Cool and Lam series, and he wasn’t about to change his trajectory. That limited us to the next book on JJ’s list: 1956’s Beware the Curves. This is the 15^th or 16^th adventure, depending upon how you place the “rediscovered” The Knife Slipped.  I wasn’t too worried about going out of order since, like the Masons, a chronological approach, although appealing, isn’t really necessary. Based on JJ’s reviews, which I tend to read with one eye closed (I don’t want to spoil anything), I know that the quality of these stories varies, much like the Mason novels. Well, SPOILER ALERT: Beware the Curves is a delight!

You can tell from the first line that Gardner is having a blast writing this book: “Big Bertha Cool displayed all of the ingratiating mannerisms of a hippopotamus acting coy during the season of courtship.” Bertha loves money, and she can sniff out a client she believes is rolling in dough, a client like John Dittmar Ansel, the “tall drink of water with the dark eyes of a poet” who shows up asking if the firm can locate someone for him, a man named Karl Something-or-Other, who once gave Ansel a knockout idea for a story he wishes to write. Ansel claims to have met Karl six years ago in Paris, and all he can remember is that the man came from Citrus Heights, California and was traveling on his honeymoon with his wife, a beautiful woman named Betty. 

Being the ace P.I. that he is, Donald Lam doesn’t believe a word of this story. After easily locating Karl, he starts to gather more information, which he uses to his advantage with the client and with every person he subsequently meets. Nobody throws obstacles at his heroes better than Gardner/Fair, and nobody finds more entertaining ways for his heroes to get out of these scrapes. Before long, Donald is knee deep in the scandals of Citrus Heights, fending off the attentions of corrupt politicians and beautiful dames, as he investigates the increasingly complicated history of a past murder. 

I won’t spoil all the wonderful twists and turns for you. Suffice it to say that it all leads to an arrest and a murder trial. At one point, Donald advises his client to seek legal representation, and the client replies that inquiries have been made about a couple of excellent attorneys in Los Angeles. (Hmmm . . . I wonder who that could be!) Donald advises the client to seek local counsel, which is probably the right thing to do – but I couldn’t help thinking how close we might have gotten to a Cool and Lam and Mason crossover tale!!!

The attorney for the defense, Barney Quinn, happens to be an old law school buddy of Donald’s, and their relationship throughout is a hilarious inverse of the friendship between Perry Mason and Paul Drake. In a typical Mason case, Drake mopes about and warns Perry that he doesn’t stand a chance getting his client off. Here, Donald basically runs Barney’s case for him, showing him the ropes on how to give his client the best defense possible. Meanwhile, the prosecuting attorney, Mortimer Irving, is a politically ambitious matinee idol type who woos the female witnesses and jurors with his good looks and “the well-modulated voice of a man who has taken a course in dramatics in college.” There might be more courtroom action here than in many a Mason novel, and it’s a delightful section where the defendant’s fortunes go up and down like a yoyo. Unlike Mason’s cases, this one ends on a much messier note, but it’s no less clever or satisfying a denouement than some of the tight squeezes Perry has gotten out of at the last minute. 

Unfortunately, Bertha Cool has to wait around for a long time before we get to see her spring into action. Mostly, she grouses at Donald for marching to his own beat; however, she can’t complain at the results he gets. Meanwhile, Lam is both assisted and stymied by a luscious thing named Stella Karis, who may be good, or bad, or a little bit of both, but is definitely a babe: “ She had on some sort of a fluffy creation which kept popping open around the throat, and long bell-shaped sleeves that would have trailed in the coffee, across the fried eggs and into the toast if she hadn’t been some kind of an indoor acrobat and managed to grab the trailing cloth just in time.”

In the Doug Selby books, Gardner’s writing is earnest; in the Masons, it’s fast-paced, often gripping. Here, as A. A. Fair, Gardner is having the time of his life: Bertha Cool is one of a kind, and in Donald Lam the author has created a character who might just tie Perry Mason as my favorite in the Gardner-verse. Honestly, I have so many books here to read, folks! – and I cannot wait to revisit the offices of Cool and Lam very soon.