5) Owls Don’t Blink - Gardner wrote Owls Don’t Blink while staying in New
Orleans during January 1942. The start of World War II stifled Gardner’s travel
plans and restricted his movements. These changes would be reflected in
Gardner’s works with Cool and Lam. He wrote to his parents: “Conditions are so
chaotic no one knows what is going on anywhere and it is terribly hard to make
plans. I am working on a story of New Orleans for a publisher and expect to
have it finished with the next week or ten days. – After that, I’ll probably
head directly for California and get things in shape out there so that if I
come East again in the spring I’ll have the ranch running all right.” Owls Don’t Blink was the first of
Gardner’s wartime trilogy for Cool and Lam. Donald has finished a case in
Florida and agrees to meet Bertha in New Orleans (the city where Gardner had
written to his parents a few months before) to help locate a missing woman,
Roberta
Fenn. Lam finds her without trouble; she then eludes them. When Lam is
on the trail of the woman again, he and Bertha find a dead lawyer in Fenn’s
apartment. Fenn and a friend, Edna Cutler, had switched identities for a while
to cool some suitors. In the interim, Cutler’s husband had served Fenn with
divorce papers, which now put into question the legality of Mr. Cutler’s recent
remarriage. Woven throughout the case is
the subplot of Bertha landing military construction contracts as a side
business to the detective agency. Her motive is both profit and keeping Lam out
of the military. Her actions only serve to have Lam enlist before the end of
the book. He explains the entire scam on the steps of the Naval recruitment
office, just before going inside.
4)
The Bigger They Come – The first, and in some ways the most
ingenious of the Cool and Lam books. Gardner used a loophole he had discovered
in the law to allow Donald Lam to show his own character by using that loophole
to save a girl he was interested in. In The
Bigger They Come, Lam is assigned to serve
divorce papers on Morgan Birks,
who is also wanted in connection with a slot machine con. Through Sandra Birks,
the plaintiff in the divorce proceedings, Lam meets Alma Hunt. He falls hard
for her, and gives Alma a stolen gun to protect herself. After serving Birks
with the papers in a hotel, Lam is kidnapped and taken to see a mysterious man
known as “The Chief.” Later, Birks is found murdered, shot with the same gun
that Lam had given to Alma.
3) You Can Die Laughing - You Can Die Laughing, the title for the
first of the two 1957 titles, comes from a saying that Lam tells a client twice
during the course of the story. Gone are the courtroom scenes and the lack of
action of Beware the Curves. A client
hires Cool and Lam to locate Yvonne Clymer, who also goes by the name of Mrs.
Drury Wells. From the start of the book, the client is not honest with the
firm. He spins a tale of oil and land grabs to Bertha, only to report a routine
missing persons case to Donald. Clymer inherits property and cash if she can be
found; otherwise the estate goes to a cousin. The client wants Clymer to sign
some paperwork regarding the mineral rights for that property. Unlike many
cases where the client is merely an impetus for the story, this client
continues to barge into the action, trying to wrest control of the
investigation from Donald. Hence, Donald gives him the titular response at one
point.
2) Try Anything Once - Lam runs up
against the law and Frank Sellers again. An important client asks Lam to keep
his name out of a murder case that took place at the motel where he was having
an assignation with a woman who was not his wife. Lam impersonates the client,
but Sellers doesn’t fall for it, and catches Lam when Lam must either lie
directly to the police or admit some of the truth. The police want to learn the
name of Cool and Lam’s client, as the victim was a deputy DA on the trail of a
killer when he was murdered. Lam follows the dead man’s tracks to find out what
the victim had discovered and why he ended up at the motel. Sellers throws Lam
in the drunk tank at one point to keep him away from the crime and the
suspects, a move that only temporarily keeps him away from the action and one
that leads to a rare apology from Sellers.
1)
Top of the Heap - When the firm gets a new client who
wants to find two young women, Lam smells a trap. John Carver Billings the
Second wants to find the pair he had met previously. When Lam goes to
investigate, he finds a prescription label that leads him right to the girls in
question. Lam suspects that the girls represent a faked alibi for the heir, and
he begins to investigate likely crimes covered by the alibi. One of the crimes
is the disappearance of a mobster’s girlfriend, following the mobster’s death.
Donald thinks that might be the only crime that would be sufficiently worth the
trouble of the alibi.
Fools
Die on Friday, Some Women Can’t Wait, Beware the Curves, Double or Quits, and Bats Fly at Dusk, would like round out
the top 10 for me.
