Decade by Decade, Part 7: Lam and Cool

Erle Stanley Gardner (pictured here) is best remembered today for his excellent Perry Mason novels, but he was an incredibly prolific author during the days of the pulp magazines, publishing stories about dozens of different characters in dozens of different magazines.

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And he was good--a magnificent storyteller who was an expert in constructing intricate mystery and adventure plots. His Mason stuff probably is his best, but you can read just about anything he wrote and have a good time.

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In 1939, Gardner (using the pen name A. A. Fair) wrote the first of a series of novels about Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. Bertha is the owner of a detective agency. She's overweight, mildly profane, mildly unscrupulous and very, very stingy. She's also smart and tough as nails.

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Perhaps the smartest thing she did was hire disbarred lawyer Donald Lam as her primary investigator. Donald barely tops five feet in height--he doesn't seem to be very tough and, in fact, he gets beaten up an awful lot. But he never gives up and he never stops thinking. In fact, as Gardner tells us, he has "a brain that worked so fast that sometimes he couldn't keep up with it himself."

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Together, Bertha and Donald make a great pair of protagonists in a series of twenty-nine novels published between 1939 and 1970 (the year of Gardner's death).

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The second novel--Turn On the Heat--was published in 1940 and will act as our gateway into that decade. In this one, Bertha's agency is hired by a man who is obviously using an alias, but pays good money to track down a woman who went missing twenty years earlier. The client will not explain why.

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Donald investigates and soon discovers that at least two other people have also been looking for the long-lost woman. Before long, Donald is threatened and beaten up, but he keeps on asking questions.

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Soon, there's a murder thrown into the mix. Soon after that, dirty politics in a small town become a factor. Donald is framed on a hit-and-run charge by a corrupt cop and it looks like their client might be pegged for the murder. With Bertha's sometimes reluctant support, Donald makes plans and improvises when necessary as he stays one step ahead of everyone else, finally gathering up enough information to blow the lid off the case.

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It's a fast-moving plot which manages to bring all its seemingly disparate elements together coherently at the end. But it's the interplay between Bertha and Donald that really makes it fun. Both are great characters on their own. Together, they give the already fine plot a unique flavor that makes Turn On the Heat a great mystery novel.