Erle Stanley Gardner is perhaps best known for the recurring character of Perry Mason, but he also wrote 20ish novels (under the pen name A.A. Fair) about Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. If you’re unfamiliar, Cool and Lam kinda-sorta turn some familiar private investigator tropes on their ear, and in a really entertaining way. For starters, Bertha Cool is pushing 300 pounds and is the blunt hard-ass who runs the detective agency, while Donald Lam is about 125 pounds and is a clever, mouthy little weasel. 

One major problem with reading mid-century paperback books is that so many of them are out of print, and it’s hard to read a series in order. Which is how I came to be reading Otto Penzler’s reprint of the first Cool & Lam novel The Bigger They Come recently, despite the fact that I had read later books in the series already. 

As a novel, it’s fun enough. Gardner tells a good story, and since he favors dialogue over description, things move along pretty quickly. Gardner was an attorney, and likely had a bagful of legal anecdotes he could reach into now and again to supply a neat little detail to one of his stories. I always knew the first Cool & Lam story as being the story that featured Gardner’s own discovery of a legal loophole that allowed for someone to commit murder and get away with it in Arizona (a loophole Arizona was quick to close when the book was published). I wasn’t disappointed, as that was a major feature of the plot. 

Although maybe I was a little disappointed? A teensy, weensy bit? The particulars of the loophole don’t enter the story until close to the end, and in some ways it felt a bit like an entirely different story for a few pages as it unfolded. But this I can kind of forgive since it was at least used in an unexpected way, was not the central crime of the book (in fact, it was more interesting than the central crime of the book), and was not woven into the story the way I thought it would be. 

I instead want to focus on something that appeared at the end of the book: a series of discussion questions for readers. I’ll reproduce them here: 

• Were you able to predict any part of the solution to the case?
• Aside from the solution, did anything about the book surprise you?
• Did any aspects of the plot date the story? If so, which ones?
• Would the story be different if it were set in the present day? If so, how?
• What role did the setting play in the narrative?
• For those familiar with Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason novels, how did this compare?
• Can you think of any contemporary mystery authors that seem to be influenced or inspired by Erle Stanley Gardner’s writing? 

I actually like these questions, and as the last few words of the novel still tumbled around in my head, I was kind of glad to have something waiting for me to force me to think about what I just read. 

I won’t go through them all here (and I didn’t consider all of them after completing the novel), but there are two that felt more significant to me, and I bolded them above, in case you were wondering what that meant. 

The first question about whether something was predicted is fun, as the answer in my case is “yes.” There’s an ambiguous identity that’s central to the plot, and it is absolutely telegraphed early on in the story. However, that is somewhat forgivable, in my opinion, as this novel was written in 1939 and who knows if your average reader then would pick up on the same things that today’s hyper-reader does. Having read quite a lot of things from this time period in the crime fiction genre, I can only assume that the reading public had not yet been trained in tropes, and it hardly seems fair to ding Gardner some originality points for something he could very well have invented. Loads of stories (including the mysterious one I referred to a couple of weeks ago where someone pretended to be his own twin brother) hadn’t yet overused their plot devices, and no one else had a chance to rip them off. 

As for setting, maybe I missed some important context in the early pages of the novel, but evidently it takes place in Yuma, Arizona, a fact that I was surprised to learn. Given Yuma’s proximity to Mexico, one would think there would be some Spanish language in the novel, but no. One might also think that some aspect of the American Southwest would also play a role – a mention of a certain kind of tree, cactus, bush, bird, lizard, furry animal, giant hat, or cowboy accessory. Heck, even some mention of an architectural detail, mention of the heat, or time zone. It’s not until the end that I felt grounded in a specific place, when there’s a very important car ride between Yuma, AZ and El Centro, CA. And frankly, part of the plot involves a gang of people who relocate from Kansas City. You mean to tell me they chose Yuma? 

It was pretty weird to spend almost two hundred pages in a book set nowhere in particular only to have the setting become vitally important all of a sudden. These kinds of omissions in stories tend to feel one of the following ways: overlooked, unimportant, or withheld. In this case, it felt withheld. 

Cool & Lam are enjoyable characters, but now and again I read one of these old paperbacks and I realize why it’s out of print. I keep a short list of books I’m searching for affordable copies of, and I have a Great Collector’s Fear, I suppose, that I’ll panic buy something (oh, like Gil Brewer’s 13 French Street) at a higher price because I bump into it in a bookstore somewhere and then disappointingly reach a similar conclusion as with The Bigger They Come: a fun curiosity, but ultimately something that shows its age and isn’t the kind of thing you’d refer to as a reader or writer later on. 

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I do want to be clear about something here, which is that I have no real intention of using this blog space to write book reviews. I wrote (and even published) a number of book reviews quite a few years ago and took no real pleasure from it. In my case, I always felt the subject of my book reviews was, well, me, and not the book. Look how insightful I am! Allow me to interpret this book for you, or at least steer you towards The True Thoughts when you read it on your own! This could have stemmed from how I was reviewing literary books, and that world tends to favor the unusual, whether in craft or criticism. 

Several blogs (or Substacks, these days) that I follow tend to have grab-bag or filler posts, where it’s sometimes book reviews, sometimes restaurant reviews, or even lists of songs that the author is currently enjoying. In addition to avoiding book reviews, I want to avoid that, too. No one wants to read capsule summaries of my life’s various moments, and I certainly don’t want to write them. 

I’m sharing this mostly because the list of questions at the end of the Gardner book were useful, certainly more useful than any insights I had in book reviews I wrote, and they follow on a bit from some of what I wrote recently about dated stories in the crime fiction genre. There is an enormous back catalog of quick, fun diversionary reads in the crime fiction world, and I’m not sure that “datedness” or “predictability” are enough to disqualify enjoyment. Lord knows I myself am trying to write the stuff, and who knows what kind of Sell By date will get invisibly stamped on whatever I manage to finish…