My Top 5 Cool and Lam titles

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.