Given that A.A. Fair was a nom de plume adopted by Erle Stanley Gardner, a trained lawyer who would write over 80 legal thrillers featuring Perry Mason, it was inevitable that the Cool and lam books Fair wrote would veer into legalistic territory at times. The first in the series, The Bigger They Come (1939), relied on an obscure state law loophole, after all, and got things off to an ingenious start. What’s perhaps surprising is that it wasn’t until fifteenth title Beware the Curves (1956) that Gardner would venture once more into the courtroom with his L.A. P.I.s…though, I suppose he had written 36 Masons and nine novels featuring D.A. Doug Selby in the meantime…so I guess he was getting his fix elsewhere.

Hired by John Dittmar Ansel to track down a man he has met some six years ago on holiday, Donald Lam is able to complete the task very quickly indeed, but being what Bertha Cool likes to call a “brainy sonofabitch” is wise to the holes in the story they’re sold.

“Someone gave him an idea for a plot in Paris six years ago. He doesn’t make much money. It was a factual story the man gave him, but he’s going to turn it into fiction and make a novel out of it. So he wants to find the guy, and quite naturally he employs a detective agency to locate this bird. It’s just routine.”

Bertha shook her head as the full implications of what I was saying dawned on her.

“Fry me for an oyster!” she exclaimed.

“Exactly,” I told her.

The plot from here, well, it acquires the thickness, as motivations become suspect, an old murder rears its head, and it is increasingly apparent that something is going on behind the enquiries Ansel set running which hints at a bigger picture in play. The Fair books are to be noted for the clever switchbacks employed within, and this might just be the most dense in terms of plotting to date: keeping up with exactly who is suspected of what is half the fun, and the nature and timbre of the book changes probably half a dozen times in its short duration. As a result, it’s perhaps not the most successful book in the C&L canon, but it’s fun watching Fair pull rug after rug from beneath you, and the characters are superb:

Whenever a client was making out a check Bertha considered the moment sacred. The slightest sound, the intrusion of a comment might be an interruption.

Given Gardner’s undoubted excellence in all things legal, it’s a shame that the eventual courtroom direction of this feels a little tame. I could have done without Donald — who, yes, was a qualified lawyer before he was disbarred — essentially mansplaining how to behave during a trial to Barney Quinn, the lawyer they get working for them and, if I’m completely honest, I don’t see how the various, apparently-bizarre instructions given to Quinn form part of Lam’s masterplan. And therein lies the main rubs I have with this book: for all its slick plotting and commendable attitude of dismissing the notion that women are ‘past it’ once they hit 30, Gardner’s evident and understandable reverence for the law takes two big hits in the closing stages which leave a weird taste in the mouth.

The first of these is that I simply don’t understand how a judge and a District Attorney could be unaware of…the thing…that Donald draws on as his final sucker-punch. This is the problem when plotting in a way that requires the esoterica of a specialism (and one of the reasons I’ll never understand the popularity of House (2004-12)): the general observer has no notion of how clever these deductions are, and I just don’t believe that this one would be unknown. Far worse, however, is the postscript, in which it is heavily hinted that a man is jailed on false charges after what must have been false evidence being given against him…this following passages in the novel in which a prosecutor is reprimanded for trying to bring in evidence without foundation against the accused. Is it just me? This is…uncomfortable, right?

And so for all the cleverness here, the lingering sense of hypocrisy and the horrible implications of the much-vaunted legal processes being used to achieve what might loosely be termed justice on false grounds feels more like the sort of thing Gardner would rally against (he has established the Court of Last Resort by this point, after all) than the sort of crowning fillip he’d allow his long-running heroic characters to stoop to. It leaves an amoral stain on the surface of what had been some fairly breezy books to this point, but let’s not pretend that we take out literature so seriously that I won’t be able to read further.

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