Note: Who to cast as Donald Lam? Cagney - too pugnacious, not smart enough. William Powell - too old. Alan Ladd - too young. Dick Powell - perfect in his 30s, yes, but older, no. As Bertha Cool? Marie Dressler had a commanding presence, but too matronly. Thelma Ritter - too small. Lucille Ball - only after 1960, hard to picture her smacking somebody, but possibly.... Geraldine Wall in her 40s - about perfect.
Give 'em the Ax - A. A. Fair aka Erle Stanley Gardner
In this 1944 mystery Donald Lam returns Stateside from duty in the Pacific. The hardcore reader trusts the Navy got a lot of milage out of Lam’s sharp legal mind – which got him disbarred when he talked too much to a gangster about how to get away with murder. Suffering from malaria sequelae, he's been discharged from Navy Intelligence with symptoms such as decreased appetite and unpredictable onsets of sudden fatigue. The sharp legal mind is subject to brain fog like memory problems, difficulty focusing, and slower less efficient processing.
He finds in a precarious state the detective agency that before Pearl Harbor he ran with partner Bertha Cool. Cool and Lam had attracted complex cases with serious money, headlines, and the enmity of the cops involved. But after Lam’s deployment, business fell back to the penny-ante insurance and cheating spouse stuff, though the professional animosity from Sgt Sellars of the authorities continued. Paradoxically, Sgt Sellars has a thing for Bertha because she is what he looks for in a woman: tough and practical.
And that’s Bertha’s problem when she’s client-facing. Bad-tempered Bertha is smarmy when she attempts charm. Her obvious faking of care and concern turns potential clients off. The office manager Elsie Brand, target of Bertha’s acting out, tells Lam that the only reason she stayed on was to try to hold the business together. Another reason is that Elsie is in love with Lam. Manipulative monster Lam pretends not to know her feelings for him though it would a tough lift to find somebody as loyal, smart, and kind as Elsie, an ideal Gardnerian woman like Della Street.
Lam is a client-pleaser because he’s such a good listener. So on his first day of popping into the office, a new case comes their way. It’s hardly a lulu. Admitting to being a home-wrecker, a woman wants a private detective agency to get something on her boss’ new wife. The woman says she and the boss were very “close,” but when she returned from a long vacation, the boss, pining and bereft, married a woman he had met when the two had a car accident together. Angry and hurt, the woman wants the goods on the new wife. Ho-hum, nothing to get excited about here.
Eager to get back in the saddle, Lam luckily finds the wife in the Rimley Rendezvous. This is a nightclub that has tapped the afternoon market of bored married women who are looking for afternoon delight. The operator of the club, a hard case named HJH, recognizes Lam and throws him out since a PI on the cheating side of town is “as welcome as smallpox on an ocean liner.”
Pressed to time, Donald calls Bertha. He describes the owner and tells Bertha to tail him when he leaves the club. The tail job ends in an auto accident, which will be followed by an ax murder. Lam finds himself involved with a cigarette girl with legs up to here, who's way close to the murder.
Highly recommended.
