Perry Mason 121: The Women of Cool & Lam

Note: This fan gets the feeling that Earl Stanley Gardner wrote the Perry Mason novels in order to meet the payroll but had fun writing the Cool & Lam books. The Cool & Lam novels have deeper characterization and more vivid scene setting. I don’t much like comparing so I will leave it by saying the Cool & Lam hinge on the comic interplay between Bertha and Donald while Mason novels usually just rise to droll.

The Women of Cool & Lam

Bertha Cool smashes the china shop of the hard-boiled genre like Charles Ruggles in If I Had a Million. Private eye novels usually feature lean, tight-lipped men and sultry femme fatales. Bertha blows up detective novel stereotypes: overweight, middle-aged, mercenary, and indifferent to lady-like ways.  She dresses well and wears expensive jewelry to please herself, couldn’t care less about male-gazey expectations concerning attire or deportment.

She’s the boss, hiring disbarred lawyer Donald Lam as her underling and cutting deals with clients on her own terms. Bertha is well-aware she has a narrow skill set but she possesses supreme confidence in her own realism about the basic motives: love and hate, lust and money. Bertha doesn’t take men too seriously because they are too easy to manipulate and too liable to get carried away by petty emotions and stupid urges.

Gardner’s depictions of women with agency don’t stop with Bertha. His Cool & Lam women – clients and suspects – manipulate others to conceal their ambition. A heiress feigns helplessness while plotting like Machiavelli (Beware the Curves); a playgirl weds a codger for her financial security but fondly indulges his kicks in his twilight years (Some Women Won’t Wait). These independent women indirectly suggest nothing replaces thinking for one’s self and clear goals are useful to have in a society merciless to the ignorant and passive.

In a genre that usually puts men center stage, Gardner’s women invite readers to question the extent to which virtue and vice are anything more than conventions to deal with the economic realities that our culture imposes on all of us.