The twelfth published novel from Erle Stanley Gardner under his A.A. Fair nom de plume, Bedrooms Have Windows (1949) finds L.A. P.I.s Bertha Cool and Donald Lam once more skirting the law in pursuit of a case whose precise shape is obscured by the sheer number of actions dragged across its trail. And while this should be getting pretty tiresome by now, the truth is that since series nadir Crows Can’t Count (1946) Fair has delivered some blisteringly fast and fun little crime thrillers that go a long way to show how to write entertainingly: let everything fly at the page, and have someone as unshakeable as Donald on hand to unpick whatever madness you throw him into.

Ostensibly hired for a routine tracking job, things get complicated for Donald pretty quickly: picked up by an attractive woman — of course — to chaperone her into a bar (was this really a thing — not letting women into bars unaccompanied?) before long they’re both bribing the waiter to bring them ginger beer when they order scotch and acting drunk in the hope the other will let something slip. A ‘drunken’ car ride, a stop at a random motel, the booking of a room…and three noises that, Donald hopes, were simply a truck backfiring in the vicinity later, things get pretty hairy for our pint-sized protagonist, and he has to pull in his long-suffering partner to dig him out of the first of oh-so-many holes.

It was a good thirty minutes before Bertha Cool showed up and she was mad enough to have bitten her initials on an iron fence rail.

From here, you get the expected, smoothly-handled imbrication of events and people, and Fair does a bang-up job of keeping everything clear as he casually throws in another reversal that makes you reassess all you’ve read to that point. The twists are many and expertly-deployed, and his little character notes are customarily sharp, from the people…

He had a cigarette dangling listlessly from loose lips. It was as though the mouth simply didn’t have strength enough to hold the cigarette up, but let it dangle at an angle that emphasised the utter weariness of his features.

…to the settings:

6285 Orange Avenue was a post-war job that had been knocked together out of such materials as were available and such labour as had been willing to work. It was a Monterey-type house, neat enough on the outside, but the builders had been up against a problem of cost per square foot and had tried to make the square feet as few as possible.

It feels like he’s putting a little more effort into his settings here, in fact, rather than relying on boilerplate recognition of a generic bar or a bland house or similar: perhaps moreso than before in this series, Fair is using space and environment to inform you about the people who inhabit them, and it’s interesting, at times, to watch the narrative shy up so that the precise details of a room can be run through. It’s a little odd, especially if you’re used to the Fair style of wheeling through scenes as colourfully as possible, but it also makes a nice change, and shows that some purposeful construction is going into these novels, even if the nay-sayers won’t buy it. And, don’t let talk of that shooting being a locked room setup fool you; it sounds like it is, but there’s an open window which goes undeclared for a frustrating number of pages. Move on quickly.

The events of the final third are where the changes are well and truly ringed — rung? — however, with events taking on an urgency unlike anything we’ve seen in this series before. We know the world will end up against Donald and he’ll do everything he can to keep his clients and his partner free of blame, but at times here it really does seem like there’s a simply insuperable problem to overcome. And then Fair pulls out one of the best reveals I think I’ve encountered from him, and flips the whole thing on its head once again. You won’t believe it — the sheer amount of explanation required to tie the threads together can’t cover a few cracks in wanting to surprise you as much as possible — but I feel sorry for you if you can’t enjoy it.

I took surprisingly few notes, I now realise, so eagerly did I burn through this, so don’t let this astonishingly vague review put you off. I’m keen to preserve the surprises for those of you lucky enough to still have this to read, and if you’re keen to see the central couple at their best then you could do much worse in what Fair had published to this point. You’re not reading Cool and Lam books for artfully wrangled prose and reflections on the human condition, and this is easily in the top five of this series so far. Anyone looking to cherry-pick their way through the high spots should buckle up and take this for a spin.

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