Cover

OTTO PENZLER PRESENTS

AMERICAN MYSTERY CLASSICS

THE BIGGER THEY COME

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER (1889-1970) was the best-selling American author of the 20th century, mainly due to the enormous success of his Perry Mason series, which numbered more than 80 novels and inspired a half-dozen motion pictures, radio programs, and a long-running television series that starred Raymond Burr. Having begun his career as a pulp writer, Gardner brought a hard-boiled style and sensibility to the early Mason books and to his series starring Bertha Cool and Donal Lam. For over a quarter of a century he wrote more than a million words a year under his own name and numerous pseudonyms, the most famous being A.A. Fair.

OTTO PENZLER, the creator of American Mystery Classics, is also the founder of the Mysterious Press (1975), a literary crime imprint; MysteriousPress.com (2011), an electronic-book publishing company; Penzler Publishers (2018); and New York City’s Mysterious Bookshop (1979). He has won a Raven, the Ellery Queen Award, two Edgars (for the Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection, 1977, and The Lineup, 2010), and lifetime achievement awards from NoirCon and The Strand Magazine. He has edited more than 70 anthologies and written extensively about mystery fiction.

Title

THE BIGGER

THEY COME

ERLE STANLEY

GARDNER

writing as A. A. Fair

Introduction by

OTTO

PENZLER

AMERICAN

MYSTERY

CLASSICS

Penzler Publishers

New York

Introduction

INTRODUCTION

WHEN READERS think about Erle Stanley Gardner, they mostly conjure Perry Mason, partly for the eighty-six novels in which the trial lawyer was the primary character, but also for the long-running television series that starred Raymond Burr and is still a late-night staple in re-runs.

But Gardner also wrote thirty novels under the A.A. Fair pseudonym, all about the private detectives Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. The Bigger They Come (titled Lam to the Slaughter in the U.K.), the first novel in the series, was published in 1939, but Gardner’s authorship was not revealed until the end of World War II. For most authors, thirty books would be a full career but for Gardner it was fewer than a quarter of the 130 novels he produced.

Many readers prefer the novels about this unlikely detective duo to his more iconic defense lawyer because the characterization is sharper than in the Mason and other novels and they have the one element noticeably lacking in much of Gardner’s other works—humor.

Bertha Cool is the senior member of the team. A large, gray-haired woman in her sixties, she founded the private investigation agency in 1936 when her husband Henry Cool died. Her twinkling eyes give her a grandmotherly appearance that is belied by her tough-mindedness and equally tough language. Her battles with weight are an ongoing challenge, as she has weighed as much as 275 pounds. She prefers to wear loose, unconfining garments and has been described by her partner as looking like “a cylinder of current jelly on a plate” when she walks.