Crows Can’t Count by Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A.A. Fair

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

Partnerships in detective fiction usually are usually studies in contrasting characters. The head of B. Cool Confidential Investigations is Bertha Cool, a comic miser in the Mr. Krab manner. Her partner is Donald Lam, a shrimpy lawyer who got disbarred because he informed a gangster of a legal trick to get away with a murder. Cool is a hard driver while Lam is more subtle, never telling cops, clients, or Bertha all he knows or suspects. To prospective clients, Cool describes Lam as “a little runt, but he’s brainy.”

Crows Can’t Count (1946) involves trusts, emeralds, a pet crow and savvy city women. The running gag – that every female that crosses Lam’s path falls for him – is honored. The unique point is that Cool and Lam travel to Columbia (as in Bogota, not South Carolina) to investigate the precious stones aspect of the case. Lam adjusts inter-culturally but Cool, of course, is her irritable self, stomping on cultural corns left and right. It’s hilarious.

The dialogue-driven stories have believable and vivid characters. The stories demand thinking. “Among his many other virtues,” wrote Anthony Boucher, long-time reviewer for the NYT, “Erle Stanley Gardner is surely the finest constructor of hyper-intricate puzzles in evidence. Besides the Perry Mason mysteries, Gardner wrote a couple dozen Cool and Lam mysteries under the pen name of A.A. Fair. The titles are often generalizations about animals as in Owls Don’t Blink or Cats Prowl at Night.”

Maigret on the Riviera by Georges Simenon

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

This 1932 mystery is also known as Liberty Bar. M.’s superiors assign him to investigate a murder on the French Riviera, so the novel is set in Antibes, Cap d’Antibes, Juan-les-Pins and Cannes.

Stabbed to death in his car is Australian William Brown, once a spy during WWI, so M. is told to tread with discretion. M. finds that Brown has come down in the world, owing to poor choices as to hard drinking and unsavory companions. M. finds out that Brown’s lifestyle frightens and disgusts his family, which deprives him of resources and pays him only a monthly minimal allowance. M. also discovers that Brown shared his life among his “four women:” first Gina, his “official” mistress and the mother of the second one, with whom he lived in his villa in Antibes, then Jaja, the owner of a bar in Cannes, where the young Sylvie, the fourth and a prostitute, also lives.

Despite this sordid backdrop, M. feels a connection with the victim because they resemble each other in looks, an uncompromising attitude, and a love for a quiet drink. Also, among the lush tropical flora, garish colors, and tanned beach bunnies, for a brief moment while wearing his usual heavy coat, M. himself better understands why a man on the Riviera for the first time might turn to extreme slacking.

He takes himself in hand, however, and explores two different settings, high and low, to find the culprit. The sadness and the squalor are balanced in the last when M. and his wife have a wonderful conversation in the last couple of pages. In this 17th Maigret novel, written in 1932, Simenon starts to use the existential themes that we meet in his “hard novels.”

The Seven of Calvary by Anthony Boucher 

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

This 1937 mystery fits the criteria for genre of academic mystery: set at a university, professor as detective, international cast, cultured dialogue, learned digressions, and mild gibes at profs’ manners and ways.

Though this was the author’s first mystery, he takes pleasure is satirizing the conventions of the Golden Age mystery. For instance, the professor-detective, like Nero Wolfe, never stirs out of this room to investigate the crime. In fact, he has a graduate student be his Archie Goodwin, getting out and talking to persons of interest. The grad student narrates the story in an arch and faux-sophisticated tone, very much like Michael Innes in the Thirties. In an outrageous post-modern technique, the grad student and Boucher (rhymes with “voucher,” by the way) meet over chow to confirm with each other that fair-play has been the byword, that clues needed to solve the mystery have indeed be given to the reader.

The story moves steadily through plenty of action. Boucher misdirects too but the long-time mystery reader, while alert to being fooled, will not be cheated out of a good surprise either. It’s impressive that Boucher developed such a crackerjack story his first time out. This book well deserves its classic status. Although he did not return to a campus setting, he wrote many more mysteries and short stories. For many years he was the mystery reviewer for the New York Times. He has a convention of mystery fandom named after him, Bouchercon.

Minute for Murder by Nicholas Blake

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

Cecil Day-Lewis, poet and translator of Latin classics, added to his probably low income as a prof by writing detective novels under a pen-name. As we’d expect from a professor of classics, his writing is erudite, witty, and lucid enough to put up with the usual British whodunit machinery of red herrings, beautiful blondes, and wacky characters.

The upside of Minute for Murder (1947) is that it is probably based on Lewis’ wartime experience working in the Ministry of Information, which Orwell also satirized in 1984.

Series hero Nigel Strangeways is working at the “Ministry of Morale” in the Visual Propaganda Division. He captures the tensions among different grades of staff and the problems of supervising talented but temperamental people. The material on the human factor and red herring combine to make this rather longer than the typical old-timey whodunnit, but he’s such a charming writer that we don’t mind.

The Case of the Careless Cupid by Erle Stanley Gardner

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

An affluent widow is in love with a wealthy widower. Although one of his nieces is sympathetic to the match, the other niece and her main-chancer boyfriend don’t want rich uncle to tie the knot. Insinuations that the widow murdered her first husband are bruited about, capturing the attention of the police and an insurance company that wants its dough back, plus all the money she made from investments on that dough. Ace lawyer Perry Mason is hired by the widow to defend her on the first-degree charge that she poisoned her husband with arsenic.

This 1968 outing, the 79th and third from the last of the series, has its problems, like more than couple of Mason novels written after 1960. The prose is mechanical. The characters tend to excessive explications, which is odd since Gardner usually handled dialogue more skillfully (he dictated the novels). The plot is not as intricate as usual. In fact, the ease with which we can identify the perps makes this border on an inverted mystery, which is highly unusual for Gardner.

On the positive side, Gardner, as is his wont, includes strong female characters. The widow is the kind of independent-minded, self-sufficient female Gardner respected. She’s an astute investor, turning a $100K into a half-million. She’s blunt: “I like what I like and not what I’m supposed to like because of mass rating. And I very much dislike the things I don’t like.” Gardner also features a real person, which is very uncharacteristic. The female pilot that takes Della and Perry to El Paso is Pinky Brier, the first woman to become a flight and aerobatics instructor in the early 1940s.

I’d still recommend it to Mason fans but also to readers looking for a quick uncomplicated read without subplots or extraneous detail. Perry springs into action numerous times. Watching him direct Paul Drake (his PI), his client, Della (his PA), and lead the cops on is always a kick. Gardner’s language is simple if stiff. The interesting legal issues and thinking keep the little grey cells engaged. The story has suspense and theatrics.