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.

The fourteenth published tale by Erle Stanley Gardner about L.A. P.I.s Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, Some Women Won’t Wait (1953) marks the halfway point of my reading all thirty titles for the blog — ‘cos, y’know, there’s that unpublished one — very nearly five years after I started. And while I won’t say that the machine is starting to bleed to death here, it’s probably the simplest Cool and Lam case put on paper to date: relying essentially on a moment of misdirection akin to a classic novel of Golden Age detection rather than the imbrication of a variety of switchbacks that have been the hallmark of the series thus far.