Hired by Texan businessman Lawson C. Corning to find the whereabouts of Mrs. Yvonne Wells, the Cool and Lam Detective Agency has reason to believe that there might be more in back of the request than they’re told. Finding the woman’s house doesn’t prove too difficult, but her surly, uncommunicative husband is unwilling to help Donald Lam in his enquiries, and so Lam has to cast his net a little wider. Which is how he ends up at the next door neighbour’s house where Mrs. Raleigh tells him that she heard an argument in the Wells house a couple of nights before, and that Drury Wells then exited the house carrying a body.

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.