Tue 11 Dec 2018
Archived PI Mystery Review: A. A. FAIR – The Bigger They Come.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[4] Comments
A. A. FAIR – The Bigger They Come. Donald Lam & Bertha Cool #1. William Morrow, hardcover, 1939. Pocket #228, paperback; 1st printing, September 1943.
In this, the first book Erle Stanley Gardner wrote under this name, we learn the following: how Donald Lam happened to get hired by the Bertha Cool Detective Agency, that that may or may not be his real name, some details about Bertha’s life with the late Mr. Cool …
And how to commit a murder and not be punished for it. If this is not a hard-boiled novel, it is the toughest next thing to it. You can also always count on legal shenanigans in a Gardner book — and more puzzle in the plot than in all of the mysteries written last year, combined.
–Reprinted from Mystery*File #19, January 1990, very slightly revised.
December 12th, 2018 at 1:18 pm
That is less of a review and comment about the overall series.
December 12th, 2018 at 2:10 pm
Beb
The template was set with the very first one, wan’t it?
I don’t remember the details of this one, but from reading what I said about this one, there are are facts covered in it that weren’t gone over again and again in the ones that followed.
Such as the possibility that that may or may not be Donald Lam’s real bane, and a mention of a late Mr Cool that I don’t remember being brought up in later books. (I may be wrong about that.)
December 12th, 2018 at 9:52 pm
This varies a little from the later series on a few minor details, but not significantly.
Gardner always insisted the gimmick in the book was an actual loophole in California law that allowed a “legal” murder to be committed. Some claimed otherwise, but the legislature does seem to have rewritten the statute so any loophole was closed.
Bertha gets more colorful and a shade more human as the series progresses and Donald seems to get shorter and more frail, but still proof positive that even among the tough guys brains beats brawn.
These are hardboiled in the same sense that George Harmon Coxe’s Kent Murdock books are, an older pre Chandler version of the hardboiled school that was as focused on the mystery and solution as the language and violence. I think it says something that we question that these or the early Mason’s were hardboiled because our definition of the genre is much narrower now than the writers who invented it conceived it.
I suspect most of Gardner’s old Black Mask alumni considered this to be in that tradition.
December 12th, 2018 at 10:03 pm
Well said, David.