Sat 23 Jul 2022
Archived Mystery Review: JACK DONAHUE – The Lady Loved Too Well.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[3] Comments
JACK DONAHUE – The Lady Loved Too Well. Harlan Cole #2. McGraw-Hill, hardcover, 1978. No paperback edition.
Those of us who mourn the fact that there can be no more Perry Mason stories now have reason to rejoice once again! Here’s the second of a new series starring Houston attorney Harlan Cole, who, believe it or not, comes complete with an utterly devoted secretary and his own personal private detective.
And of course there’s a flashy final courtroom solution climaxing the trial of his client, a famous woman’s lib author accused of killing her lover. As in all of Erle Stanley Gardner’s writing, the prose is purely functional, but with the added plus of modern bluntness and sexual candor. While it may be true that the murderer is guessable, that’s part of the fun, isn’t it?
Rating: B
July 23rd, 2022 at 8:08 pm
No matter how much fun I seem to have had with this one, my comments probably didn’t influence sales all that much. The first in the Harland Cole series was Pray to the Hustlers’ God (Reader’s Digest Press, 1977). There wasn’t a third. (Donahue did have two earlier novels published, neither with a series character.)
July 23rd, 2022 at 9:44 pm
Nice to know someone tried to fill Gardner’s niche.
July 24th, 2022 at 7:33 am
There were authorized Perry Mason’s, both written by Thomas Chastain:
The Case of Too Many Murders, Morrow 1989
The Case of the Burning Bequest, Morrow 1990
but of the purely ersatz variety, I have the feeling that this one was the most blatant.