Review: Double or Quits - A.A. Fair (Erle Stanley Gardner)

Once again I found myself in need of a book that would read quickly and provide sure-fire entertainment. Well, fry me for an oyster, what better choice than Donald Lam, Bertha Cool, and Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A.A. Fair?

DOUBLE OR QUITS is the fifth book in the series, published in hardback by William Morrow in December 1941 and reprinted more times than I want to count in paperback since then, as well as currently being available in an e-book edition. As with most of Gardner’s novels, the plot is so complicated that it’s difficult to follow and almost impossible to summarize. Bertha Cool is on a bit of a health kick as this one opens, and she and Donald are out fishing on a barge. I immediately figured they were actually there working on a case, but no, they’re doing it for the exercise. However, a casual conversation with another angler nets them a new client and a challenging case. Their new fishing buddy is a doctor, and some of his wife’s valuable jewels have been stolen from a safe in their house. The wife is an invalid, and her secretary/companion has disappeared, so naturally the girl is the most logical suspect. The doctor hires Donald and Bertha to find the girl and recover the jewelry.

Of course, it’s nowhere near as simple as that. Before you know it, someone is dead from carbon monoxide poisoning. Was it an accident, a suicide . . . or murder? As with many of Gardner’s novels, the plot hinges on his knowledge of some obscure point of law, in this case exactly what an insurance company considers a death by accidental means. Double indemnity is riding on the answer.

Along the way, there’s another murder, some false identities, several nice bits of trickery by Donald where he fools not only some of the other characters but also the reader, and finally a solution that, by and large, makes sense once Donald explains everything, which doesn’t happen until he’s almost become a murder victim himself. A month from now I’ll remember very little of the plot.

I will, however, remember that I had a lot of fun reading DOUBLE OR QUITS. I’ve long since given up trying to out-think Erle Stanley Gardner. I did pick out the murderer in this one, but it was mostly a guess. Instead of trying to figure it out, as I would, say, with an Ellery Queen or Agatha Christie novel, I just go along for the ride. In this series, it’s Donald’s brisk, funny narrative voice; in the Perry Mason books, it’s Mason’s hard-charging character, the give-and-take between Mason, Della Street, and Paul Drake, and those great courtroom scenes. Gardner’s just a thoroughly entertaining writer, as far as I’m concerned, and that’s really the reason I read. If you’re a Cool and Lam fan, you’ll enjoy this one, and if you’re not, you really should give the series a try.

Spill the Jackpot - A.A. Fair (Erle Stanley Gardner)

SPILL THE JACKPOT, published in hardcover by William Morrow in 1941 and reprinted in paperback more times than I’m going to count, is the fourth Donald Lam/Bertha Cool novel by Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A.A. Fair. Or the fifth if you count THE KNIFE SLIPPED. It doesn’t really matter, because either way this novel is early enough in the series that I got the feeling Gardner was still experimenting a little, deciding exactly how he wanted things to go with these books. As a result, he tries several things that are a little different.

For one thing, as this book opens Bertha has lost a lot of weight due to a stay in a sanitarium in Salt Lake City where she recovered from a bad bout of flu and pneumonia. When Donald arrives to pick her up, she’s not exactly thin, but she’s slimmed down enough to seem almost like a different person. Gardner even gives her a possible romantic interest in a man she meets on the plane going back to Las Vegas, where she and Donald are supposed to meet a potential client before returning to Los Angeles.

Wouldn’t you know it, the guy they meet on the plane turns out to be the client. He’s a wealthy businessman who wants to hire the B. Cool Detective Agency to locate a missing young woman who was engaged to his son. The only thing Donald and Bertha have to go on is that the missing girl got a letter from somebody in Las Vegas.

After that, things get very complicated, very quickly, even for a Gardner novel. Donald gets a lesson on how to steal from slot machines. He gets knocked down by a punch-drunk ex-boxer who then becomes a friend and ally. He meets several attractive young women, some of whom are probably not trustworthy. He tangles with another ex-boxer who’s definitely not a friend. He gets hauled in by the Vegas cops. And eventually, somebody winds up dead, a murder that Donald feels compelled to solve, even though in the middle of the investigation he up and quits Bertha’s agency.

Bertha, meanwhile, hangs out in the hotel and flirts with their client while Donald goes off to the desert for several days and then makes a quick trip to Reno and back. The reader knows not to take his resignation from the agency too seriously, of course, and as always, Donald figures out who committed the murder.

But along the way, Gardner gives us a long section where Donald, the girl he’s fallen for, and the amiable ex-boxer spend several days camping in the desert and Donald gets lessons in pugilism. This has almost nothing to do with the plot and reads more like Gardner was trying his hand at some Hemingwayesque mainstream fiction . . . and I loved it. The writing is very vivid, reminiscent of Gardner’s Whispering Sands stories without the mystery and adventure elements. It’s just Donald, his girl, and his friend getting back to nature for a while. This is such nice stuff I could have read a whole novel of it, I think.

Of course, sooner or later Donald has to go back and solve the crime, which he wraps up neatly, but also with a double reverse that I actually didn’t figure out until several hours after I’d finished the book. And when it hit me what actually happened, it was almost a jaw-dropping moment. Donald is always thinking two or three steps ahead of everybody else in the book, and Gardner was definitely that far ahead of me.

I was prepared to say in this review that the changes Gardner makes in Bertha are a big misfire (and they still don’t really ring true for me), but by the end of the book he’s resolved that angle satisfactorily, too. Overall, SPILL THE JACKPOT is one of my favorite books in the series. I’m reading/rereading the Cool and Lam books in order, and it’s pretty interesting to watch Gardner’s development as a writer . . . and to think about what he might have done if he had gone in different directions.

Forgotten Books: Gold Comes in Bricks - A.A. Fair (Erle Stanley Gardner)

 

I’ve been in a bit of a reading funk lately. I’ve read a few good books, but for the past couple of months I’ve struggled to finish quite a few of the books I’ve read, and then when I finally did, I was disappointed in them. A few, I even wished I hadn’t wasted the time reading them.

So recently, I decided to grab a book off my shelves that I knew wouldn’t disappoint me: GOLD COMES IN BRICKS, the third Donald Lam/Bertha Cool novel, originally published in 1940 by William Morrow under the pseudonym A.A. Fair and reprinted in paperback many times since. It’s possible I’ve read this one before, but if I have, it was more than fifty years ago and I didn’t remember a thing about it, so it doesn’t really matter, does it?

This one begins with Donald being hired to pretend to be a physical trainer for a rich man who wants to find out if his daughter is being blackmailed. The idea of Donald being a physical trainer is pretty amusing to Bertha, but she wants the fee so she orders Donald to take the job. In short order, complications pile upon complications. What else would you expect in a Gardner novel? In this one, we get a murdered gambler, legal shenanigans involving corporate taxes, a romantic South Seas cruise, more shenanigans involving dredging for gold, missing love letters that provide the motive for a second murder, and jujitsu lessons. For what it’s worth, I figured out who the killer was, but not until more than  halfway through the book and I didn’t have all the plot untangled. The murderer’s identity was at least partially a guess. Donald, as usual, was ‘way ahead of me.

One reason (other than the fifty years that have passed) I don’t recall whether I’ve read this one before is the realization that the plots absolutely don’t matter in Gardner’s novels. Sure, they’re always complex and it’s a lot of fun to try to keep everything straight and maybe figure out the killer, but honestly, I pretty much forget the plot of most Gardner novels five minutes after I’ve read them. What keeps me coming back is simple: I love Donald Lam being a wise-ass and Bertha being a curmudgeonly skinflint and the camaraderie of Perry Mason, Della Street, and Paul Drake. I love the fast-paced dialogue and the breezy narrative and the humor (Gardner was a lot funnier than he’s usually given credit for). His books, especially the ones from the Thirties and Forties, have a really nice sense of time and place, too. Gardner has a reputation as not being a particularly good writer (Steve Mertz, if you’re reading this, what’s that Raymond Chandler quote about Gardner you once told me?), but he’s an absolutely wonderful storyteller.

And this book didn’t disappoint me at all and has restored my faith in fiction, at least for now. Quite an accomplishment for a 1940 mystery novel by a guy once known as the King of the Pulps, ain’t it?

Forgotten Books: The Count of 9 - A.A. Fair (Erle Stanley Gardner)

I don’t actually remember the first Donald Lam/Bertha Cool book I read—I think maybe it was SHILLS CAN’T CASH CHIPS—but I know I checked it out from the bookmobile that came out to our little town from the library in Fort Worth, so it was at least 55 years ago. I checked out several of the series from the bookmobile, and the guy who drove it out there told me that the author, A.A. Fair, was actually Erle Stanley Gardner, who wrote the Perry Mason books I was also reading. You can tell that from the plots and pacing of the books, although the Cool and Lam books always had more humor in them than the Masons.

Anyway, I’ve continued to read the series over the years, but it’s reached the point where I don’t know, based on the titles, which ones I’ve read and which ones I haven’t. And I’m not sure it matters, because I don’t remember the ones I read 50 years ago. However, I can say with some degree of certainty that I’d never read THE COUNT OF 9 until now.

Originally published by William Morrow in 1958, reprinted several times by Pocket Books and also by Hard Case Crime, THE COUNT OF 9 follows a well-established pattern. The Cool and Lam private detective agency is hired to protect some valuable African artifacts at a party given by wealthy explorer and adventurer Dean Crockett. Bertha Cool is actually in charge of that job, but her associate, pint-size, wise guy narrator (and actual crime solver) Donald Lam gets drawn in when a couple of items get stolen from Crockett’s penthouse despite Bertha’s presence. One of the missing artifacts is an African blowgun, and wouldn’t you know it, somebody turns up murdered with a dart from said blowgun. That sends Donald galloping off on a lightning-paced investigation involving nude models, jade Buddhas, and brawny hoodlums who hand him a beating that they have cause to regret, since Donald is not only smart, he also has a bit of a mean streak in him and knows how to get his revenge.

As always, Gardner’s plot is complex, although maybe not quite as labyrinthine as in some of his other novels. It was plenty twisty enough that I didn’t figure it out before I got to the end and Donald explained everything. I don’t think THE COUNT OF 9 goes in the absolute top rank of A.A. Fair novels, but it’s still very good and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

Forgotten Books: Turn on the Heat - A.A. Fair (Erle Stanley Gardner)

I've been a fan of Erle Stanley Gardner's Donald Lam and Bertha Cool books ever since I picked up a copy of SHILLS CAN'T CASH CHIPS at the bookmobile more than fifty years ago. I've read many (but not all) of the novels since then and still pick one up from time to time. I love the twisty, fast-paced plots, the rat-a-tat-tat dialogue, and most of all the characters of Donald and Bertha. As much as I enjoy Gardner's Perry Mason novels, I think the A.A. Fair books are even better.

TURN ON THE HEAT is the second book in the series. I don't think I'd read it before, and if I did, it was many years ago and I didn't remember a thing about it. This one begins with Donald and Bertha being hired to find a woman who disappeared more than twenty years earlier, after an ugly divorce case involving her eye doctor husband and his receptionist. But of course not everything is what it appears to be at first, and soon our two protagonists find themselves neck-deep in a stew of political corruption, crooked cops, shady ladies, blackmail, phony identities, and ultimately murder. Donald has to be his usual tricky self in order to discover the truth and extricate himself and Bertha from the trouble they're in.

Although physically they couldn't be much different, Donald Lam always reminds me of Mike Shayne, because he's two steps ahead of everybody else in the book and three steps ahead of the reader. I love the little bits of business he pulls that don't pay off until much later in the book, when you realize that Donald was on the trail of the killer all along. When everything is explained, it all makes perfect sense (usually; Gardner was known to lose track of his plots every now and then), and I'm often left figuratively smacking myself on the forehead and saying, "D'oh!" because I didn't spot the clues.

TURN ON THE HEAT is a thoroughly entertaining book and a fine example from one of my favorite series. If you haven't tried any of these (and I know most of you probably have), I highly recommend it. Below are covers from some of the many reprint editions.