The count of 9

In 1936, Bertha Cool, a sizable lady with a tart tongue and a detective agency, gives a job to defrocked lawyer Donald Lam. He's a little guy the cops call him Pint Size. The pair went on to spark 29 novels by the pseudonymous A. A. Fair, better known as Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason. In this reprint of the long-unavailable tale, the seemingly incompatible sleuths are asked to protect a rich man's property a blowgun with darts, and a jade Buddha but the items are stolen anyway, from a site under intense surveillance. As Cool and Lam struggle to figure out how it was done, Gardner riffs beautifully on the conventions of the hard-boiled detective story. Lam rebuffs advances from a scantily clad vixen, then lies and fakes evidence to fit his sense of who's guilty. He gets the daylights pounded out of him, but, instead of fighting back, he gets even. Boss Bertha is more conventionally drawn, a tough woman who, at the last moment, turns golden-hearted. The trimmed-down dialogue crackles, and the plot is hyperfast. It's good to have these two unusual sleuths back.--Don Crinklaw Copyright 2018 Booklist

In 1958, Gardner, the prolific creator of the Perry Mason legal thrillers, published this smooth and easy entry in his Cool and Lam detective series, now reissued with a classic-but brand new-cover by legendary paperback artist Robert McGinnis. Globe-trotting adventurer Dean Crockett hires Bertha Cool ("a hundred and sixty-five pounds of potatoes in a sack") to do security for a party in his penthouse. But then Crockett is found dead inside a locked room, the apparent victim of darts from a blowgun, and two small jade idols are missing. Bertha mostly sits this one out, bringing in her diminutive partner, Donald Lam, to do the heavy sleuthing. For Lam, think young skinny Frank Sinatra, who was perfectly cast for the role in a 1946 radio adaptation of 1940's Turn on the Heat. As usual, the little gumshoe gets the snot pounded out of him by towering thugs (think Ernest Borgnine). Lam has his brain to rely on, however, and comes up with solutions to the locked-room and other puzzles. Undemanding crime readers will be content. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.