Thursday, October 19, 2017

Up for Grabs: A Donald Lam-Bertha Cool Mystery by A.A. Fair




I am sitting out back enjoying the cool weather.  It is 68 degrees and glorious.  I have my feet propped up on a small table in front of me, the better for Hercaloo to shred my sandals.  Ah, well. They're old.  It's hard to catch her in action because she knows when her picture is being taken and she stops what she's doing and poses.



I am listening to Beethoven's Piano Trio in C Minor Opus 1 No. 3, performed by the inestimable Isaac Stern on violin.



Up for GrabsUp for Grabs by A.A. Fair

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The first A.A. Fair book I read I wasn't sure of. A.A. Fair is a pen name for Erle Stanley Gardner. His two heroes in his A.A. Fair books do not remotely resemble Perry Mason and his secretary Della Street and it left me unsure.

This is the second book by Fair and I'm sold. The two heroes are an unlikely couple who have nothing in common but their detective agency. Bertha Cool is a tough as nails woman whose face could stop a truck and whose mouth could shut up the truck driver. She runs a private detective agency and runs the business end of things. We rarely see her outside the office. She wants to solve crimes because she wants to make money. If solving the crime doesn't make money, she is not interested.

Donald Lam is the private detective who works with Bertha. He is young and light of stature but very, very charming, something that gets on Bertha's nerves, probably because she's not a sweet young thing and blind and deaf to his charms.

Lam is not in it for the money; he's in it to solve the crime. He is the brains behind the operation and the one who keeps them in business.

They're a good pair, because without Cool, there would be no income. Cool negotiates and keeps the books. She makes sure they get a fair price for their services and nobody is going to rip her off. She's too intimidating for that.

Without Lam, there would be no business because crimes would not get solved and there would be no clients.

The stories are told from Lam's first person narrator which is nice because he is charming. And witty and funny and slick and very clever. Hearing the story from Bertha's perspective would be brutal and filled with lots of salty language.

The plot: The head of an insurance company, a Mr. Breckinridge, comes to Cool and Lam with a proposition. To weed out false claims of injuries, Breckinridge has set up a phony contest where claimants "win" a two week vacation to a dude ranch in Arizona. With activities like swimming, golf and horse back riding, a very attractive hostess, the dude ranch is not a place to convalesce.

The trick is to catch the "injured" victims engaging in activities that belie their condition. Breckinridge is willing to pay a lot of money to the private detective agency if Lam would be willing to travel to Arizona and collect proof of false injury claims.

Lam is not particularly interested but Cool is not a woman to say "no" to, so off he goes.

Without giving anything away, things become complicated really fast. There are all sorts of shenanigans going on, including a murder. The naked plot is fine, but the really enjoyable part is watching Donald Lam in action as he puts the pieces together and slowly tightens his noose.

In conclusion? A great entertaining read.



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14 comments:

Fred said...

I didn't realize that Gardner was such a prolific writer.

Brian Joseph said...

This sounds like a lot of fun.

I am in the insurance industry. False injury claims still plague us. All sorts of creative methods are employed to catch the fraudsters. Some things never change!

Mudpuddle said...

delighted you got a chance to spend some time with Lam/Cool... i've gotten a lot of fun and enjoyment out of them... some of the books are better than others, tho: this is one of the better ones... unfortunately, some are hard to find and apt to be overpriced. i've read about a third of them and look for them whenever i'm in a bookstore or Goodwill or the like...
Herc looks like he's grown a bit... i heard Stern in S F one time; excellent violinist... the most remarkable performance on the violin i ever was at, was also in S F: hearing Ruggiero Ricci play an all Paganini concert... a small man in a tatty brown suit entered and produced a huge sound and the execution was technically perfect... i'll never forget it...

RTD said...

Wow! I didn't know that Fair and Gardner were the same person. Thanks for that eye opener, Sharon. BTW, I have become "addicted" to reruns of Perry Mason on FETV. Great stuff (even if some of it is so old (like me)).

Sharon Wilfong said...

Fred, he wrote oodles of mysteries. I personally don't know how someone can come up with that many ideas.

Sharon Wilfong said...

Brian, Josh was watching a youtube video about people like that. It was interesting the audacity some of these people had.

Sharon Wilfong said...

Mudpuddle, I agree with you that some Lam/Cool's are better and I really enjoyed this one.

I think Hercaloo is a bit bigger. She's a year and a half now. I read that they take three years to mature. She's my sassy lady.

I would have liked to have heard that concert. I haven't been to alive concert in a while. It's time I rectified that.

Sharon Wilfong said...

R.T., I was just talking to Josh about watching the Perry Masons. Hope they're on NetFlix. Raymond Burr is a great actor.

Mudpuddle said...

they are on Nertflix... the mrs. and i recently finished watching all they had; i don't think they have all of them...

Sharon Wilfong said...

Thanks, Mudpuddle. We'll put them in the que.

Fred said...

Those old Perry Mason shows are great. I saw many young actors whom I didn't recognize until I saw their names on the cast list.

I did recognize a young Leonard Nemoy, though, even without the ears. I think he played a young thug or somebody equally disreputable.

Sharon Wilfong said...

OK, I'm not saying I'm a Leonard Nimoy fan, but at our local Books A Million, when they were having a Sci Fi fair. A cashier handed my son a head shot of Spock.

My son handed it to me because he knew which one of us wanted it.

It's hanging in my study next to my Harvard's Classic book collection.

Mudpuddle said...

yay! Spck lives!

Sharon Wilfong said...

Always!