Just Finished Reading: Top of the Heap by Erle Stanley Gardner (FP: 1952) [222pp] 

LA private detective Donald Lam was well acquainted with rats, and he could smell this one almost as soon as he entered the office. He knew it for certain when he heard his proposal. What the rat needed from his agency was, on the face of it, simple enough and the proffered bonus certainly helped his boss to take the case on. The rat, it seemed, needed an alibi confirmed before the cops came running. The reason? Supposedly he had hooked up with a pair of San Francisco girls on the rebound from a gangster's moll who had subsequently ‘disappeared’ not long after her lover had been shot. So, with much reluctance, and his bosses' evil eye, Lam would do his investigation. Managing to track the girls down in record time they vouched for the rat and corroborated his story – word for word. At this point the smell of rat was almost overwhelming. Lam just couldn’t help himself and so kept digging. It wasn’t long before the ‘alibi’ started to crumble leaving hints to the real story behind. That story involved the mob, illegal gambling, money laundering and a fake mine. There was only one problem – the people who didn’t want the story to be made public. Donald Lam was about to find out if he was as smart as he thought he was.  

I am, as my regular visitors will know by now, a sucker for all things Noir which is the main reason I’ve been reading the Hard Case Crime novels. Although the series is a bit hit and miss (with some rather spectacular misses) this one was generally above average. Lam himself is the archetypal PI, although in this case working for a female boss which is unusual and must have been even stranger in 1950’s America. The case is very convoluted – indeed at first I had very little idea what exactly was going on – but slowly the pattern emerged and started to fit together. The plotting was clever although I did think the character list was a tad excessive for such a short book. There was a lot packed in between the covers though as alluded to above. The scam at the heart of things was quite clever and I liked the way Lam figured things out even with him being a little ‘bull in a China shop’ at times! It was also nice reading a crime novel that wasn’t simply about someone ending up dead – and especially as it wasn’t the usual standby of men killing women because of various species of jealousy. Two bodies were involved (both killed ‘off page’) but these crimes were incidental to the big crime the murders were meant to cover up, so that was refreshing. The descriptions of 50’s LA and San Francisco were interesting from a cultural history PoV and I loved the fact that Lam produced a mini camera and a tripod from his bag to photograph a cheque signature! The only thing I didn’t like about this book was the apparent need for extended exposition at the end to explain things to the reader. Not only was that somewhat overlong but Lam ended up doing it twice – once to the SF police and once to his boss back in LA. But despite that mild annoyance this wasn’t a bad noirish outing. A reasonable read. Recommended with caveats.  

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