Review: A. A. Fair and the Donald Lam and Bertha Cool Mystery Books
(Cross-posted to vintage_crime)
A. A. Fair was one of the pseudonyms used by Erle Stanley Gardner, who is best-known for creating the famous defense attorney Perry Mason. Gardner wrote over seventy Perry Mason books from the 1930s through the 1960s. Perry Mason is most known from the 1950s television show starring Raymond Burr, but there were also earlier movies and even a radio serial. In addition to the Perry Mason books, Gardner wrote a handful of other series. His most notable non-Mason books are the two dozen or so Donald Lam and Bertha Cool detective stories published under the name of A. A. Fair. (A full listing of Gardner's works can be found at StopYou'reKillingMe, a superb mystery book directory.)
I have been familiar, if not fully acquainted, with Perry Mason for quite some time, primarily from the television show. My mother watches it and I've seen many five-minute segments when I wander into her room, although I don't think I've actually sat down and watched an entire episode. (Raymond Burr himself I've heard as a very tough cop in the Pat Novak radio series, opposite a very tough Jack Webb.) The series has never really grabbed me. Don't get me wrong; I have nothing against it. Courtroom drama and legal issues have simply never been that interesting for me. I read mysteries for the excitement and the puzzles, mostly in that order, and it seemed unlikely to me that the Perry Mason books would have much of those elements, particularly the first.
Somehow, through PaperBackSwap, BookMooch, or possibly an auction for a lot of paperbacks on Ebay, I've ended up with a few Gardner books. They've all been earlier ones, from the 1940s. In my experience, the earlier decades of long-publishing authors tend to be the best, so I did avoid the late 1950s and 1960s books on principle. The Perry Mason books I've read have a different feel from what I've gathered of the show. They're a bit more wacky, a bit more romantic, and have more action. Still, at the heart they're legal mysteries and not my ultimate favorite. My first A. A. Fair book, Spill the Jackpot, is different. I have no memory of how I got it, but at least the publication date of 1941 didn't look bad. I finally read it right after The Case of the Crooked Candle, since I'd been very pleasantly surprised by the Crooked Candle book. The next thing I know, I'm really liking Spill the Jackpot. I mean really liking it.
Bertha Cool, the head of the B. L. Cool Detective Agency, has "the majesty of a snowcapped mountain, the assurance of a steamroller." She'll never see forty again, weighs 200+ pounds, keeps an eagle eye on agency money, and never turns down good food. She's a peach. Donald is one of her operatives. Donald himself... Well, let me quote Bertha: "He's a pint-sized parcel of dynamite with the nerve of a prize fighter and a punch that wouldn't jar a fly loose from a syrup jug--but he's always trying." Ain't it the truth!
After that brilliant success, I've gone on and read the first two in the series, The Bigger They Come and Turn On the Heat. I've concluded that these books are good simply because of an astute combination of characterization and style that works extremely well. Donald and Bertha are very atypical characters in the classic crime genre. Bertha's no old hag, no femme fatale, and certainly no Girl Friday; she's the one who runs the agency, and she's all about the money with very little benevolence. While at 5'5" and 127 pounds, Donald in no way resembles a detective, he's got about two full measures of a hero's typical willingness to fight. Furthermore, Donald's size isn't just a gambit to make a detective series a little different. Because he's simply not big enough to handle a serious fight, he's got an extremely sharp mind enhanced by legal training. The legal element thus becomes key in each plot, but working seamlessly with events and deductions instead of becoming the entire plot.
Bertha and Donald together make a pretty wacky combination, especially when Donald's determination inconveniences Bertha way too much and spends way too much of her money. Finding out what's going on is only part of the issue. Actually dealing with it, and other things that happen, are just as much of what goes on. Like the Albert Campion books, these are more suspense or adventure stories than true mysteries, since they're not written for the reader to try to solve. They're written to tell a story. Donald and Bertha do plenty of serious information-gathering and deduction--the books have a level of detail that I've rarely seen in other authors--but they don't stop there. They don't just try to discover; nor do they just pitch a wrench into the works to see what'll blow, like Sam Spade. They plan and maneuver to achieve a particular outcome, changing those plans as events develop. Combine atypical characters with atypical behaviors in atypical plots, and you've got stories with humor, action, ingenious legal reasoning, plenty of the unexpected, and even romance. These books are page-turners.
Has anyone else read these books? Like the Perry Mason books, Gardner continued the series through the 1960s; does the quality and content degenerate, as it does for other authors in the same period? I'd love to hear other opinions on the Perry Mason series, too.
A. A. Fair was one of the pseudonyms used by Erle Stanley Gardner, who is best-known for creating the famous defense attorney Perry Mason. Gardner wrote over seventy Perry Mason books from the 1930s through the 1960s. Perry Mason is most known from the 1950s television show starring Raymond Burr, but there were also earlier movies and even a radio serial. In addition to the Perry Mason books, Gardner wrote a handful of other series. His most notable non-Mason books are the two dozen or so Donald Lam and Bertha Cool detective stories published under the name of A. A. Fair. (A full listing of Gardner's works can be found at StopYou'reKillingMe, a superb mystery book directory.)
I have been familiar, if not fully acquainted, with Perry Mason for quite some time, primarily from the television show. My mother watches it and I've seen many five-minute segments when I wander into her room, although I don't think I've actually sat down and watched an entire episode. (Raymond Burr himself I've heard as a very tough cop in the Pat Novak radio series, opposite a very tough Jack Webb.) The series has never really grabbed me. Don't get me wrong; I have nothing against it. Courtroom drama and legal issues have simply never been that interesting for me. I read mysteries for the excitement and the puzzles, mostly in that order, and it seemed unlikely to me that the Perry Mason books would have much of those elements, particularly the first.
Somehow, through PaperBackSwap, BookMooch, or possibly an auction for a lot of paperbacks on Ebay, I've ended up with a few Gardner books. They've all been earlier ones, from the 1940s. In my experience, the earlier decades of long-publishing authors tend to be the best, so I did avoid the late 1950s and 1960s books on principle. The Perry Mason books I've read have a different feel from what I've gathered of the show. They're a bit more wacky, a bit more romantic, and have more action. Still, at the heart they're legal mysteries and not my ultimate favorite. My first A. A. Fair book, Spill the Jackpot, is different. I have no memory of how I got it, but at least the publication date of 1941 didn't look bad. I finally read it right after The Case of the Crooked Candle, since I'd been very pleasantly surprised by the Crooked Candle book. The next thing I know, I'm really liking Spill the Jackpot. I mean really liking it.
Bertha Cool, the head of the B. L. Cool Detective Agency, has "the majesty of a snowcapped mountain, the assurance of a steamroller." She'll never see forty again, weighs 200+ pounds, keeps an eagle eye on agency money, and never turns down good food. She's a peach. Donald is one of her operatives. Donald himself... Well, let me quote Bertha: "He's a pint-sized parcel of dynamite with the nerve of a prize fighter and a punch that wouldn't jar a fly loose from a syrup jug--but he's always trying." Ain't it the truth!
After that brilliant success, I've gone on and read the first two in the series, The Bigger They Come and Turn On the Heat. I've concluded that these books are good simply because of an astute combination of characterization and style that works extremely well. Donald and Bertha are very atypical characters in the classic crime genre. Bertha's no old hag, no femme fatale, and certainly no Girl Friday; she's the one who runs the agency, and she's all about the money with very little benevolence. While at 5'5" and 127 pounds, Donald in no way resembles a detective, he's got about two full measures of a hero's typical willingness to fight. Furthermore, Donald's size isn't just a gambit to make a detective series a little different. Because he's simply not big enough to handle a serious fight, he's got an extremely sharp mind enhanced by legal training. The legal element thus becomes key in each plot, but working seamlessly with events and deductions instead of becoming the entire plot.
Bertha and Donald together make a pretty wacky combination, especially when Donald's determination inconveniences Bertha way too much and spends way too much of her money. Finding out what's going on is only part of the issue. Actually dealing with it, and other things that happen, are just as much of what goes on. Like the Albert Campion books, these are more suspense or adventure stories than true mysteries, since they're not written for the reader to try to solve. They're written to tell a story. Donald and Bertha do plenty of serious information-gathering and deduction--the books have a level of detail that I've rarely seen in other authors--but they don't stop there. They don't just try to discover; nor do they just pitch a wrench into the works to see what'll blow, like Sam Spade. They plan and maneuver to achieve a particular outcome, changing those plans as events develop. Combine atypical characters with atypical behaviors in atypical plots, and you've got stories with humor, action, ingenious legal reasoning, plenty of the unexpected, and even romance. These books are page-turners.
Has anyone else read these books? Like the Perry Mason books, Gardner continued the series through the 1960s; does the quality and content degenerate, as it does for other authors in the same period? I'd love to hear other opinions on the Perry Mason series, too.