Official Case #13 for the Cool & Lam Detective Agency, Top of the Heap (1952) finds A.A. Fair, nom de plume of Erle Stanley Gardner, on slick-but-unmemorable form — mixing ingredients in a way that is at once comfortably familiar for this series yet tries to ring a few changes at the same time. And while it’s certainly not a bad book, for this reader — an avowed fan of Gardner and Fair both — it all sort of fell apart in the closing stages in which so much surmise is piled up that it’s to be wondered whether some sort of meta-textual commentary on the concept of ‘solving’ a case is being offered. It’s not, but, wow, is Donald Lam ever out on a limb or five here, and it shows.

Hired by John Carver Billings the Second to track down some people who can provide him with an alibi, Donald is at first a little sceptical (causing the wonderfully profane Bertha Cool to brand him “the most gift-horse-in-the-mouth-looking bastard I ever saw”) and, when the case is wrapped up inside two days, it seems he has good reason to be. Feeling like he has been following “the clues that had very carefully been left for me to follow”, Donald begins to have suspicions about Billings’s story — indeed, it doesn’t even make sense from a fictional point of view, which I was hoping would be spun to better ends — and soon he finds himself facing accusations and lawsuits from the powerful John Carver Billings the First.

Applying the sort of ingenious reasoning that makes the character so interesting, Lam decides that Billings is in fact seeking an alibi for something else entirely, and before too long he’s pulled in to deal with cops, attempted murder, and a trio of women who all fit into the picture in ways that, at this early stage, it becomes difficult to fathom. And it’s both to the book’s credit and detriment that you can pretty much guess how things are going to unfold from here.

While it’s interesting to see Lam evince sympathy for the women who are, by turns, innocently and smugly caught up in something bigger than they can imagine (“You’re dealing with a bunch of amateurs. They think they can fix things up. You’re a nice girl, Millie. I hate to see you get mixed up in this thing. You could get in pretty bad over this.”), and the structure throws us a loop of him starting an investigation again from scratch at the book’s halfway stage (“I was going to have to start work on a case that had been so terribly, so hopelessly messed up that it was a thousand-to-one shot.”), the truth is that I’m going to take this off my shelves in a week and fail to remember anything that happened in it.

Update: yes, that happened.

A few tiny flickers of interest peek through — the agency now has a “copying camera” that Donald is able to set up to take photos of documents, he eats “a bowl of chile” at one point, he encounters a thug who doles out a violent beating with all the bland disinterest of someone doom-scrolling Instagram — the truth is that this feels like it’s casting a too-wide net in trying to tie in the shooting of a mobster, a hit-and-run, the murder of a woman who never even appears in the narrative, and countless other minor crimes alongside. Gardner had his talents, but even he bit off rather a lot here, and the reader is forced to swallow whole chunks without even attempting to chew them.

I’ve been trying to write shorter reviews of late — it’s my belief that no-one really wants to read more than 800 words at a time — and I suppose the general lack of impression this leaves should be taken as a godsend in that regard. My Dell edition pictured above is another wonderful physical object, and this opens with a lovely extended foreword that draws attention to Gardner’s work with the Court of Last Resort, but if you want to know anything about the plot by the time this review comes out, honestly ask elsewhere. It does nothing to disgrace itself, but it clearly gets by on charm alone, and as such it’s difficult to either castigate or extol. Lam comes out on top, of course, but, bottom line, this is pretty middle of the road stuff.

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