RARA-AVIS: Re: Top of the Heap, by ESG -- and an introduction

From: fugue1197 ( redwingblackbird@direcway.com)
Date: 21 Jan 2005


Re Lam/Cool, I would love to find some of the Cool/Lam books and read them again. Like you, I definitely favored them over Perry Mason -- like the difference between coffee and espresso. Most of the series, as I recall, was almost satirical because Lam simply didn't fit the physical stereotype of the tough PI, but most of the hard-boiled elements were there. Now, to introduce myself: I'm a 46-year-old Hoosier, a teenage wannabe novelist turned small-town newspaper reporter and editor turned wire-service reporter, who got hooked on mystery at age...8 or 9, maybe, when I stumbled across a copy of the Compleat Sherlock Holmes and read the first two novelettes without coming up for air. I was determined to be a science fiction or detective writer in my burning youth, but life intervened. However, I think I'm getting the old itch again and I certainly am a much better writer now than I was then, so we'll see what happens. C.J. Wilson

--- In rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, William Denton <buff@p...> wrote:
> I read TOP OF THE HEAP by Erle Stanley Gardner (1952, as A.A. Fair) and it
> was fine stuff! This is the first Gardner book I can be sure I've
> finished--I think I started some Perry Masons when I was a lad, but I
> don't remember getting to the end. After this, however, and the
> recommendations I've seen for the Bertha Cool/Donald Lam books (such as
> this) and the Perry Masons, I'll try more. I think people have said that
> Perry's sort of hardboiled in the early books.
>
> Does Bertha Cool play more of a role in the other books than in this one?
> Here she's around at the start and the finish, but mostly it's Lam on his
> own.

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