The Ides of Perry Mason 61

Intro: On the 15th of every month for years and years now, a review of a Gardner story, usually a Perry Mason, or an episode from the original TV series has been posted. But this month we depart from custom to examine a novel The Man wrote under a pen-name.

Turn on the Heat – Erle Stanley Gardner, writing as A.A. Fair

Published in 1940, Turn on the Heat is regarded as one of the best of the 30 stories that starred the PI team of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam.

An untrustworthy client hires our protagonists to find a woman who disappeared around 20 years before. Another investigator who was poking into the case then gets murdered. Cool and Lam must find the missing woman, but throw sand into the eyes of the police to keep them from getting close to their client. The title, therefore, refers to law-school grad Lam creating confusion and distraction.

The plus is that the story gets tangled plenty fast as Cool and Lam scramble to avoid charges as accomplices after the fact. Lam tries to protect Cool by keeping her out of the loop, but as usual she blunders anyway into the thick of blackmail, assumed identities, and murder.

Another positive is that in the Cool and Lam novels, more than the Perry Mason novels, Gardner examines the rough side of local politics: bent cops, crooked politicians, co-opted news reporters, mean gangsters, and cowed citizens. As in the Mason novels, the killing takes second to the complex criminal scheme that goes sideways and leads up to the killing.

The negative is that being elaborate, plot and incident may be hard to follow and at least some of the time make demands on memory.

The young woman in trouble swoons for Lam, inevitably. Bertha Cool’s dependence on Lam to keep them out jail contrasts with her assertiveness, toughness, and unwarranted confidence.

Well-worth reading.  For the last 80 years discerning readers have rightly claimed that the Cool and Lam stories are funnier, grittier, and sexier than the Mason novels.