Turn On The Heat, by Erle Stanley Gardner
Erle Stanley Gardner created more than the always triumphant lawyer Perry Mason. So prolific was the writer-lawyer that he fed the pulps with stories from the pseudonymous pens of over a half dozen noms de plume, creating dozens of characters pleasing readers of mysteries and westerns for over a decade even before the first Perry Mason novel saw print. And though he went on to write over eighty novels featuring the hard-charging defense attorney fortunate enough never to have a guilty client, Gardner kept on dishing out other stories, creating a number of other mystery series, most notable among them the Cool & Lam series featuring Donald Lam, the featherweight but brainy detective working for the agency led by Bertha Cool, a hefty and mercenary woman holding her own quite well in a man’s world.
Those whose experience of Erle Stanley Gardner’s characters consists only of repeated viewings of Raymond Burr’s turn as Perry Mason in the long-running TV show have very little idea just how quick-witted Gardner’s heroes were, nor just how much action he packed into his early mysteries. Members of the A/V club might get a slight idea from the earliest Perry Mason movies starring Warren Williams as the fast-talking, fast-moving lawyer—though those films take serious liberties with the series. In the earliest novels, Perry Mason has no compunction against breaking and entering, and will do almost anything to save his clients.
In a very similar vein and then some, the Cool & Lam series features the clever footwork and cleverer mouthwork of Donald Lam, a quondam lawyer now doing the actual investigation work for Bertha Cool. Written originally under the pen name A.A. Fair, Turn On The Heat is the second book in the series (which ran to well over two dozen titles). This 1940 tale starts with a mysterious investigation for a mysterious Mr. Smith of a woman missing for some twenty years from a moribund Southern California thorp. Lam sticks out like a sore thumb in the no-horse town of Oakview as he pursues the cold trail of Mrs. Lintig, where he almost immediately runs into trouble.
I watched my chance and lurched across the seat. I grabbed the steering-wheel with both hands and jerked. I couldn’t turn the wheel, although the car swerved to one side of the road and the back to the other as he exerted pressure to counteract mine. He snapped up his elbow without taking his hand off the wheel, and it caught me on the point of my sore jaw, making me loosen my grip. Something like a pile driver caught me on the back of the neck, and the next I remembered I was lying flat on my back in the dark trying to figure where I was.
Donald takes a chance and is taken for a ride
Now there’s a reason Lam’s legacy is as a quick-witted detective: he’s no good in a fight. He can’t throw a punch worth a damn and he takes a beating worse than Ned Beaumont, and much more often. He lives by his wits and lucky for him he has a good deal more than his fair share. In Turn On The Heat Lam shows off his ability to keep a dozen bluffs running at once while he figures out just what is behind the sudden interest in a runaway bride long gone since before the Jazz Age. Gardner’s deft and witty prose and dialogue keep pace with his scrawny detective’s perpetual motion through the minefield of secrets he must cross to arrive at the truth behind the seemingly straightforward ‘find the woman’ assignment he is given. The action never stops in this second outing in the Cool & Lam series, and neither does Donald Lam’s headlong rush—sometimes chin first—through dangers both physical and legal as he skates near corruption and murder. He plays the hand he’s given the best way he knows how: all in.
Bertha Cool started to drum with her thick, jeweled fingers on the top of the desk. “What a mess,” she said.
“You cooked it,” I told her.
“I’m sorry, Donald.”
“I thought you would be.”
“Listen, couldn’t you take over and—”
“Nothing doing,” I said. “If you hadn’t known anything about it, I could have gone ahead and done what I thought was necessary. I could have acted dumb and if anyone had questioned me, they could never have proved anything except that I was dumb. Now, it’s different. You know. What you know might get found out.”
“You could trust me, lover,” she said.
“I could, but I don’t.”
“You don’t?”
“No.”
Her eyes hardened and I said, “No more than you trusted me a few minutes ago.”
Sometimes being smart means playing dumb, and sometimes it means playing it smart, but it always means playing it close to the chest
I simply devoured this thriller, and hadn’t intended to finish the same day I started it, but what are you gonna do? It has been many years since I read one of the ‘off-brand’ Erle Stanley Gardner mysteries, and I seem to recall that the Cool & Lam series turns a little runny—more half-baked than hard-boiled—late in its run, just as the Perry Mason novels do after the first twenty years. But I am not sure that is actually the case; trust my recollection as you would any other assertion you found on the Interwebs. I have a few of the later books featuring Bertha Cool and Donald Lam—Turn On The Heat is the earliest in the series I own—and so I’ll report back to you once I’ve read some of those products of Gardner’s ‘more mature’ consideration. For now, it’s two thumbs up for me. Come for the lurid cover, stay for the exciting whiz-bang ending.
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