The Knife Slipped (Cool and Lam)

While to many the Cool and Lam novels by Gardner aren't as well known as his Perry Mason novels...they are in their own right just as good. While Mason as a character stands for a more moral approach to solving the case, Cool and Lam are a little bit seedier but just as effective in their own way .Lam is shadowing a suspect in what appears to be a standard divorce case but instead stumbles into a case with political overtones and corruption. To make it worse Lam soon finds himself pursued by the police on a murder charge while still trying to unravel the mystery. Another fun read by a great author.

The Knife Slipped is a terrific piece of pulp detective fiction. Erle Stanley Gardner is best known as the creator attorney Perry Mason, whose exploits filled eighty novels and graced radio and television for decades. Gardner is not as well known for the other series he authored, the Cool and Lam mysteries. There are thirty novels in this series, published between 1939 and 1970 (with The Knife Slipped, having been written in 1939 as the second novel in the series, but never having made it into publication at the time).Bertha Cool and Donald Lam are a mismatched pair of odd couple detectives and the series is quite fun to read. Cool is featured as a cheapskate, cynical, hard-talking, heavyset woman. The best description of her ever is found early in the The Knife Slipped: “Bertha didn’t waddle when she walked. She didn’t stride. She was big, and she jiggled, but she was hard as nails, physically and mentally. She flowed across the office with the rippling effortless progress of a cylinder of jelly sliding off a tilted plate.” What a description! Lam is her counterpoint. He is a slightly built, smaller gentleman, who is always getting beaten in fights with hoods, but he is clever, intuitively seems to figure things out, and has a certain charm with women. As noted in the Afterword to this novel, Cool is a bit more clever and thoughtful in this novel. In other novels in the series, Cool is more than a bit dense and Lam is credited with all the cleverness. Here, she seems, at times, to be like a mother hen, taking Lam under her wing and showing him the ropes: “someone has to tell you the facts of life, if you’re going to be worth a damn in this business. I may as well be the one.”The Knife Slipped was one of those lost novels, never published in Gardner’s lifetime, discovered and finally published by Hard Case Crime. It is a joy to read to anyone who dives into stacks of old-fashioned pulp novels. It is written with a great sense of humor, such as the description of Cool: “As for money itself, she hung onto it like a barnacle caressing the side of a battleship.” The book is filled with nefarious figures, mysterious blonde bombshells, and innocent country girls who suddenly find themselves in the cold, hard city. There are bodies thrown about and murder weapons tossed about as well as frame-ups and corruption and malfeasance. But, what really makes this novel work me is the narrative voice used for Donald Lam and the pulpy descriptions. The client is described here as a “hatchet-faced battle ax with high cheekbones, big, black eyes with dark pouches underneath, a mouth which was a straight gash across her face, a nose like the prow of a battleship.” And the blonde bombshell, “Her voice was the kind that made ripples run up and down a man’s backbone. It was one of those seductive voices that came as a cooing caress to the masculine eardrum.”For those used to more modern-era detective fiction, the novel might appear a bit dated. It was, after all, written some seventy-six years ago in a very different world. But for those of us who can never get enough of pulp detective fiction, this is just what the doctor ordered.

This is the first I've read from Gardner, and it's a good one. It's more of a straight-up detective mystery than a noir, and it doesn't attempt the reach depth or weight you find in the best crime and noir novels, but it is entertaining.Bertha Cool is the unapologetically unorthodox head of the B. Cool detective agency. Donald Lam, "the runt," is her new, wet-behind-the-ears junior detective. He's got plenty of brains and more than enough street smarts to do his job, but he has a weakness for a women in trouble, or perhaps for any woman who will give him the time of day. Or as Bertha puts it, "You pick some little tart and fall in love with her every time."Unlike Lam, Bertha Cool has no tendency toward sentiment. She's big, fat, greedy, strong, smart, clear-eyed, determined, and will have everything her way. The two of them make quite a team. Gardner apparently published 29 novels about this pair, and they seem interesting enough to follow through a number of adventures.This particular volume, which brings the series total to 30, was the second. Written in 1939, it was not published until 2016. I think Bertha Cool was much of the reason the original publisher refused to print it. Readers of mass market genre fiction are supposed to like the protagonists. Bertha Cool was too strong a character for readers in 1939 to stomach. Gardner could have made her more palatable to his depression-era audience by making her slim and pretty and somewhat vulnerable, but she's too strong and clear-sighted to be put in a weak body, or to be saddled with the need to be needed. She's glad her husband is dead, glad to make a living on her own, and never content to conform to expectations of what a woman should be.Cool and Lam are pursuing an adultery case in this book. At least in the beginning. It turns into more, but I won't spoil it. Gardner's treatment of adultery, and of sexuality in general, is as factual, clear-eyed and realistic as Bertha herself. Both Bertha and Donald Lam recognize desire as an inescapable element of human existence, which is not to be shunned or neglected or too brutally suppressed. Bertha even admits early on that she engineered some of her late husband's affairs, steering him toward less destructive women, in order to preserve the peace of their union.That sort of talk just wouldn't go over well in 1939. Nor would Lam's very reasonable attempts to convince the guilt-ridden Ruth Marr that her desire is normal, and that acting on that desire (the source of her shame) is normal too. The mystery/thriller genre in general tends to be moralistic. Readers expect a protagonist they can root for, and a villain they can root against, and they expect the good guy to win in the end.But Gardner goes muddling with convention by having his good-guy detective tell Ruth Marr she's not a slut, and by having the fat, bossy, opinionated, unfeminine Bertha Cool push around every man she encounters. It must have added up to more than his editors could take. Worst of all, unlike the traditional bad guys who are supposed to get their comeuppance in this moralistic genre, Bertha Cool turns out to be consistently right in her cynical assessments of just about everyone.The plot meanders a bit in the second half, as many mysteries do, but it's a good read overall.

Hard Case Crime brings us another lost novel by a famous author and it's a shame it's taken so long - a whopping 75 years - for this one to reach the bookshelves. This was the second novel Perry Mason creator Erle Stanley Gardner (under the name 'AA Fair') wrote in his Bertha Cool and Donald Lam detective series. It was rejected by the publisher at the time it was written. This actually represents the earliest novel, chronologically, in the Cool and Lam series that Hard Case have published.The book is very much 'the road not taken'. Later books showed Lam as very much the brains of the operation and his foul-mouthed, money-grubbing boss, Bertha, as a foil. Here, we see Lam make mistakes - rookie errors - and the indefatigable Bertha takes pleasure in pointing out these mistakes and is clearly a highly intelligent investigator herself, teaching the rookie Lam. After the book was refused by the publisher, Gardner simply wrote a completely different one, rather than rewrite this one.This particular tale sees out hapless detective run afoul of fake identities, angry wives and mother-in-laws, a young woman suspected of murder, police and local government corruption... and the every-loving Bertha.Gardner was a terrific writer. This 1938 book balances the laughs and shocks to perfection. It's nice to have a rookie detective who makes mistakes and Bertha is a fabulous comic grotesque I could imagine Hattie Jacques playing to perfection.I can't honestly decide whether to recommend it as the first Cool and Lam for someone to read. I'd almost say to read one or two of the later books to get a feel for the regular version of the series before picking up this slightly atypical late entry. On the other hand, if you're not too fussed, pick this one up and enjoy it for what it is: a thoroughly enjoyable Gardner novel with a suitably twisty plot and a terrific duo of lead characters. It astonishes me that Cool and Lam never got a regular TV show or made it into movies!

An Erle Stanley Gardner story that never got published. It was really good.

Light and nice for holidays

Having read the entire series multiple times, it's easy to see why the publisher rejected this second Cool and Lam story - the plot is goofy and nonsensical, Donald Lam isn't nearly fleshed out as the character he is in the rest of the series, and it's a tough read. Glad I read it for the sake of completing the series, but ultimately a very disappointing read - if you're expecting the wry, witty Donald Lam of the later books, you won't find him here.

Well written. A very enjoyable read. Perhaps more true to everyday life than most people would care to think about. It has some teaching moments.Still, I have some questions. I gave the story Three Stars for the main characters.