The Ides of Perry Mason 53

Note: On the 15^th of every month for way too many years now this space has presented an article related to Our Favorite Lawyer. But I have resolved to run reviews of the Cool and Lam novels that Erle Stanley Gardner wrote under his pen name.

The Bigger They Come - A. A. Fair

This smart, fast-paced mystery from 1939 was the first of 30 novels starting the private eye team of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. They are a study in contrasts. Bertha is large, loud, abrasive, and shrewd. Donald is small, subtle, and quick-witted. Bertha is a hard-charging penny-pincher and doesn’t care she’s in a business chock full of male lunkheads on both sides of the law. Donald is an ex-lawyer, disbarred for ethical violations by the persnickety bar association in California. Bertha and Donald are both devious and mean. As for unscrupulous, Donald is, a little, and Bertha is too, a whole lot.

With no qualifications except knowledge of the law, a way with people, and cleverness, Donald is hired by Bertha as an operative. His first assignment seems straight-forward enough: locate a missing husband and serve divorce papers on him. Going beyond the call of duty, however, he gets that job done by disguising himself as a bellboy. Though Bertha warns him not to obtain a gun, he gets one anyway but the weapon ends up being the gun that killed a police detective in Kansas City. A brunette falls in love with him and we read a hot make-out scene we’d never find in a Perry Mason novel. It’s a busy first-day at work indeed.

There are two set-pieces that the reader feels Gardner wanted to get off his chest. After he serves the papers, Donald is kidnapped by gangsters and worked over brutally though they are careful not to break anything in the way of teeth or bones. Donald impresses them with his courageous refusal to spill. As the beating was only business, nothing personal, they help him clean up, give him some clean clothes, and give him a ride to his rooming house. A mug gives him advice on how to fight in a “voice holding a note of impersonal boredom as though he’d been softening people until it had become a routine chore, and he felt aggrieved about being called upon to perform it after five o’clock.” Gardner wrote for pulps so one feels in a novel he had the urge to stretch out and portray gangsters less as ravening beasts in human guise and more as professionals just getting on with a job.

Gardner may have been consciously blowing up stereotypes with the characterization of Bertha Cool. For instance, our heroes locate the house where Donald was beaten. The crime boss figures they show up to exact revenge. Bertha demonstrates her unladylike callousness:

“Nuts,” Mrs. Cool said. “We’re not wasting time over that. You beat him up — it’s good for him — toughen him up some. Beat him up again if you want to, only don’t leave him so he can’t go to work at eight-thirty in the morning. I don’t give a damn how he spends his evenings.”

Another set piece the reader feels Gardner felt impelled to write involves Donald’s run-in with the police and a deputy district attorney which results in him being jailed for a couple of days. Suffice to say, while Gardner felt that citizens should cooperate with the police when the situation calls for collaboration, he also thought that taxpayers ought to have no illusions about overbearing cops, police abuses, interrogators’ fatherly tones, prosecutorial misconduct, and civic corruption. In many of his novels he reminds us not to talk to the police without legal representation. The minders of the criminal justice system have done what they do with persons of interest hundreds of times; the little guy like us persons of interest has never mixed with the cops. Who holds the winning cards in this situation?

Anyway, in the somewhat breathless final third of the novel Lam dramatically proves his original hypothesis that it is possible to legally get away with murder by using himself as an experimental subject and the guardians of the criminal justice system as research assistants. This true-to-life loophole in California law was not shut tight until 1966.

Told in Donald’s lively first-person voice, this story has the elements of pulp fiction but not noir fiction. Noir fiction has psychological elements of distress and self-loathing which are not in evidence in this story. It took World War II, the most destructive war in history, for noir to get as jittery and alienated as In a Lonely Place. The violence of the beating scene in this novel is not sociopathic, but played very dryly, as all in a day’s work.

More than in the manner of Perry Mason tales, the tone of Cool and Lam novels is hard-boiled in the sense that characters and readers too are assumed to be tough-minded, clear-eyed, unsentimental and cynical, wise to the world of hard knocks the Depression made, one where you had to be thick-skinned and mean.