Erle Stanley Gardner (1889–1970)

The Bigger They Come: A Cool and Lam Mystery by Erle Stanley Gardner

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS:
-PRINT: COPYRIGHT: (January 1, 1939) 10/4/2022; ISBN: 9781613163566; PUBLISHER: Penzler Publishers; PAGES: 227; UNABRIDGED (Paperback info from Goodreads)
-*DIGITAL: COPYRIGHT: (1/1/1939) 10/4/2022; ISBN: 9781613163573; PUBLISHER: American Mystery Classics / Simon & Schuster; PAGES: 251; UNABRIDGED
-AUDIO: COPYRIGHT: Not found
Feature Film or tv: Not found

SERIES: Cool and Lam #1

MAIN CHARACTERS: (list not comprehensive)
Bertha Cool - Owner of detective agency
Donald Lam – hired by Bertha
Alma Hunter – Friend of client of the Cool detective agency
Sandra Birks – Client of the detective agency
Morgan Birks – husband of the client of the detective agency
The Chief – a criminal
Fred – an employee of the Chief’s
Bleatie – Sandra’s brother (sort of)

SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
-SELECTED: It came to my attention that a television show that I enjoyed as a child, Perry Mason, was based on a series of books by Erle Stanley Gardner, and that a precursor series was Lam & Cool, so I wanted to read the first one of that series.
-ABOUT: Donald Lam competes for employment at a detective agency, and although he doesn’t look the part, Bertha Cool appreciates his imagination and hires him on the spot. He is assigned to a missing person case of sorts—to find a spouse for the purpose of serving divorce papers, but there turns out to be much more to the job.
-LIKED: It was clever and entertaining.
-DISLIKED: NA.
-OVERALL: This has the flavor of mysteries from the decade that it was written, 193o’s.

AUTHOR:
Erle Stanley Gardner
From Wikipedia:
“Erle Stanley Gardner (July 17, 1889 – March 11, 1970) was a prolific American author. A former lawyer, he is best known for the Perry Mason series of legal detective stories, but he wrote numerous other novels and shorter pieces and also a series of nonfiction books, mostly narrations of his travels through Baja California and other regions in Mexico.
The best-selling American author of the 20th century at the time of his death, Gardner also published under numerous pseudonyms, including A. A. Fair, Carl Franklin Ruth, Carleton Kendrake, Charles M. Green, Charles J. Kenny, Edward Leaming, Grant Holiday, Kyle Corning, Les Tillray, Robert Parr, Stephen Caldwell, and once as Perry Mason character Della Street (The Case of the Suspect Sweethearts). Three stories were published as Anonymous (A Fair Trial, Part Music and Part Tears, and You Can't Run Away from Yourself aka The Jazz Baby).”

NARRATOR:
N/A

LOCATION(S)
California; Arizona

TIME(S)
1930’s

GENRE
Mystery, Fiction, Crime, Detective

SUBJECTS:
Process Serving; Law; Detectives; Divorce; Crime

DEDICATION:
Not found.

SAMPLE QUOTATION:
From “Chapter One”
“Pushing my way into the office, I stood just inside the door, my hat in my hand.
There were six men ahead of me. The ad had said between the ages of twenty-five and thirty. If appearances were any indication, some of them were optimistic liars. For the most part, we were a seedy-looking outfit.
A straw-haired secretary behind a typewriting desk banged away at a typewriter. She looked up at me. Her face as cold as a clean bedsheet.
‘What do you want?’ She asked.
‘I want to see Mr. Cool.’
‘What about?’
I moved my head in a comprehensive gesture to include the half-dozen men who were looking up at me in casually hostile appraisal. ‘I’m answering the ad.’
‘I thought so. Sit down,’ she said.
‘There seems,’ I observed, ‘to be no chair available.’
‘There will be in a minute. You may stand and wait, or come back.’
‘I’ll stand.’
She turned back to her typewriter. A buzzer sounded. She picked up a telephone, listened a moment, said, ‘Very well,’ and looked expectantly at the door which said ‘B. L. Cool, Private.’ The door opened. A man, who looked as though he was trying to get to the open air in a hurry, streaked through the office. The blonde said, ‘You may go in Mr. Smith.’
A young chap with stooped shoulders and slim waist got to his feet, jerked down his vest, adjusted his tie, pinned a smirk on his face, opened the door to the private office, and went in.
The blonde said to me, ‘What’s your name?’
‘Donald Lam.’
‘L-a-m-b?’ she asked.
‘L-a-m,’ I said.
She jotted it down, and then, with her eyes on me, started making shorthand notes under the name. I could see she was cataloguing my personal appearance.
‘That all?’ I asked when she covered me from head to foot with her eyes and finished making pothooks with her fingers.
‘Yes. Sit down in that chair and wait.’
I sat and waited. Smith didn’t last long. He was out in less than two minutes. The second man made the round trip so fast it looked as though he’d come out on the bounce. The third man lasted ten minutes and came out looking dazed. The door of the outer office opened. Three more applicants came in. The blonde took their names, sized them up, and made notes. After they were seated, she picked up the telephone and said laconically, ‘Four more,’ listened a moment, and hung up.
When the next man came out, the blonde went in. She was in there about five minutes. When she came out, she gave me the nod: ‘You may go in next, Mr. Lam,’ she said.
The men who were ahead of me frowned at her and then at me. They didn’t say anything.
Apparently she didn’t mind their frowns any more than I did.
I opened the door, entered a huge room with several filing cabinets, two comfortable chairs, a table, and a big desk.
I put on my best smile, said, ‘Mr. Cool, I—’ and then stopped, because the person seated behind the desk wasn’t a Mister.
She was somewhere in her sixties, with gray hair, twinkling gray eyes, and a benign, grandmotherly expression on her face. She must have weighed over two-hundred. She said, ‘Sit down, Mr. Lam—no, not in that chair. Come over here where I can look at you. There, that’s better. Now, for Christ’s sake, don’t lie to me.’

RATING:.
4

STARTED READING – FINISHED READING
8/23/23 – 9/16/23… (mehr)

Why do I get the sneaking suspicion Gardner wrote this over a quiet weekend, perked up on chai and chocolate biscuits?

Seriously, the 82nd Perry Mason novel (but my first) is murder by numbers. The dialogue is uninventive, the mystery intriguing but ultimately more of an exercise than a narrative, and things plod along smoothly with the clockwork sound of an expert pulp writer. There's nothing really wrong with it, and I like that Gardner is (very lightly) self-parodic in the denouement scene, where an eccentric judge somehow convinces all parties to bypass usual trial procedure and just tell their stories to one another.

Still, I doubt I'd go back to this well very much, even if the "golden era" novels are much more clever in their execution. It just has that feel of a jobbing writer churning out another volume. There's nothing wrong with that (I'm gradually moving into that field myself) but this book fulfills its function, nothing more.… (mehr)