Mount TBR #3

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

The Knife Slipped – Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A. A. Fair

In 1939 when Gardner submitted the second Bertha Cool – Donald Lam PI mystery, the publisher rejected it. The afterword of this 2016 Hard Case Crime edition has no speculation as to why the publisher passed. However, I imagine that the publisher thought readers would be uncomfortable with three aspects of the novel.

The character of Bertha Cool is unlikeable. She’s greedy, gluttonous, profane, and sarcastic. Gardner does something he never did anywhere else in the dozens of novels of his that I’ve read: he has a character express cynicism over the endless tolerance Americans have for the hollow clowns that lead them.

The necking scenes are steamy. All the dames that cross his path fall for Donald Lam. Our city girl in a jam, a stock character in Gardner-land, loses her heart to him for his knack for sympathetic listening and his seeming need of mending and cheering up. The necking scene in the car just before the killing is – whoosh. Gardner always kept Perry Mason and Della Street platonic and in the later Cool & Lam novels things are playfully sexy, but the boldness in this one is such that I can see why publishers may have felt nervous.

The scheme that the story turns on is all complicated up with adultery, approaching the complexity of Hammett’s Red Harvest. Gardner, ever interested in how scams ticked, examines the rigging of the Civil Service exam system and the advantages of such corruption for the police. Furthermore, the reveal of the true perp is, for me, delightfully convoluted, but readers not used to Gardnerian twists – Lam does some funny business with the murder weapon - may disagree.

After the publisher nixed this novel, Gardner put it in a drawer and forgot it. He wasn’t one to tinker with stories, he just moved on, so endless was his invention when it came to coming up with stories. The publisher Hard Case Crime is to be commended for bringing out this lost episode of the Cool & Lam saga. I highly recommend to this fans of 1930s noir (there are smoking stands galore) and of course to fans who are happy whenever Elsie Brand is in the scene.