The Maltese Falcon (1941)
Erle Stanley Gardner wrote thirty Cool and Lam detective agency series novels under the pseudonym A A Fair. Amazingly, the series ran from 1939 to 1970.
I happened to pick up a couple of these in a bookshop the other day (republished by Hard Case Crime) and I was intrigued by them. The prose is accessible and immersive. Easy to read. Funny.
The Cool and Lam novels were adapted into an unaired 1950s TV series (rejected by the networks). The combination of Bertha Cool, a cynical middle-age business woman, and Donald Lam, a skinny nice guy, frequently beaten up by crooks, was probably too weird and anti-hero for mainstream TV. The networks might have preferred it if Bertha was young and beautiful and Donald had better fighting skills. Erle Stanley Gardner also wrote the Perry Mason legal mystery novels, which were adapted into the successful TV series.
In their time, I suspect the Cool and Lam book series would have been classified as mystery fiction. Today we might be more inclined to call them Hard Boiled, noir detective stories, or simply crime fiction.
The first thing that comes to mind when reading these novels is how much fun they are. The prose is incredibly accessible. The witty chapter headings give Ian Fleming a run for his money. A quick flick through Fools Die on Friday (1947) has chapters titles like: ‘Anchovy Paste and Soft Soap’, ‘Psychological Handcuffs’, ‘A Hellcat on Wheels’, and the delightful ‘Moonbeams on Flypaper’.
Reading these books makes me realise that we’ve lost a lot of fun in genre fiction over the years. This is the opening of Shills Can’t Cash Chips (1961):
I walked across the reception room of COOL & LAM INVESTIGATORS, opened the door to my private office. Elsie Brand, my secretary looked up with an expression I had come to know.
“What is it, Elsie?’ I asked. “Good or bad?’