Review by C.J. Bunce
For Erle Stanley Gardner’s Cool & Lam novel #13, the detective work of Bertha Cool co-star Donald Lam takes the driver’s seat more than ever before. This crime is delivered in a style different than his earlier novels. Top of the Heap brings readers into the case of a wealthy L.A. tycoon whose son may have been the last to see a mobster’s wife alive. Cool & Lam stories usually mean a sumptuous helping of humorous banter, but detective agency partner Bertha is barely in this story. This is more Donald Lam in a crime-solving role like Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe sideman Saul Panzer, another methodical, no-nonsense detective, with Gardner (originally writing under the name A.A. Fair) describing all the happenings in a Joe Friday Dragnet style. Although B. Cool brings her requisite bad-mouthing in the final chapter, without her dipping in with her normal follow-ups and complaining it also feels like an episode of The Rockford Files. Initially brought back from the dusty shelves in 2004 by Hard Case Crime (then its first publication in 30 years and the imprint’s third-ever title), Top of the Heap has been re-released for 2025, available now here at Amazon.
Anthony Boucher called Gardner “the finest constructor of hyper-intricate puzzles in evidence.” That usually results in a soaring pulp tale that drags you through the dark alleys and up through some tricky sleuthing. In this case this 1952 tale exhibits more of the 1930s Code era (little sex and violence), like black and white crime movies. It’s not quite stilted, but as Boucher noted it’s absolutely hyper-intricate, to the point that many details seem like filler that don’t serve to push the plot forward. It’s like Gardner had a fully fleshed out case he wanted to document intended for Perry Mason, but it somehow got woven into his head as Donald Lam instead.
It all begins when the tycoon’s son, John Carver Billings II, hires the detective agency to find two women he spent the night with after he drunkenly and inadvertently caroused with the girlfriend of a crime boss. That’s scandalous stuff for 1952. Tracking down the women takes Lam solo to San Francisco where he quickly finds his targets. Only Lam sees it all as far too easy. Billings seems to be after an alibi, since the moll has vanished and the newspaper is all over the story. But Lam can’t leave well enough alone.
The story is a lot to process, with all sorts of characters, from San Francisco cops to traveling women looking for a good time in Hollywood, to a white collar criminal mine scheme, a surprise dead body, a stripper-turned-heiress widow, illicit meetings on a luxury yacht, and Lam tracking down crimes without knowing what crimes happened. Plus blackmail and insider trading… by Donald Lam himself?
This may not be the Donald Lam you think you know.
Don’t look for Lam hooking up with some damsel in distress or a femme fatale. The women in this story are each a bit in a state of trouble, more like Judy Barton in Vertigo (I reviewed that original novel here, also first published iin 1952). Gardner gives readers so little detail of the actual murder victim that you also wouldn’t compare Lam’s hunt to that of Mark McPherson in Vera Caspary’s Laura.
Along with too little of B. Cool is too little of the firm’s Girl Friday, Elsie Brand.
Jim Rockford swapped for Donald Lam? That can’t be right. Somehow this story just plays better as a Rockford story. I usually see Lam as Stout’s Saul Panzer and Cool as Dawn French, but you can almost see Jim Rockford sleuthing this puzzle out to its end. For those who like to be able to solve the crime with the detective, this is not that book. Gardner only dishes out new information when he feels it’s necessary, and it’s not enough for any reader to figure it out until Gardner tells us. I still don’t understand how the title is relevant — Gardner had a much better title right there in the story: The Green Door — a key component to the MacGuffin scam underlying everything.
A very different take on Cool & Lam, count this tale as one more for fans of Gardner’s Perry Mason.
Order Top of the Heap now here at Amazon. This trade paperback edition features cover artwork by Bill Nelson. Don’t miss my reviews of other Cool & Lam novels The Knife Slipped, Turn on the Heat, Fools Die on Friday, The Count of 9, and Shills Can’t Cash Chips.
