Cool and Lam is a fictional American private detective firm that is the center of a series of thirty detective novels written by Erle Stanley Gardner (creator of "Perry Mason") using the pen name of A. A. Fair.

Bertha Cool

In the first book about her, The Bigger They Come (1939; British: Lam to the Slaughter), Bertha Cool opened her detective agency after the death of Henry, her husband, in 1936. Her age is given as "somewhere in the sixties" in the first book; in Some Women Can't Wait (1953), she is "about fifty years old", and, in Beware the Curves (1956), she is "in the late fifties or early sixties." She is described in various terms as overweight, and uncaring about her weight—in the first novel, Donald Lam estimates her weight at 220 lb. At the beginning of Spill the Jackpot (1941), she had flu and pneumonia, and lost a great deal of weight, down to 160 lb, and in many later novels, her weight is given as 165 lb. She has white hair and "greedy piggish eyes". All the novels agree that she is extremely avaricious and miserly. However, she has persistence, loyalty, and nerve. Her favorite expletive is some variant of "Fry me for an oyster!" or "Can me for a sardine!". In the opening chapter of the first novel, she hires a small, nervy, and extremely ingenious former lawyer named Donald Lam. Donald later becomes a full partner in her business, forming the agency, Cool and Lam, which features in more than two dozen books by Gardner.

Donald Lam

In her biography of Gardner, Dorothy B. Hughes wrote, "Erle said over and again that if Donald Lam, 'that cocky little bastard,' had a model, it was Corney"—Thomas Cornwell Jackson, his literary agent. Jackson later married actress Gail Patrick, and they formed a partnership with Gardner that created the CBS-TV series Perry Mason. Donald Lam begins his adventures as the employee of Bertha Cool. As a detective, Lam is in stark contrast to the fictional hard-boiled types of his era. Donald is about 5 ft, weighs 130 lb soaking wet, and gets beaten up quite frequently. While he does get into several fistfights, he loses all but one — a single fistfight against an insurance investigator in Double or Quits, only after taking boxing lessons from a former pug named Louie Hazen in Spill the Jackpot, and studying jujitsu with a master named Hashita in Gold Comes in Bricks.

Adaptations

Radio

Turn On the Heat was adapted by Welbourne Kelley for the June 23, 1946, broadcast of The United States Steel Hour on ABC radio. Frank Sinatra was the first actor to portray Donald Lam.

Television

Cool and Lam first appeared on television in the January 6, 1955, episode of Climax! based on the debut novel, The Bigger They Come (1939). It starred Art Carney as Donald Lam and Jane Darwell as Bertha Cool and is considered "lost." A 30-minute pilot program called Cool and Lam was made in 1958 but never became a series. Billy Pearson was cast as Donald Lam and Benay Venuta as Bertha Cool. The pilot was loosely based on Turn On the Heat. One feature of interest is that, a few minutes after the start of the program, Erle Stanley Gardner is shown on the set of Perry Mason's office. He speaks directly to the viewer, introducing the characters, and talking about his pleasure in the casting and his hopes that the pilot will become a series. It is uncertain whether this pilot was ever broadcast and, if so, whether this segment featuring Gardner would have been included, since it pushed the running time of the program to the 30-minute mark and did not allow for commercials.