The Knife Slipped was intended to be the follow-up to The Bigger They Come (1939), the first Cool and Lam mystery—until it was rejected by Morrow, Erle Stanley Gardner’s publisher.
But Gardner didn’t give up on the duo; he had strong affection for these two characters. Lam was based on his literary agent, Thomas Cornwall Jackson, another “brainy little runt” (he went on to marry actress Gail Patrick, who later, together with Gardner, produced the classic Perry Mason television series starring Raymond Burr, as well as a failed pilot for a Cool & Lam series, which can now be found on the Internet with an intro by the author himself). Even though Gardner is best known for creating Mason, one of fiction’s greatest detectives, he said he got more pleasure writing the outrageous adventures of Bertha and Donald than he did the more serious cases of the better-known lawyer-sleuth.
Turn on the Heat (1940) eventually became the second book in the series that went on to span 29 books, the last, All Grass Isn’t Green, published in 1970 after Gardner’s death. Except now I suppose the number is 30, including this one.
It’s interesting to note that the plot of Turn on the Heat bears no resemblance to that of The Knife Slipped. Gardner didn’t attempt to “fix” this book, he chucked it and wrote an entirely new story. As the prolific author of over 150 books, Gardner had made himself into a veritable fiction factory, continually turning out new product. If something came off the assembly line and didn’t work properly, he didn’t try to repair it and send it back through again—he went back to the drawing board to design a better model that did work.
To some extent his books are formulaic, but it is not so much a formula he adheres to as a recipe he follows while adding different exotic ingredients. Gardner uniformly wrote his books around a central conflict and then spiced them with his wide range of interests and his experiences as a lawyer. Thus the reader learns how to salt a gold mine in Gold Comes in Bricks (1940), how to fix a slot machine in Spill the Jackpot (1941), and the legal difference between accidental death and death by accidental means in Double or Quits (1941).
What intrigued me most while reading The Knife Slipped was the question “what if?” What if this book had been accepted and become the second book, how would it have shaped the rest of the series differently?
There are some key differences. For one, Bertha Cool comes off as a much better detective here than she does in any of the books that follow, superior to Donald Lam in this case, which could be called one of his failures. It falls to her to be the clear-headed one and point out aspects of the case Donald has been blind to (blinded by love). If this dynamic had continued in later books, they might have developed a Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin relationship, with Donald doing all the legwork but Bertha ultimately untangling the mystery with her shrewd, cynical approach.
It’s not that in subsequent books Gardner “dumbed down” Bertha, though in her two solo assignments that take place while Lam is serving in the Navy during WWII (Bats Fly at Dusk and Cats Prowl at Night), she does need outside assistance to solve the cases. Rather it’s that her interest in solving crimes is primarily “How high a fee can I charge?” If there is no payoff, why solve the crime at all? To Bertha there is a far worse crime than theft, blackmail, drug-smuggling, and murder combined, and that’s expending valuable resources and not getting paid for it!
If anything, in The Knife Slipped, the reader encounters Bertha Cool at her most—for want of a better word—sentimental. She forgives Donald even though she knows he’s lying to her face and withholding information. And then!—in the end she finances a romantic cruise for him with his lady love. This is nothing like the Bertha Cool in books such as Top of the Heap (1952), in which she dissolves her partnership with him, scratches his name off the door, and cancels his access to the joint bank account when he gets in serious trouble with the law (only to take it all back when he shows up with a five-figure payoff).
In the rest of the series, Donald is shown to be the real brains of the organization, but in this book he makes some rookie mistakes no self-respecting private eye ever should. He loses the man he’s tailing because he goes to get something to eat. He tampers with evidence by getting rid of the gun with no real purpose in mind. His play-acting at the hotel lobby phone booths meant to divert attention only heightens the night clerk’s suspicions.
His biggest error in judgment is that he believes the woman he’s helping is actually guilty of the murder. He assumes Ruth’s love for him is a sham, that she’s only playing up to him to get his help, but he “heroically” allows her to play him for a sap. This assumption blinds him to what has really happened and prevents him from solving the murder without Bertha Cool’s help.
These are mistakes of youth, and possibly Gardner envisioned a longer apprenticeship for Donald Lam in the books to come. In a way, The Knife Slipped was ahead of its time, departing from the model of the infallible hard-boiled detective completely in control of the situation no matter how complicated it got. Instead Gardner wrote of a young man getting in over his head and making mistakes. It may be that the publisher rejected the book back in 1939 for just that reason: readers weren’t ready for a detective flailing around, doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons.
However, whether this book wound up published or not, I believe Gardner needed to write about this early failure in Lam’s career, to create a backstory to better inform the character and make him more human. The Donald Lam that emerges in Turn on the Heat is less of a cocky know-it-all, he has humility without falling into the cliché of self-deprecation. He’s a man that appears to have paid his dues. That’s why I feel this book is an important addition to the series: it serves as a “lost” episode showing how a great detective isn’t born, but made.