Bullet Points: Wednesday Supersize Edition

• There’s something odd about an article setting out to highlight crime novels “that don’t start with a dead girl.” Aren’t there thousands of such works? Well, apparently killing off young women at the beginning of books has become a trend recently, enough of one at least that Bustle’s Charlotte Ahlin wants to give readers some alternatives. “Look,” she makes clear right up front, “I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with a murder mystery that centers on a young, non-living lady. But every once in a while you might want to read a mystery novel that doesn’t star a grizzled male detective hunting down the killer of a super hot female corpse. Maybe, maybe even a thriller where the non-male lead makes it all the way to the end without getting killed or horrifically brutalized at all. I know it’s a lot to ask, but there are a few books out there that manage to be mysterious and gripping without killing a woman off in the first few pages.” Ahlin’s choices include novels by Brandi Reeds, Tara French, Sujata Massey, and Sheena Kamal. (Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)

• While writing recently about the death of actor Burt Reynolds, I happened across a YouTube clip from a 1976 NBC-TV pilot film titled A Matter of Wife … and Death. Remembering nothing about that project, I promptly reached for Lee Goldberg’s fat and essential reference book, Unsold Television Pilots: 1955-1989, and looked it up. Goldberg explains that the 90-minute flick was a follow-up to Reynolds’ 1973 big-screener Shamus, in which he played a pool hustler-turned-New York private investigator, Shamus McCoy. The pilot placed Rod Taylor in Reynolds’ shoes, and also starred Dick Butkus, Joe Santos (who’d appeared alongside Reynolds in Shamus, but is better known for his role on The Rockford Files), and a 24-year-old Lynda Carter. This plot briefing was found on the Web’s Complete Rod Taylor Site:

The show opens with the apparent murder of a [small-time P.I.] friend of Shamus’. Shamus has to deal with an assortment of underworld types as he uncovers a gambling scheme.

In the course of the story, his romancing of (a) Zelda (Lynda Carter—the future Wonder Woman) and (b) Carol (Anne Archer) is continually cut short when duty calls. Shamus also shows off his prowess at playing pool and making scrambled eggs. He also changes his shirt a lot.

A big difference between the Burt Reynolds movie and the Rod Taylor TV show is the location. “We’ve moved the locale from New York to Los Angeles, and we have more high comedy than low,” Rod said in an April 1975 interview. But then, here’s a similarity between the actor and his character: “Shamus is a guy who is gentle with women and tough with guys.”

I have no memory of ever sitting down to watch that Taylor pilot, but it’s apparently available on the Walmart Web site for $17.99. Does anyone have an opinion on whether it’s worth buying? Maybe YouTube’s clip—embedded below—will summon up a recollection or two.



• Speaking of failed pilot films, North Carolina’s Winston-Salem Journal notes, in a wrap-up of new DVD and Blue-ray sets, the release this month of Television’s Lost Classics, Volume 2: Rare Pilots (VCI Entertainment), a collection featuring four vintage, half-hour tryout flicks that never generated small-screen series. Among those is Cool and Lam, a 1958 production based on Erle Stanley Gardner’s novels starring mismatched Los Angeles gumshoes Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, which he published under the pseudonym A.A. Fair. Gardner himself explains, in the TV pilot’s short introductory message to would-be sponsors, that “the Cool and Lam books have been successful for many years” (beginning with 1939’s The Bigger They Come). Sadly, neither that fact nor the lighthearted performances of stars Billy Pearson and Benay Venuta was enough to convince CBS, the network for which this pilot was made—already the home of Gardner’s Perry Mason—that Cool and Lam deserved placement on its weekly broadcasting schedule. If you get a chance to watch Cool and Lam either on YouTube (where a version of marginal quality can be found) or on VCI Entertainment’s new discs (which promise a “high-definition restoration” of the film), it’s easy to imagine CBS execs grousing that the plot was simply too complex for its half-hour format.

• That Cool and Lam pilot, incidentally, appears to have been shot from a script based on Gardner’s much-superior 1940 novel Turn on the Heat, which was re-released by Hard Case Crime just last year.

• Oh, and before we deviate too far from the subject of Burt Reynolds, let me direct you to Vox’s picks of half a dozen performances that defined the late actor. And for your viewing pleasure, YouTube has available full episodes from Reynolds’ 1989-1990 private-eye series, B.L. Stryker. Episodes of his previous crime drama, 1966’s Hawk, can be found here—at least as of this writing.

• One more thing: Don’t miss reading Ace Atkins’ tribute to Reynolds, found on the Web site of the South-focused Garden & Gun.

• Considering how difficult these things are to maintain at an active level, I am always quite impressed when a blog survives for more than two or three years. So hats off to The Nick Carter & Carter Brown Blog, which last week celebrated its eighth anniversary.

• If it’s such a hard, unremunerative enterprise, why do mystery/crime-fiction bloggers go to all the effort? For Sisters in Crime’s bimonthly First Draft publication, Eona Calli asked that of four familiar figures in this field, including Classic Mysteries’ Les Blatt. (Although she never spoke with yours truly, Calli was kind enough to list The Rap Sheet among crime-fiction blogs worth checking out.)

• Why mystery-fiction readers make difficult jurors.

• A good books-related question, posed by Terena Bell of The Guardian: “Why does the U.S. change so many titles?” Bell points out that those renamed books are “disproportionately” mysteries, and that altering their titles is usually a marketing decision. She adds, however, that “sometimes publishers themselves don’t know” why a book has been given a new name. Bell continues:

For example, Hitler’s Scapegoat by Stephen Koch will be released ... in the US next year as Hitler’s Pawn. I asked their publicity manager why, but she wasn’t sure and said the editor didn’t know either. Ask the Brits, she suggested.

Then there’s The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, a Stuart Turton novel renamed The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle in the States because, apparently, Americans die more frequently. When asked about the change, US publisher Sourcebooks initially joked: “Our editorial team decided to supersize it.” We’re lucky [Agatha] Christie’s Three Act [Tragedy] wasn’t upgraded to 3¼ or—horror of horrors—Tragedy 3.0. After all, this is the country that slapped the title Little Women II on Louisa May Alcott’s Good Wives.

• Coincidentally, Matthew Bradford’s post last week, in Double O Section, about how Sony and Eleventh Hour Films will be bringing Anthony Horowitz’s teenage super-spy, Alex Rider, to the small screen, provides yet another example of a dumb book-title change.

• I always enjoy a good “listicle” piece, and here are three that caught my attention recently: For CrimeReads, author Stephanie Gayle picks seven of her favorite race-against-time thrillers; that same Web site features Steve Goble, author of The Bloody Black Flag and the new The Devil’s Wind, writing about seven “pirate novels that might appeal to lovers of crime fiction”; and The Guardian hosts Sarah Ward’s choices of the “top 10 trains in novels,” including those in Ian Fleming’s From Russia, with Love and Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train. (If you’d like more suggestions of train-based mysteries, track down a copy of the Summer 2017 issue of Mystery Scene, which offers bookseller Ann Whetstone’s piece on that very subject.)

• I mentioned a couple of weeks back that, in December, U.S. publisher Brash Books will begin re-releasing Ralph Dennis’ fondly remembered Hardman series of private-eye novels. In advance of that, you can also read a “long-lost short story” by Dennis titled “Wind Spirit,” available from Amazon for just 99 cents. “It’s not vintage pulp,” says Brash co-creator Lee Goldberg, “but it might be of interest to fans of Ralph’s work for what it may reveal about his own life at the time (the late ’60s). The parallels are striking.”

• Shotsmag Confidential reports that Belfast’s NOIRELAND International Crime Festival, launched back in October 2017, will become a spring gathering next year, with events set to take place in the Northern Ireland capital from March 8 to 10, 2019. “The festival programme,” explains blogger Ayo Onatade, “will be announced and the ticket office will open on 16 November 2018.”

• I recently made the tough decision to give up Esquire, after subscribing to the magazine for more than half of my lifetime. (I just didn’t feel I fit the slick’s demographic profile any longer.) So I’m still susceptible to a bit of Esquire nostalgia. Which drew me to this short piece by Samuel Wilson of the True Pulp Fiction blog, recalling that mag’s role—primarily between 1947 and 1952—as a venue for “pulp-esque genre fiction.” One thing I hadn’t known before was how important Esquire was in promoting Henry Kane’s swingin’ Manhattan private eye, Peter Chambers. As Wilson recalls, Chambers “made his debut in February 1947 [with ‘A Matter of Motive’] and remained an Esquire exclusive through the end of the decade.”

• Leave it to Jimmy Buffett to find fun in imminent disaster. As The Washington Post reported last week, in advance of Hurricane Florence’s brutal touchdown in the southeastern United States, the singer-songwriter finally got to live out his 2009 song lyric about “goin’ surfing in a hurricane.”

• New York author and music critic Jim Fusilli announced on Facebook last week that publisher Open Road Media will soon be reissuing his three well-regarded Terry Orr private-eye novels—at least in e-book format. Kindle editions of Closing Time (originally published in 2001), A Well-Known Secret (from 2002), and Tribeca Blues (2003) are all scheduled go on sale on October 9.

• The trailer for The Ballard of Buster Scruggs looks fantastic! That anthology-format Western film (more details here), directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, will begin streaming on Netflix on November 13.

• “Reading fiction from around the world can be key to understanding larger geopolitical questions,” opines Tobias Carroll. “Reading procedurals, which innately focus on questions of the law, societal norms, and questions of history, is especially edifying.”

• Some of the all-time-worst covers have been made for Kindle e-books. (Hell, there’s a whole Tumblr blog devoted to such design disasters.) But the front of Tom Leins’ Slug Bait (Dirty Books)—shown on the left—is powerful and ugly enough to draw attention from a dead man. It also seems appropriate for a violent story that reviewer David Nemeth says “is like immersing yourself in a vat of feces, vomit, and blood.”

• I don’t know who’s behind the pseudonym “dfordoom,” but he or she deserves my Big Thumbs-Up of the Week, based on this Cult TV Lounge post extolling the virtues of the 1975-1976 NBC-TV series Ellery Queen, which starred Jim Hutton as mystery writer/sleuth Ellery and David Wayne as his father, Inspector Richard Queen. I, too, remain a fan of that show (developed by Columbo creators Richard Levinson and William Link), as I slowly but surely make my way through the many Ellery Queen novels.

• This is excellent news! From The Hollywood Reporter:

Vincent D’Onofrio is headed to Epix.

The actor, who has been recurring on Netflix’s Marvel drama Daredevil, has booked a co-starring role on the premium cable network's forthcoming series Godfather of Harlem.

Picked up straight to series in April, Godfather of Harlem tells the true story of crime boss Bumpy Johnson (Forest Whitaker), who in the early 1960s returned after 10 years in prison to find the neighborhood he once ruled in shambles. With the streets controlled by the Italian mob, Bumpy takes on the Genovese crime family to regain control. During the brutal battle, he forms an alliance with radical preacher Malcolm X—catching his political rise in the crosshairs of social upheaval and a mob war that threatens to tear the city apart.

The project is described as a collision of the criminal underworld and the civil rights movement during one of the most tumultuous times in American history.

• From the blog Vintage Everyday: “The Story Behind the Iconic Farrah Fawcett Red Swimsuit Poster That Wound Up Plastered on Millions of Bedroom Walls.”

• “Stephen King knows crime,” explains Max Booth III. “He grew up mainlining pulp legends like Richard Stark and John D. MacDonald. He was a goddamn noir geek, if you want to know the truth. When MacDonald agreed to write the introduction for King’s debut collection, Night Shift, he nearly pissed himself.” Booth’s look at the broad diversity of King’s crime and mystery fiction is here.

• Julia Roberts has sure come a long way since her role in 1990’s Pretty Woman. In the upcoming Amazon Prime psychological drama Homecoming—based on a podcast of the same name created by Eli Horowitz and Micah Bloomberg—she plays Heidi Bergman, described by the Killing Times blog as “a caseworker at the Homecoming Transitional Support Center, a Geist Group facility helping soldiers transition back to civilian life. … Four years later, Heidi has started a new life, living with her mother (Sissy Spacek) and working as a small-town waitress, when a Department of Defense auditor (Shea Whigham) comes to her with questions about why she left the facility. Heidi begins to realize there’s a whole other story behind the story she’s been telling herself.” Homecoming will debut on November 2.

• The presence in American culture of Richard Boone’s 1957-1963 CBS-TV Western series, Have Gun–Will Travel, extended well beyond the small screen. Paul Bishop presents the evidence.

• I have launched a fun new series in my Killer Covers blog, looking at how vintage artists might differ substantially in what they emphasized when painting fronts for the same book. We’re only two installments into this series so far, found here and here.

• How to look like … Modesty Blaise!

• Those darn crime-fiction writers, they just keep on talking, don’t they! Here are some interviews that have turned up recently around the Web: Scott Von Doviak chats with MysteryPeople’s Scott Montgomery about his “one-of-a-kind” debut novel, Charlesgate Confidential; Paula Hawkins (The Girl on the Train) answers questions from The Guardian; NPR Weekend Edition Saturday host Scott Simon speaks with Sarah Weinman about her new non-fiction book, The Real Lolita; Nancie Clare’s latest podcast conversation is with Margaret Mizushima, the author of Burning Ridge, her fourth Timber Creek K-9 mystery; January Magazine’s Linda L. Richards goes one-on-one with Dietrich Kalteis (Poughkeepsie Shuffle); The New York Times manages a chinwag with the ever-elusive “Robert Galbraith” (J.K. Rowling), author of the new Cormoran Strike mystery, Lethal White; Saskatchewan lawyer/blogger Bill Selnes conducts a short exchange with Jayne “J.E.” Baynard, who penned When the Flood Falls; and Crimespree Magazine quizzes Warren C. Easley about Moving Targets, the sixth of his Oregon-set Cal Claxton mysteries.

• Author Scott Von Doviak is a resident of Austin, Texas, but his new novel, Charlesgate Confidential (Hard Case Crime), is set in Boston, Massachusetts. That makes him eligible to comment on “How George V. Higgins Invented the Boston Crime Novel,” as he does for CrimeReads; and about five writers—younger than either Higgins or Robert B. Parker—who are “taking Boston noir in exciting new directions,” his topic for the Strand Magazine blog.

• By the way, the story Von Doviak rolls out in Charlesgate Confidential was inspired by the mysterious and shocking theft, in March 1990, of 13 irreplaceable works of art from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. If you’d like to learn more about that “largest unsolved art heist in history,” note that The Boston Globe and public radio station WBUR-FM have just launched a podcast, “Last Seen,” which is re-examining and unearthing new details about the 28-year-old crime. You can listen to the episodes here.

• And for its next issue, Mystery Readers Journal is on the hunt for articles about “mysteries that take place in the Far East.” The deadline is October 10. For additional submission details, click here.

Brainy Runt and His Cheapskate Chief

Just over two weeks ago, Jeffrey Marks--who’s in the midst of composing a biography of Erle Stanley Gardner--posted a list of his 10 favorite Perry Mason novels. Today he follows up with a rundown of his five favorite entries in another Gardner series, this one starring mismatched Southern California private eyes Bertha Lam and Donald Cool. Check it out here. I’m pleased to be able to say that I have read all but one of Marks’ picks.

Wheels of Misfortune

In my Kirkus Reviews column today, I look back at Erle Stanley Gardner’s other great mystery-fiction series, that one starring the odd-couple detective duo of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. Specifically, I recall 1941’s Spill the Jackpot, the series’ fourth installment, which finds the pair in Las Vegas, trying to track down a runaway fiancée and get to the bottom of a slot machine racket.

You will find that piece here.

Putting Up a Good Front

I hope I’m not establishing a trend here, but I have chosen to participate in my second meme of 2009. The first one required that I post 16 random facts about myself. This time, I am tagging onto a meme that started at a Web site called Weekly Geeks. The assignment is to “pick a book--any book, really--and search out multiple book cover images for that book. They could span a decade or two (or more) ... Or they could span several countries. Which cover is your favorite? Which one is your least favorite? Which one best ‘captures’ what the book is about?”

One of the half dozen or so works I’m currently reading is Turn on the Heat, the second installment of the classic Bertha Cool and Donald Lam detective series, created by novelist Erle Stanley Gardner under the pseudonym “A.A. Fair.” That series began with The Bigger They Come in 1939 and continued until 1970, when the 29th Cool and Lam novel, All Grass Isn’t Green, was published.

Turn on the Heat originally went on sale in January 1940. It finds obese private eye Bertha Cool and her “half-pint runt” of an operative, former attorney Donald Lam, being hired by a mysterious “Mr. Smith” to track down Amelia Lintig, the wife of an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist who disappeared from the small town of Oakville, California, 21 years before. That disappearance followed a marital scandal involving Dr. James Lintig’s young nurse; neither Mrs. Lintig nor her unfaithful hubby has been spotted since. However, when Lam visits Oakville, he discovers that--by apparent coincidence--Amelia Lintig has also just dropped into town for the unexpected purpose of dismissing her long-ago divorce case, leaving her still married to James Lintig. Before Lam can get a handle on all of this, Amelia Lintig vanishes again, he’s given a thorough beating by parties unrecognized, he falls for and gains the assistance of an Oakview reporter, and a link is sought between the Lintigs’ troubled past and a political campaign in the present--a race that could be seriously jeopardized by revelations about extramarital dalliances of yore. As with most of Gardner/Fair’s Cool and Lam stories, clients are deceptive, Lam cleverly manipulates suspects toward a satisfying resolution of the case, and Mrs. Cool begrudgingly goes along with her op’s illegal connivances, because she knows there’s a guarantee of financial reward in the long run.

Searching carefully through the Web, I was able to come up with six different covers that have featured on Turn on the Heat over the years. The first two come from the 1940s; the rest were published at various times in the 1960s and ’70s:





Honestly, none of these jackets does a perfect job of representing Gardner/Fair’s tale, though the second one in the top row--showing a naked woman being strangled with a cord--was at least inspired by an event in this novel. The first jacket, with what looks like a vintage blow torch, signals the escalating tensions of Turn on the Heat, but the other fronts seem intended to draw the eyes of male book buyers, rather than capture anything about the plot on offer in this work. The two jackets on the bottom are particularly worthless--examples of what book designers of the “make love, not war” era thought was cool, but having only scant connection to Turn on the Heat. Those covers could have been featured on any number of ’60s detective novels, and worked just as well--or just as poorly--as they do on this one.

As far as I can tell, there hasn’t been another American edition of Turn on the Heat since the last one shown here (bottom right), which came out from Dell Publishing in 1972.

If you would like to see what other bloggers have been doing with this “judge a book by its cover” meme, click here.

The Book You Have to Read: “The Bigger They Come,” by A.A. Fair

(This marks the 40th installment of The Rap Sheet’s ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Previous recommendations can be found here.)

2009 is shaping up to be a year in which I read lustfully from the dusty back files of detective fiction, while at the same time trying to keep up with the seeming surfeit of promising new works expected to reach bookstores over the coming months. If you could see my desktop (and thank goodness, you cannot--it’s a mess), you wouldn’t fail to notice a small but escalating stack of vintage paperbacks, evidence of my having recently shopped too many used bookstores, as well as my curiosity about authors whose works I don’t know all that well. For instance, after being exposed--through Bruce Grossman’s weekly Bookgasm column, “Bullets, Broads, Blackmail & Bombs”--to the work of prolific spy novelist Edward S. Aarons, I’ve finally plunked down hard cash for a couple of his books. I have also picked up two of Brett Halliday’s Mike Shayne novels and a collection of early Nick Carter short stories.

But the real treasures here, I think, are my A.A. Fair novels. Fair, you probably know, was a pseudonym employed by Perry Mason creator Erle Stanley Gardner, when he chose during the Great Depression to embark on a new series, featuring private investigators Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. While I’d read a few of Mason’s courtroom adventures in my younger days, I hadn’t ever picked up a Cool and Lam novel until last year, when I bought and thoroughly enjoyed Top of the Heap, which was published originally in 1952 but reissued in 2004 by Hard Case Crime. Following that experience, I started to look around for other Cool and Lam titles, buying one here, another there, eventually winding up with 14. But then, a couple of weeks ago, I strolled into the venerable Seattle Mystery Bookshop, down in my hometown’s historic Pioneer Square district, and what should I find? Paperback copies of almost every Cool and Lam novel known to man, apparently acquired from someone’s estate. After a trip back home to figure out which books in the series I already owned (but had not yet gotten around to reading), I returned to the bookstore ... and laid claim to the 15 novels I had not previously found, all at prices ranging from $2.99 to $5.99. I suspect that the Klondike gold prospectors who, in the late 1890s, flooded through Seattle on their way to northwestern Canada felt much as I did when they held glittering nuggets in their hands.

While it’s probably not necessary to read the Fair novels in the order they were published, I was pleased to finally catch up with the first Cool and Lam outing, The Bigger They Come, which was released 70 years ago this month. It’s in those fewer than 200 pages, after all, that Gardner originally worked out the back stories and characteristics of his odd-couple protagonists (though he was never much for consistency, and later diddled with a few “facts”). It’s there, too, that he established the relationship between his sleuths--a relationship filled with humor and fast-flowing banter of the sort that I suspect most crime-fiction enthusiasts don’t associate with attorney Mason’s creator.

This tale begins with Lam answering a newspaper ad for an operative at the Cool Detective Agency in Los Angeles. He has no particular qualifications for the job, just an empty stomach, an easy way with prevarications, and no employment prospects elsewhere. It seems he used to be a lawyer, but lost his license after making a foolish bet with a stranger, based on Lam’s statement that “it would be possible to commit a murder so there was nothing anyone could do about it.” Unfortunately, the stranger turned out to be a small-time gangster, who told police after his arrest that he’d been planning to give $500 to Lam in exchange for information on how to kill a rival and get off scot-free. The California Bar Association didn’t look kindly on that alleged breach. Lam didn’t look kindly on the Bar Association as a consequence, and decided to go into another line of work. The private dick game appeared to be a better option, even though Lam (which is an assumed name) lacks a bit in the way of intimidating stature. When the series begins, he’s described as being in his mid-20s, about 5 feet, 6 inches tall, and 127 pounds. At one point, Bertha Cool calls him “a brainy little runt.” But, as Lam assures her,

“Everyone has to protect himself in life. When he’s weak somewhere, nature makes him strong elsewhere. I figure things out. I always have. If a man starts pushing me around, I find a way to make him stop, and before I’m through he’s sorry he ever started pushing. I don’t mind hitting below the belt if I have to. I guess I even get a kick out of it. That’s because of the way I’m made. A little runt is apt to be mean.”

Nonetheless, he often comes out on the losing end of fistfights. And there are many of those as this series rolls along. Poor Donald.

Bertha Cool is as big and blustery as Lam is diminutive and suave. Gardner introduces her as “somewhere in the sixties, with gray hair, twinkling gray eyes, and a benign, grandmotherly expression of her face. She must have weighed over two hundred.” (Later in the series, she’s slimmed down somewhat to about 165 pounds.) Money-conscious in the extreme and almost anxious to ding a client for any excusable expense, Cool’s also a world-class cheapskate, often complaining to Lam about his expenses on a case. She evidently took over the detective agency from her deceased and adulterous hubby, Henry, whose repeated cheating she used as an excuse to lose her girlish figure. Though quick to anger, she is also quick to forgive (as long as there are dollar signs for motivation), and is famous for her exotic exclamations. “Kipper me for a herring!,” she might say. Or “Can me for a sardine!” Or “Peel me for a grape!” You get the idea. Gardner must have had fun crafting ever-more-outlandish interjections.

Shortly after Cool hires Lam in The Bigger They Come, she sends him out to serve divorce papers on Morgan Birks, who is wanted in association with a slot-machine scandal that involved police payoffs. Birks’ wife, Sandra, intends to use her husband’s fugitive status as further cause to end their marriage, but first she has to locate him--and do a better job of it than the cops have done so far. Upping the odds in Lam’s favor is Sandra’s longtime friend Alma Hunter, a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty with “a figure worth showing.” (It’s not surprising that Lam should fall in love with Alma over the course of this mystery. But then, being a certified romantic, he often finds himself drawn to fetching females, though his relationships don’t last from one book to the next.) And sure enough, Alma does help him track down Birks--at a hotel, where the fugitive intends to meet his not-so-clandestine lover. The situation deteriorates fast, though, when wife Sandra suddenly shows up at the hotel, too, wanting to give Birks a piece of her mind, and is accompanied by her brother, B. Lee “Bleatie” Toms, who was recently in a traffic accident, and is pretty seriously bandaged. Further complicating this situation, Lam has purchased a “hot” gun from the hotel’s bellboy, which he’s given to Alma for her protection.

After managing, amid this three-ring social circus, to serve the divorce papers on Birks, Lam thinks his work completed. However, it’s only begun, for he’s soon kidnapped by a couple of hard-knuckled types whose boss wants to know all the specifics of the detective’s efforts to beard Birks. Then, not long after returning home with a minimum of mortal wounds, Lam has to rush out again, this time to Alma’s aid--it seems she’s plugged a would-be molester in her bedroom, firing the .32 automatic that Lam bought her. When police arrive on the scene, they find that the dead man is none other than Morgan Birks, and he’s been shot in the back--which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, given Alma’s recollection of the night’s events.

Add to this vintage yarn a bunch of missing dough, elusive safety deposit boxes, false identities, and a flimflam more complicated than anything concocted in The Sting, and you’ve got a story that almost demands a flow chart to understand at times. But the rewards of sticking with it are many. Oh, and in the end, Donald Lam even gets to prove that a person really could get away with murder. At least in 1939, in California.

As near as I can tell, most of the 29 Cool and Lam novels fell out of print in the 1970s (though The Bigger They Come saw a new paperback printing in 1984). That’s regrettable, because Erle Stanley Gardner really seemed to have fun with those two sleuths, who at their best were cynically witty, self-effacing, and an excellent team. He really knew how to pack a punch in this series. Even Hollywood took notice. In 1958--almost 20 years after The Bigger They Come was first published, and another dozen years before this series concluded (with All Grass Isn’t Green)--a 30-minute, black-and-white Cool and Lam TV pilot was shot. Undoubtedly, producers hoped to capitalize on the popularity of Perry Mason, which had debuted on CBS the year before and made Gardner’s name golden. That pilot starred former jockey Billy Pearson as Donald Lam, and playing Bertha Cool was singer-performer Benay Venuta (who later appeared as Jean Smart’s mother-in-law in the show Designing Women). There seems to be some question as to whether that pilot was broadcast, but if it ever shows up on television, I’m determined to catch it.

Meanwhile, I only have 27 more Cool and Lam books to read.*

Fry me for an oyster! I’m thrilled by the prospect.

* Since this critique was first published, a 30th Cool and Lam novel has been discovered and brought to market: The Knife Slipped, penned in 1939 and intended as the series’ second entry, but not published (by Hard Case Crime) until 2016.

READ MORE: “Forgotten Books: Try Anything Once--by A.A. Fair
(Erle Stanley Gardner),” by James Reasoner (Rough Edges); “A.A. Fair--Owls Don’t Blink,” by Marcia Muller (Mystery*File); “A.A. Fair--Kept Women Can’t Quit,” by Steve Lewis (Mystery*File); “A.A. Fair--Crows Can’t Count,” by Steve Lewis (Mystery*File).

Confronting Frontal Nudity

Regular readers of The Rap Sheet know my fondness for vintage paperback fronts, especially those that Independent Crime’s Nathan Cain might define as “book cover porn.” I find the squeamishness of modern U.S. readers toward provocative novel jackets ludicrous, especially when they’re hit through every other medium by sexy imagery (see this new ad campaign for PETA, as an example), and when they appear more ready to take up arms against bared body parts on the nation’s bookshelves than they are violence in their crime and thriller fiction. I also applaud the willingness of publishers such as Hard Case Crime to bring back the sort of suggestive illustrations (see here and here) that were, interestingly, familiar to pre-Sexual Revolution Americans of the 1940s and ’50s, but are now deemed too risqué. Aren’t we all grown-ups here?

So Steve Steinbock’s post yesterday at Vorpal Blade Online about vintage Dell paperback covers struck me as amusing. Among the many fine examples he showcases of works by Ellery Queen, George Harmon Coxe, John Dickson Carr, and others are two versions of Fools Die on Friday, a Bertha Cool/Donald Lam mystery, originally published in 1947 and credited to “A.A. Fair,” one of the numerous pseudonyms employed by Perry Mason creator Erle Stanley Gardner. It seems that this novel bore two rather dissimilar paperback covers during its early years, one of which (shown on the left above) was distinctly racier than the other. When that original version (Dell #542) was republished (as Dell #1542), the redhead who’d previously been zipping up her skirt and displaying a handsome cleavage was now merely adjusting a shirtcuff. According to Bookscans, a paperback history site,

This is the only Dell cover illustration ever to be altered. The first was published in 1951, the later printing appeared in 1953. Robert Stanley remembers painting over the old illustration, but claims that he was never told the reason, or who the request came from. William Lyles, the Dell bibliographer, believes the change was ordered by either [William] Morrow (the hardcover publisher) or by Erle Stanley Gardner ...

The model in the illustration was obviously one of Stanley’s favorites. She graces the covers of literally dozens of vintage paperbacks. You guessed it ... she’s his wife, Rhoda.

So what happened between 1951 and 1953 that might have prompted such a change? Plenty. In 1952, Congress convened the House of Representatives Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials. They wound up “suggesting” that a list of 60 paperback titles be banned by communities throughout the country, including works by Erskine Caldwell, John Steinbeck and Irving Shulman, to name only a few. ... Of particular interest to the Committee was the “pornographic” nature of modern book covers. Oddly, the Book Jacket Designers Guild (yes, they had a union, too) agreed with them. They saw no reason to make jacket illustrations overly provocative, especially if the work itself was not particularly sexual in nature.

This book [Fools Die on Friday] was NOT on anybody’s “bad” list, but somebody obviously thought the original cover illustration had crossed the line between good taste and indecency. And so Stanley was told to change the scene. The cover art is actually very true to the story. You will notice the copywriters also changed the dialog at the top of the scene. While they’re both close, neither of the quotes listed on the covers is taken verbatim from the text.

(In the book, Donald Lam, who unwittingly has a knack for attracting ALL women, has stashed a key witness in his apartment. Sgt. Sellers is on his way to search the place. She’s taking a bath when Lam gets there, just ahead of him. He--ever the honorable hero--turns his back as she gets dressed. Hey, whaddya expect in the early 50’s? That’s as risqué as it was allowed to get!)

I guess American Puritanism comes and goes. Thanks to today’s condemnatory, hyper-religious posturing of U.S. conservatives and the dimwitted complacency of everybody else, it seems, the country is enduring another of its prudish periods. Fortunately, those old paperbacks aren’t yet being burned on the White House lawn, and I live with confidence that these priggish times, too, will pass.

(Hat tip to Bill Crider.)