Before long, the woman in question would be reduced to a sniveling mass of quivering flesh, willing and anxious to provide any information or assistance that the firm of Cool and Lam might require.Īs I recall, these books usually followed a predictable pattern. At that point, he would call in the reinforcements, and Bertha would bestir herself and swing into action. Occasionally, though, Donald would encounter a “dame” who, for some inexplicable reason, was immune to his charms and needed to have the living bejesus scared out of her. As a small boy myself, I found it very encouraging to think that a guy who was only about five-six and 135 pounds could still do so well with the ladies. Donald had a gift when it came to the fairer sex, and women usually fell for him fast and hard. Lam was the brainy, pint-sized detective who did all of the work, while the bejeweled, avaricious, and considerably overweight Bertha, who had founded the agency, mainly sat behind the desk and gave her partner grief. Fair series featured a team of detectives, Donald Lam and Bertha Cool. There is a stripper in the book, along with a couple of other women of questionable virtue, and so I’m betting that this is one that Dad didn’t recommend.

I can’t remember into which category Top of The Heap might have fallen. Of course the ones I most looked forward to were the ones that he did not pass along and that I had to read on the sly.

My father was a big fan of Gardner’s Perry Mason series, but occasionally he brought home one of the Fair books, and eventually he would pass it along to me if he deemed the subject matter appropriate for a lad of my tender years. Fair, while a young boy growing up in the wilderness of northwestern Montana. I first encountered Erle Stanley Gardner, writing as A.

Top of The Heap by A.A. Fair