Note: For many years, this column focused on Our Favorite Lawyer. But out of the sheer need for variety, we sometimes turn to the 30 Cool and Lam novels.
The Knife Slipped – Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A. A. Fair
The second Bertha Cool and Donald Lam crime novel was written in 1939 soon after the first, TheBigger They Come. A no-nonsense mother and her distraught daughter hire the PI team of Cool and Lam to catch the daughter’s husband in the act of adultery. Bertha, the head of the PI agency, showcases her candid character:
Oh, for Christ’s sake, cut out the weeps! By God, you’d think your husband was the only man on earth who ever stepped out. They all do — those that are able. Personally, I wouldn’t have a man who was true to me, not that I’d want him to flaunt his affairs in my face or to the neighborhood, but a man who doesn’t step out once in a while isn’t worth the powder and shot to blow him to hell.
Seasoned writer of hundreds of stories and a dozen Perry Mason novels by 1939, Gardner unfolds an elaborate plot with a case that goes from cheating to racketeering to corruption to murder.
The action is punctuated by our hero Donald Lam, whom a crook describes as slight and delicate as “the second hand on a lady’s wristwatch.” Lam gets kidnapped, manhandled, beaten, concussed, and, barely alive, measured for evening clothes by a tailor intimidated into a rush job by Bertha. Between Lam and Ruth Marr, who is smitten with him, is a hilarious scene – he wants to get down to cases to sidestep a murder charge, she wants to explore her self-esteem and relationship issues.
The reveal of the true perp is convoluted in the intelligent Gardnerian manner, but readers not used to the author’s twists and turns – Lam conducts funny business with the murder weapon - may end up confused and disgruntled.
In keeping with the pulp nature of the story, the snappy, wise-cracking dialogue evokes the mood of the Dirty Thirties. That is, the tone is a blend of cocky brash defiance that feels very American; a sour dismay with the endlessness of the Depression; and uneasy certainty that coming is yet another war to fight in wicked old Europe. Lam observes that America is a “hard, cruel” country, a risky statement to make in front of a readership filled with just folks that pride themselves on their optimism, confidence, friendliness, and warmth. In another jab, Bertha goes sulfurous over the endless tolerance we Americans have for the hollow clowns that lead us.
This frankness may be a reason the publisher rejected it, as not in keeping with the correct can-do attitude toward truth, justice and the American way that nervous times called for. Speculation aside, the fact is that an editor thought the Bertha Cool character was too profane and always trying to cheat her clients. Bertha really is a card, as one hard-bitten policeman observes wearily, and she says “I like loose clothes, loose company, and loose talk, and to hell with people who don't.” Bertha makes the reader groan with her smarm in always calling Donald “lover” and referring to herself in the third person, greedily, with breezy promises “Remember, lover, what Bertha Cool said. She wouldn’t cut herself a piece of cake without seeing that you had a slice.”
The editor also thought that the novel was “too risqué.” Gardner handles sex in a way that puritanical Americans would think bold with lines like “She was as conscious of her sex as a kid is of a new bicycle on Christmas morning,” not to mention Bertha’s advice to the lovelorn: “Love them where you find them and leave them where you love them.” Ruth Marr, our unworldly girl that’s made poor choices (a stock character in Gardner World) loses her heart to Donald Lam for his air of detachment, capability, and self-reliance, all qualities the Great War and the Depression taught Americans to cultivate. Donald gives her a hundred dollars for expense money and she buys “a silk dressing gown with … rose-coloured mules peeping out from underneath the trousers of pajamas which seemed to be composed of black silk netting.”
After the publisher nixed this novel, Gardner put it in a drawer and toned down Bertha – a little - for later novels. This mystery saw the light of day only in 2015. 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 because there are period references galore, from The Gumps to smoking stands to directions on how to game apartment house elevators. But without reservation I also think this is one of the best things Gardner ever wrote and I had a fun time re-reading it, something I rarely do with mysteries.
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