Most people will remember Gardner as the creator of Perry Mason. The Perry Mason novels were always so much better than the television counterpart. Mason was cooler than Raymond Burr could ever be. My mother is an avid reader and she had a ton of pulp books that she kept stored in the basement and I read through the lot of them.
She had some by this guy named A.A. Fair and he did a series of books about the Cool and Lam detective agency.
I didn't like those as much as the Perry Mason books.
Yeah, I know it's the same guy...now.
Top of the heap is the thirteenth of the twenty-nine books in the Cool and Lam series, but it is as good an introduction to the characters as any. The agency is hired to provide an alibi for John Carver Billings the Second. Seems that he doesn't want to get mixed up in a possible murder case.
Lam is able to get the alibi with little effort. Being a good detective, Lam realizes that he's being used and digs a little deeper. The digging reveals a mess of worms that even he doesn't want to get mixed up in, but decides to see it to the end.
After all these years of reading Perry Mason I think I can place the Cool & Lam series next to them. I love the rapid fire conversations that Gardner writes. It's just dialogue, sometimes for pages and it flows so naturally that it pulls you along making his books a bit of a faster read than most, but you never feel cheated. If anything you feel as if you're standing in the room watching events unfold.
I hope that Hard Case Crime sees fit to reprint the rest of the series. I would read them all
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