How do you go about discussing a book you couldn’t even be bothered to finish? The tempting thing is not to review it at all, but I’m committed to certain undertakings on this blog — the complete works of Freeman Wills Crofts, the complete John Thorndyke stories of R. Austin Freeman, more Walter S. Masterman than most people will ever consume — and the full Cool & Lam by A.A. Fair, nom de plume of Erle Stanley Gardner, is one of them. So how to write about Crows Can’t Count (1946), the tenth published Cool & Lam novel, and the first time this normally lively and entertaining series has draaaaaaagged me into the doldrums of an almost spiritual level of indifference?

By the mid-1940s, the private eye novel was well past its zenith, and had certainly become driven by tropes that all genre fiction must if it wishes to survive. A client hires you for a seemingly-routine investigation — there’s a theft, someone is missing, someone isn’t trusted — and before long a dead body turns up and men with guns are appearing in doorways left, right, and centre. You, being a slightly jaded and probably plucky individual, proceed through events via a combination of native wit, accuracy with a firearm, and a propensity to run into attractive women who are, almost inevitably, not what they seem…except when that becomes too inevitable and so they turn out to be little more than what they appear at first glance.

The joy of Cool and Lam was that Bertha Cool — 60-something years old, sturdily-built, and profane as they come within publisher’s allowances as divined by the sensitivities of the reading public — was the tough one and Donald Lam was the brains who would frequently get the tar beaten out of him before winning both the day and the affections of one of those attractive women. The balance was off, and it was fun; Donald’s pluck in getting into fights you knew he was going to lose gave him a sheen of something different, and the amorality represented by the toughness of Bertha was smoothed at the edges by the canny acumen of her partner and his ability to connect up some genuinely surprising plots.

Crows Can’t Count, then, represents the series perhaps becoming the very thing it set out to reinvent: Harry Sharples hires Cool and Lam to look into…I think it’s a jewelled pendant that has turned up for sale and shouldn’t have, because it belongs to a young woman who is receiving income from an estate Sharples co-manages. It’s apparently meaningful that Sharples won’t ask the woman herself, but why this was the case is not, as far as I can remember, ever explained. Donald finds out a prosaic answer, then Robert Cameron, the other co-manager, turns up dead, and lots of meetings occur for no reason other than we need characters in rooms together having elliptical conversations whose meaning could not be more obscure and will, no doubt, have been perceived with crystal clarity in time for the denouement.

Lots of the book is people meeting, the cops getting exasperated, and then everyone going away and someone phoning Donald to talk about the meeting they just had. The quips are warmed over — “[He] glared at me as though I were a bill-collector with leprosy.” — we end up in Columbia where lots of time is spent describing scenery, and after about six weeks of reading this 220-page novel I still had 480 pages of explanations to wade through and, honestly, it’s been a long time since I was so unconcerned about the who’s-done-what-to-whom-and-why. Gardner wrote a lot, and it stands to reason that some of it must represent the lower standard of quality, but I’ve never experienced him being this lifeless yet.

We carom from one conversation to the next because that’s what the P.I. novel was now. Then Gardner realises that some foreign colour would liven it up a bit, so we get on a plane and have conversations in new surroundings. Bertha swears at Colombian nationals because they don’t speak English, and it’s such barrel-scraping material that it’s a little embarrassing to think of Gardner reverting to it once, never mind going back to the barrel for 30 pages to see if anything was left behind after the last scouring. It does end, but I don’t know how, and I’m grateful that this is the first time I’ve encountered this book because if I picked it up when I first read Gardner in the early 2000s I might have never gone back.

So, there you go. This entire review is a shrug, and even that’s more than the book deserves. 1946 was an indifferent year for Perry Mason and saw perhaps the best Doug Selby novel, so I imagine it was just Bertha and Donald’s time to be an afterthought. The next in this series, Fools Die on Friday (1947), is bound to be an improvement, so let’s take solace in that, move on, and never speak of this again, eh?

~