On the day when the United States of America celebrates its independence, let’s turn our eye upon American author Erle Stanley Gardner, here publishing the ninth novel to feature Bertha Cool and (the triumphant return of) Donald Lam, Give ‘Em the Ax, a.k.a. An Axe to Grind (1944). Having been invalided out of the Navy with tropical fever, Donald is back in America and straight back to work: initially asked to rustle up some dirt on the suspected gold-digging new wife of a businessman, it’s not long before things become unsurprisingly more complex, and the small matter of murder rears its head. How, though, does a car accident which Bertha witnesses play into proceedings?

From the off, it feels like this is going to be a slightly slimmer case for the Cool and Lam Detective Agency, with Gardner spending more time on minor characters and tiny events of almost no consequence. His prose still slides by as effortlessly as always, but the opening half of this one just feels a little less urgent than we’ve come to expect from this series; witness the care with which Bertha relates the accident she witnesses, which is then repeated almost beat for beat — if anything, in even more forensic detail — when she is grilled about it by lawyer John Carver Mysgart just past the halfway point.

Which is not to say that this is boring — I’m not sure Gardner could be boring if he tried — more that the machinations of this take a little longer to settle than we’re used to. Indeed, the various plot elements seem to circle each other for a so long that, when the threads finally wind around each other and reveal the pattern in the closing pages, I wasn’t entirely sure I immediately understood the consequences of what had I had just been told. In a way, this renders the book difficult to write about, because so much of what unfolds is unclear in its precise intent for so long, and reading too much about it might tip your hand to the terminal surprise. But it also makes the experience of reading it slightly less enjoyable than recent entries in this series for the same reason.

It’s not without points of credit, however, including some lovely character beats, like Mysgart’s introduction as…

[A] pudgy man about two-thirds bald, beamed amiably at us behind horned-rimmed glasses. He had bluish-green eyes, an appearance of beefy solidarity, and a manner which was consciously dynamic. It was as though he’d been reading books on how to impress people and had remembered just about all he had read.

…and the occasional piece of mood-setting that shows Gardner always managed to inject some class even when writing at his famously tremendous high speed:

The second floor itself was silent as a deserted court-room after the defendant has been sentenced to death and the judge has gathered his papers and gone out to play golf.

You learn how a crumpled cigarette can be a sign that someone is simulating a perhaps mendacious facade of grief, and Gardner certainly isn’t using this slower start as a means of padding out a thin narrative, since many of his plot-propelling deductions happen off-page, staying true to the incisive and canny mind that burns inside Donald’s skull. The core dynamic twixt Bertha and Donald remains a delight, and it’s great to have them together again after a couple of books which put them on opposite sides of the world, Bertha at once rallying against the complications Donald has brought down upon her and yet embracing him and his genius for being two moves ahead:

“I love you, you little bastard. I have the greatest admiration for the thinking machine that’s back of your eyes — and, you make me so goddamn mad I could kill you a dozen times a day.”

Gardner clearly has the core DNA of this series locked, and if you come at these in the random order I did when first encountering this pair you’d find little here to complain about. But, in context, it just feels like he had half an eye on other things when constructing this: the murder plot is half-baked, with both the killer and the, er, main party behaving in a way that’s only justified because they must have known they were setting up a surprise to be dropped in the final stages of a fast-paced crime novel. Maybe the late tying up of loose ends is Gardner’s way of distracting you from the thinness of this thread, and it’s a shame, given how speedily and cleanly he manages to introduce the other key elements kept on the boil for such a long time.

While by no means a disaster, Give ‘Em the Ax lacks the intriguing details of, say, Bats Fly at Dusk (1942) and the smart overlapping of Cats Prowl at Night (1943), and so comes off as slightly tarnished when placed next to its recent, more successful kin. The tidiness of some of this feels like Gardner is learning something, however, and it’s to be wondered if the succeeding title Crows Can’t Count (1946) benefitted from the experience of this one not quite coming together as completely as it should have. Come back in a few months to find out!

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