Donald Lam is a disbarred lawyer who has had many brushes with the police. In The Bigger They Come he is hungry, desperately in need of a job, and he manages to convince Mrs. Cool that, despite his diminutive appearance—he is five feet, six inches, tall and weighs 125 pounds—he is man enough to be a detective. He tries to prove it by never backing down from a fight but usually gets beat up. Though small, he is considered very attractive by most women, though Elsie Brand, the firm’s pretty and shy secretary, proves elusive in spite of Lam’s relentless pursuit.

After being hired by Mrs. Cool, Lam’s first assignment is simply to serve a subpoena but he is unable to locate the man. In fact, no one seems able to find him.

As it happens, the book was based on a real-world quirk in the law that Gardner, a lawyer, discovered and, as a crusader for much of his life, wove into the plot. He learned that there are certain conditions in Arizona that made it possible to commit murder with impunity as long as the murderer never left the state. Although a work of fiction, when it was published lawmakers were made aware of this loophole in the law and closed it.

There were numerous elements in the Cool-Lam series that returned on a regular basis. References to Mrs. Cool’s weight are common (with various books listing it between 160 and 275 pounds), as are numerous mentions of her avaricious greed and her foul mouth, though the most common epithet quoted is the mild, if bizarre, “fry me for an oyster.”

Most books remind readers of Lam’s quick wit and profound knowledge of the law. Although he often is referred to as disbarred, he claims he wasn’t ever officially disbarred but that he merely talked to much. When Bertha asks him what he talked too much about, he is both embarrassed and feisty when he acknowledges that he told someone how he could commit a murder and get away with it. (Although the methods were different, other lawyers in fiction—and, let’s be honest, probably in real life—explained to clients that murder was the solution to their problems, notably Melville Davisson Post’s Randolph Mason and Lawrence Block’s Ehrengraf.)