Look, I can’t swear to it, but I have a suspicion that Cats Prowl at Night (1943), the eighth published book in Erle Stanley Gardner’s series featuring Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, written under this A.A. Fair nom de plume, just might be the first title of his I ever read. Reading it now, some 20 years later, it tickled enough memory buttons to be tauntingly familiar while also furiously out of reach, but the distinct aspect that separates this book from its brethren — namely the absence of pocket dynamo Donald Lam from its pages — feels familiar, if only because I get the sense I started these books with no sense of Lam as a character.

Approached by Everett G. Belder to act on his behalf in a financial matter, Bertha Cool is vexed when Mr. Belder makes a second appearance later in the day…only this time he is carrying a letter, sent to his wife, alleging that he is having an affair with their maid. Belder hires Bertha to follow his wife when she attends a meeting with the letter-writer, only for Mrs. Belder to elude the tail in traffic; when Mrs. Belder doesn’t return from the meeting, and when it turns that many of her clothes have been taken from the Belder house, the obvious conclusion is reached…only for Mrs. Belder’s mother to appear on the scene and insist that Everett Belder has killed her daughter. And still letters overflowing with accusations of Mr. Belder’s romantic entanglements with various women keep arriving…

While perhaps lacking some of the intrigue of the earlier titles in this series, Cats Prowl at Night shows Gardner as a plotter extraordinaire — threads weave into the central narrative smoothly and efficiently, throwing ever more doubt on the central conundrum of the vanishing woman: a dead body in her basement, a missed telephone call, a dentist’s appointment, the financial arrangement that existed in the Belder menage…each part of the narrative is introduced so easily that you almost forget you’re supposed to be keeping an eye on these events to try and puzzle out the answer at the centre of the melee.

It helps in part that there’s such a keen eye on the people involved: Bertha is feeling the absence of Donald (surely not on the “holiday” in Europe she claims…), but intelligent work is done in his absence by Sergeant Sellers, and secretary Elsie Brand is again given more to so that sit behind a desk and rattle out 200 wpm with faultless efficiency (and the way she is involved in proceedings, trying to prise information about a vacant apartment, might bring about perhaps the finest insult Bertha ever dreamt up). The Belder household, too, positively overflows with interesting specimens: Belder himself has skeletons in his closet, and his dealing with both a disgruntled business associate and his furious mother-in-law speak of a man pulled in too many directions to really keep a close eye on anything.

This is very much Bertha’s show, though, and one gets the sense of Gardner having a superb hand on his truculent, argumentative, canny grande dame, realising depths in her that make writing about her not through Donald’s eyes all the more appealing. She’s caught in telling snatches, like when she becomes “as wary as a veteran trout in a deep mountain pool watching a fly being flicked over the surface of the water”, and is particularly striking in moments of defeat:

Sergeant Sellers’ voice contained patient rebuke. The man was tired, completely weary, dejected and disappointed. Bertha said once more, “I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

“I realize that doesn’t help.”

“It doesn’t.”

Gardner does a superb job, too, of weaving in multiple explanations for the central murders, finding small actions that speak loudly when it comes to putting an interpretation on them. That Bertha and Seller end up staring down the barrel of a murder that’s “diabolical in its ingenuity and in its legal efficiency” is, of course, a testament to Gardner’s own lawyerly training, but the plot twist to get us to this point aren’t anything like as awkwardly placed as some of the criticism of Gardner’s writing claims. This is top-tier plotting, utilising superb character work — Carlotta Goldring “as crisp as a cold lettuce leaf” is a simply perfect description — and falling down only in that the terminal explanation requires perhaps too large a step in one aspect of a background character’s personality…but, well, the further I get from this the more I’m inclined to forgive that.

Gardner wrote quickly, and could be accused of cheapness in most of his pulp shorts, but this series seems to be growing in stature as it progresses, occupying a larger part of its creator’s heart than perhaps even he suspected it might at its inception. Having read this before, I ended up just as lost as just as delighted as I had been at first encounter, and, pretty sure that I’ve not read the next two or three books in the series previously, I’m even more excited to continue with Bertha (and hopefully Donald) to see what tortuous mess they’ll extricate themselves from next time.

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