The Count of 9 (Hard Case Crime)

I am pleased to see that older books are getting re-published! Erle Stanley Gardner has long been a fave of mine, and finding this book was exciting! Definitely holds your attention and it’s fun to read vintage books.Pros: Being able to read older books againCons: None!

This is a pure slice of Angel Food with dollops of other delectables. In short: genre heaven. Once again, HardCaseCrime reprints an Erle Stanley Gardner classic that has not seen the light of day in 50 years. THE COUNT OF 9 is part of the Lam and Cool series. Bertha Lam heads a detective agency. She mostly stays behind the desk, ordering her operatives hither and yon, fingering the diamonds which adorn her puffy hands. Donald Lam is her prime investigator. He is short of stature but long on guts and brains.In this tale they are asked to guard the property of an international adventurer who likes to collect the kinds of things that turn up in classic mysteries—blowguns, jade idols with humongous rubies in their heads, etc. Add to all of that the joys of a locked-room mystery, except that here we have multiple doors, passageways that are opened by secret buttons in paneling, an elevator system that cannot be negotiated without internal help and, oh yes, an X-ray machine to check out the suspicious guests who might want to light-finger the adventurer's goods at the party protected by the Cool Agency.Of course things are stolen anyway, but here's the first of many twists: Lam figures out how the heists were done and he reveals it to the reader immediately. Thus, we are left with the question, so what's next? What's next is, of course, a murder, which involves all of the previously-mentioned complications—double locked doors, that pesky elevator and the blowgun.Don't worry; the book is not all mystery flash and detective novel chops. The dialogue is superb, the plot pacing as slick as any read-it-through-in-one-sitting fan might desire. Raymond Chandler expressed his love for Perry Mason in a sweet letter to Perry's creator, but Lam and Cool are an important part of the ESG pantheon and this is one of their best outings.Thanks again to HardCaseCrime for this early Christmas present.

If all books were written like Erle Stanley Gardner's "The Count of 9," I would watch a lot less television. A.A. Fair was Gardner's pseudonym for writing these "Cool and Lam" detective novels when writing "Perry Mason" novels to pay the bills was just too dull. Hard Case Crime has resurrected the "Cool and Lam" novels, and they are giving them a well-deserved second life."The Count of 9" is from 1958 (with love) and has some of the limitations of the author and the period of time it was written. You won't find raw sex or severe violence like the novels of Lawrence Block and Mickey Spillane. I prefer having plenty of graphic sex and graphic violence in my detective stories, but it's a testimony to Gardner that I didn't miss them here.The story involves an eccentric millionaire world-traveler, a missing blowgun (including poison darts), two stolen jade statues, a trophy wife, a lusty model, a sleazy photographer, and so on. When some of the above items go missing on the watch of the Cool and Lam agency, things get complex. And then a murder involving the stolen blowgun and poison darts makes things even more difficult for the intrepid detectives.I really enjoyed this novel, despite any small problems I had with parts of it. As I've mentioned before with the Cool and Lam series, the book seems to end before the tale is fully resolved. The mysteries are solved, but the usual "epilogue" I have come to expect from novels of this type is absent. As is the ritual uncovering of the criminals. And a secondary mystery seems to take up a lot more of the author's time and attention than the "main" crime of the tale. The title isn't terribly effective or relevant to the story at hand. I suspect it was just catchy to the author (or the publisher).Yet this is still a five-star novel for me. I had a lot of fun while reading it, and that is RARE for me.

Bertha Cool, who /always/ gets a retainer (that, gets paid up front), doesn't do one because the client is so charming and respectable.Then he turns up dead.And Donald Lam is left to figure out what happened, impeded by the police, who are more worried about who will get the credit for cracking the case than they are about actually catching the killer.And a fun time is had by the reader!

The cool thing about Cool and Lam is the odd variant of noir they are. Donald lives in a nasty, harsh, devious, ruthless dark world, just like any noir protagonist. But he is seldom in a fight, because it always turns out not to have been a fight at all, but a beating-- of Donald. He's not a rough, tough, skilled fighter-- au contraire. That sort of scene, where the bad guys clobber Donald, doesn't occur in every tale, but it happens often enough so that you can't avoid knowing this fact about him. Yet he prevails, because he is artful. Devious. Clever. Discerning. Withal, he has compassion. You don't see compassion in I,the Jury, but you do from Donald. He gets on well with the ladies, after a fashion. But he's no Johnny Liddell. Far from it. It makes them interesting to watch. This is a good one, even among Cool and Lam stories. Recommended!

For serious Gardner fans, this will seem a bit thin. Which means it's still fast-paced, still entertaining, still filled with tidbits of information reflecting the author's ecletic tastes. But it feels a bit more like a novella that a full-blown Gardner who-done-it. If I an e-book publisher looking to release one Cool and Lam title a year, there are several stronger books to choose from, such as his introductory Cool and Lam title, "The Bigger They Come."

Cool and Lam always seem to end way too fast. Count of 9 is no exception.You might have to read it twice to figure out who did what and when.No book report, just my appreciation and opinion that Cool and Lam are Gardner’s most fun and creative work.