As my grandfather used to say, “When you fall off the horse, get back on the horse”.  And that’s why he made such a controversial judge at gymnastic competitions. But the fact remains that lately I’ve had some disheartening reading experiences with favoured authors — John Dickson Carr, J.J. Connington, Freeman Wills Crofts, A.A. Fair, Craig Rice, Cornell Woolrich J.J. Connington again, maybe Rice a second time — and so the tempting thing is to leave them alone for a while, wait for that memory to fade, and then return. But, no, I’m not doing that, I’m reading Fair again now, because why not? That’s what the horse is here. It was a pommel horse all along.

Crows Can’t Count (1946), the tenth published novel to feature the hard-boiled Bertha Cool and her slick P.I. partner Donald Lam was the nadir not just of this series to that point but possibly of all my reading last year. So I could at least be assured that, by clambering back onto this horse, I’d be getting something that was bound to be an improvement — and Fools Die on Friday (1947) is that and more, perhaps near the zenith of the cases to so far feature these two. Whether Fair (nom de plume of Erle Stanley Gardner, in case you didn’t know) was aware that he owed B. Cool Detective Agency a good one we’ll never know, but we can at least celebrate this upturn in the fortunes of our controversy-dodging pair.

Employed by a woman to prevent her uncle’s second wife from poisoning him, Donald quickly realises that the woman’s story doesn’t add up and begins a parallel investigation, much to Bertha’s ire, to try to figure out what might really be going on. First, though, he must prevent Daphne Ballwin from killing her husband, and sets about putting “psychological handcuffs” on her in a frankly ingenious scheme that highlights one of the reasons I enjoy reading Gardner so much: he has creativity to spare. Existing as he does on the fringes of the P.I. novel and the tale of genuine detection, he’s free to create some hilariously inventive schemes, and this is another example of that.

But, well, this is also a Cool and Lam novel, and so there will be murder, and a most confounding murder, to boot, and so of course Donald gets more involved, and so of course Donald begins to attract the frustration of the police, and so of course…well, you can guess where this is going. Not that Gardner is out to pillory the police — sure, a couple of key oversights are made by low-ranking officers in this case, but Gardner’s at pains to point out the merits of the organisation as a whole, almost taking a sort of Humdrum approach to their efficacy:

“When we think of the police, we shouldn’t think of a collection of individual policemen, we should think of the entire police force.”

“I know they’re good,” I said. “You don’t need to try to sell me.”

“You’re damn right they’re good,” he went on. “They’re a lot better than most people think.”

It’s also genuinely quite nice to see Sergeant Frank Seller return, and have the relationship he shares with Donald and Bertha underlined by the way they break off in the middle of his cross-examination to put a bet on a horse race. This ends up feeding into the one element of this I don’t quite buy in the denouement, but it doesn’t take anything away from the clever utilisation of human foibles that underline the many characters herein.

Gardner’s toe in the GAD firmament is assured not so much through clever clewing, but rather through the way he’s so awake to clever interpretations put on certain actions. In chapter nine, when he describes to Ruth Otis the way her actions will inform the perceived reasons for a key event because of how her dentist ex-boss will respond, it’s genuinely savvy thinking, and shows the brain behind so much of what the man makes look so easy. It all ends up with Donald caught in something of a pickle, of course, and some clever thinking has to be done to make it all make sense…and, for once, you might actually follow the terminal revelations, giving the impression that maybe even Gardner knew what was going on when he wrote this.

Finally, then, remounting a horse has paid off — which it was always going to, of course. If nothing else, this has made me reassess my attitude towards disappointing books from favoured authors: everyone will write a dud now and again, because writing books is hard to do. I need to not see one dip as evidence of anything more than that — someone not quite keeping up standards is entirely acceptable, and the only sensible thing is to accept it and move on. So, what’s next…?

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