Detective Donald Lam Cuts Thin to Win in this Entertaining Novel from Erle Stanley Gardner

The twenty-seventh entry in A. A. Fair's (Erle Stanley Gardner's) Donald Lam-Bertha Cool series is one of the better books in the series. It opens with something of a twist in that a potential client comes into the office with a case that Donald wants to take and Bertha doesn't. Usually, the reverse is true.

The client, Clayton Dawson, is the assistant to the manager of a re-debenture discount security company (whatever in the world that is). Dawson has a daughter with a wild side. He presents the detectives with a scrap of cloth. Someone, he says, might claim that the scrap of cloth was found stuck in the undercarriage of a car which people might falsely claim his daughter was driving while under the influence. The car, which he insists his daughter was not driving might have been involved in a hit-and-run accident with the woman who was wearing the dress.

Dawson would like to see his daughter clear of the mess and, without saying so directly, he wants Donald to find the victim of the hit and run and make a settlement that would prevent his daughter from facing any criminal charges. Bertha is nervous as hell because this would be skating right up against the edge of the law and could cost the firm its license. Donald, though, very skillfully walks Dawson through the interview, ascertaining what the client wants without coming right out and saying it. Over Bertha's objections, he takes the case.

As is always the case with the books in this series, nothing is as it originally seems, and in taking the case, Donald opens up a huge can of worms. The plot is especially clever and interesting and is one of the few in the series that the reader can actually follow. The fun in reading these books is watching Donald in action, particularly in regard to his relationship with his partner. Like some of Gardner's Perry Mason novels, the plots are generally so convoluted that they make no sense at all, even when Donald lays it all out in the end. That is not the case here, and this book demonstrates that near the end of what was a very long run, Gardner was still capable of returning to his top form.