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.

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.

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.

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?

Look, I can’t swear to it, but I have a suspicion that Cats Prowl at Night (1943), the eighth published book in Erle Stanley Gardner’s series featuring Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, written under this A.A. Fair nom de plume, just might be the first title of his I ever read. Reading it now, some 20 years later, it tickled enough memory buttons to be tauntingly familiar while also furiously out of reach, but the distinct aspect that separates this book from its brethren — namely the absence of pocket dynamo Donald Lam from its pages — feels familiar, if only because I get the sense I started these books with no sense of Lam as a character.