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Bertha Cool and Donald Lam

kevinburtonsmith

Created by A.A. Fair
Pseudonym of Erle Stanley Gardner

One of the all-time great mismatched team-ups in detective fiction and — at the time — a real blast of fresh air. Grade A Extra Large widow and penny pincher BERTHA COOL, the sixtyish head of the B. Cool Confidential Investigations, based in Los Angeles, isn’t overly concerned with ethics. “I’ll handle any disbarred lawyer,” she says, and that she will.

Truth be told, I’ve always had a soft spot for Mrs. Cool. Greedy, corrupt, dishonest, about as pleasant as a cold sore and weighing slightly less than a Buick, she ran her own detective agency while most female sleuths of the time were puttering around in the rose garden, making tea for the vicar or waiting to be rescued.

Politically correct? Who the hell cares?

Fortunately, she finds her match in DONALD LAM, a diminutive law school dropout who shows a delightful aptitude for bending, twisting, tweaking and otherwise subverting the law, while Bertha tends to just out and out break it. As she puts it, Donald is “a little runt, but he’s brainy.” Meanwhile, Gardner himself called him “that cocky little bastard.”

Together they are simply one of the best teams of P.I.s ever, appearing in one of the more entertaining series of mysteries around, full of colourful characters, scams galore, brain-spinning twisty plots and dialogue you could shave with.  They just don’t write ’em like that anymore. (Uh uh uh uhh uh uh uh uh).

Unfortunately, Gardner was so prolific — and by then so well known for a certain other creation of his — that the Cool and Lam books never quite got the acclaim or popularity they deserved. Perhaps if a successful TV series had been developed from it, Cool and Lam may have ended up being more than a mere footnote in Gardner’s career.

Although, to be fair, there were a few attempts to bring the franchise to a larger audience.

The first stab was a one-off radio show that showed up as an 1946 episode of The United States Steel Hour of Mystery, adapted from the 1940 novel Turn on the Heat and starring none other than Ol’ Blue Eyes himself as Donald, and… uh, I have no idea who played Bertha.

Next up was a television episode on another anthology show, Climax! This one adapted the first novel, The Bigger They Come (1939), and starred Jane Darwell and Art Carney. Unfortunately, since the show was performed live, this episode is considered lost. But Art Carney as Donald Lam? That would have been cool to see!

And finally, a TV pilot was aired in 1958 by CBS, starring former jockey and $64,000 Question contestant Billy Pearson (who?) and Benay Venuta (who?) as Lam and Cool, although it was directed by noir legend Jacques Tourneur, and the executive producer was Gail Patrick Jackson, who was also the executive producer of the already popular Perry Mason series. It never developed into a series, although it comes around on YouTube now and then, complete with an introduction by Erle Stanley himself. Gardner, apparently, was very enthusiastic about Pearson as the ideal Donald Lam. 

Gardner was, of course, the creator of Perry Mason and about a zillion characters in the crime and detective pulps and one of the most popular American authors of all time, with over 100 million books sold.

UNDER OATH

CLASSIC COOLISMS

THE EVIDENCE

NOVELS

RADIO

TELEVISION

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.

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