She’s a widow (something I picked up in research because it’s not mentioned in this novel) and her voice is imposing and you can tell from the prose that she fills a room with her mouth, if not her body. Bertha Cool is not obese but she wears her one hundred and sixty pounds well. Like any good story, it’s the characters that make this story. I guess this is why he chose to write the first few Cool and Lam books under a pen name, A. After reading The Case of the Velvet Claws, the first Perry Mason book, I thought I knew what to expect from Gardner. Deferring to their knowledge, I read Top of the Heap.īoy, was this book fun! I haven’t enjoyed a book like this since The Dawn Patrol by Don Winslow. You can tell what Ardai and company think of Cool and Lam: the third book they published was Top of the Heap, a 1952 book that was the thirteenth in a series that ran twenty-nine books. If such a university existed, the books published by Hard Case Crime would be required reading. Since I am still a freshman at the University of Crime Fiction, I decided to trust a couple of tenured professors, Charles Ardai and Max Phillips of Hard Case Crime. I even asked around and folks like Bruce Grossman over at Bookgasm assured me that these books could be read in any order. I pondered starting this series with the first book, The Bigger They Come.

It’s kind of like remembering that George Lucas also wrote the movie “Willow,” except, you know, “Willow” wasn’t very good. Erle Stanley Gardner, the man who created the mismatched team of Cool and Lam happened also to create the world’s most famous defense lawyer, Perry Mason. If my research is any indication, they are two truly forgotten detectives created by one of the most famous writers of the twentieth century.

Harry allard