Top of the Heap

Top of the Heap, which was written by Erle Stanley Gardner in 1952 under the name A.A. Fair, is the first of the five Hard Case Crime books I've read that I haven't cared for. It reminds me of Sam Spade's line in The Maltese Falcon--"The cheaper the hood, the gaudier the patter." There's just too much pulp thriller dialogue that seems to have been written by a teenager who aspires to the genre, not an old pro like Gardner, who created Perry Mason.

In addition to the Mason books, Gardner wrote several novels, long out of print, about a private detective agency called Cool and Lam. Donald Lam is the shrewd, wiry sleuth, and Bertha Cool is the sharp-tongued, overweight widow who owns the business. In this book at least she's not a character as much as a device, a foil for Lam who does nothing but lust for money and say cornball things like, "Fry me for an oyster!"

The plot concerns Lam being hired by a rich young man who wants to find two girls he was out on the town with so he can verify his whereabouts. Lam finds the girls easily, too easily, and he can't leave well enough alone and pokes his nose further into the affair, and finds a mining scam, an illegal casino, and two murders. Some of this is fun, some if it is hopelessly complicated, unless you're an expert on stock swindles. Lam is a taciturn guy who sometimes is a bit too smart--he makes some deductions that I couldn't follow. In the time-honored tradition of noir era detectives, he also gets the crap beaten out of him.

There's also a lack of sex in this book. I don't mean explicit sex, of course, not in 1952. But aside from a few flirtations there isn't a really good femme fatale. I felt cheated.

I'm going to keep up with the Hard Case series, though. I have to expect a few clunkers along the way.