The Knife Slipped (Cool & Lam #2) (1939) by Erle Stanley Gardner

The Knife Slipped (Cool & Lam #2) (1939) by Erle Stanley Gardner writing as 'A.A. Fair': The great Hard Case Crime book line published this 'lost' hard-boiled detective novel from the creator of Perry Mason, Erle Stanley Gardner. It was meant to be the second in Gardner's [Bertha] Cool & [Donald] Lam series but was rejected by Gardner's publisher in 1939 for being too racy and for having Bertha Cool be a little too criminal.

Cool, a Rabelaisian giant of a woman, runs a detective agency in Los Angeles. Donald Lam is one of her newish detectives. A woman and her mother hire Cool's agency to discover what that woman's husband is up to at night. The answer is... plenty! And not all Hanky Panky!

Gardner was certainly no Hammett or Chandler. His prose is workmanlike for the most part, while some of the characters and situations are stereotypical. Nonetheless, this is an enjoyable, pulpy time-waster. Bertha Cool is a memorable comic grotesque. And some of the perils and pitfalls of private detecting are highlighted as Lam makes some (near) rookie mistakes.

And the novel is surprisingly racy. And surprisingly cynical about pretty much everything, with most of that cynicism expressed by Bertha Cool, about as knee-jerk a pragmatist as one could ask for. Gardner's PI's aren't all that interested in the larger ramifications of the case, leading to a conclusion that's pretty much a dramatic fizzle. I won't read another of the Cool & Lam mysteries published between 1938 and 1970, but I am glad I read this one. It's a hoot. Lightly recommended.