Erle Stanley Gardner’s Turn On the Heat

Turn On the Heat, published under the name A.A. Fair in 1940, was the second of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Cool and Lam private eye novels.

Gardner achieved enormous success in the 30s with Perry Mason but he started his career in the pulps so a series of hardboiled private eye novels was just the sort of thing he would be likely to be good at. And he was. The Cool and Lam PI novels were extremely successful.

It’s not absolutely essential but it helps a good deal if you start with the first of the Cool and Lam novels, The Bigger They Come (published in 1939). It gives you useful backstory information on this unusual PI partnership. Bertha Cool is middle-aged, overweight, penny-pinching and ruthless. Donald Lam is a young disbarred lawyer down on his luck but he proves to be the ideal operative for the Bertha Cool Detective Agency. Donald is a runt. He couldn’t fight his way out of a wet paper bag. He’s an easy guy to push around. But pushing Donald Lam around is a seriously bad idea. He’s smart and devious and he knows nasty ways to get even.

Turn On the Heat starts with a fairly routine missing persons case. Dr Listig and his wife disappeared twenty years earlier. Now someone wants to find Mrs Listig. The obvious place for Donald to start looking is the small town in which the couple used to live, Oakview. They were part of the younger set in what was then a thriving town. Oakview isn’t thriving any longer.

Donald does pick up the trail and then the plot twists begin. Finding Mrs Listig is easy. Much too easy. Cool and Lam don’t have to find Dr Listig but they do find him and that complicates things. A murder complicates things even further. And that’s not the end of it. There’s blackmail and political chicanery.

Bertha and Donald don’t always see eye to eye. Mutual deception and manipulation are par for the course for these two. They also both tend to take the view that if they know something that doesn’t mean they should share that knowledge. Bertha doesn’t always know what Donald is up to and Donald often doesn’t know what game Bertha is playing. Despite this they make an effective team. They’re both very good detectives.

Erle Stanley Gardner had been a prominent trial lawyer and he knew the law from the inside. And the law didn’t impress him. He thought the system was rigged against accused persons. Which is why his lawyer hero Perry Mason feels justified in using every trick in the book to protect a client. Cool and Lam take the same view. The client’s interests come first and if that means lying to the police and the DA that’s no problem. In Gardner’s novels the police tend to be either over zealous and unethical or they’re lazy, inefficient and corrupt. District Attorneys are ambitious political hacks. The police and the DA’s office don’t care about justice, they just want somebody to get convicted. That’s even more true of the Cool and Lam books. The police and the DA’s office are obstacles that it’s best to avoid and it’s also best to tell them nothing unless you have to. If you have to tell them something a smart lie is usually a better policy than the truth.

This gives Gardner’s crime fiction of the 30s and 40s a decidedly cynical hardboiled edge, and even a touch of noir fiction sensibilities.

As usual with Gardner the plotting is intricate and effective.

The real drawcards here though are Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. They really are delightful characters. They have lots of character flaws but one can’t help liking them and being amused by them. There’s plenty of barbed hardboiled dialogue, and there’s humour as well.

And there are hints of romance. Bertha is constantly amazed by Donald’s ability to charm women. In this case he romances Marian Dunton, a reporter on the local Oakview paper and also, incidentally, a key witness to that murder. Is Donald merely using Marian or does he really care for her. It’s hard to be sure and it’s probably a bit of both. He’s cynical enough to manipulate women but decent enough to try not to hurt them.

Gardner used small California towns as settings to great effect in some of the Perry Mason stories. It works extremely well here. I think it’s fair to say that Gardner was not a big fan of small towns.

Turn On the Heat is a fine fast-paced hardboiled PI yarn with an excellent mystery plot as well. What more could one ask for? Highly recommended.