Cool & Lam
28 total works
HBO series Perry Mason airs June 2020 starring Matthew Rhys in the titular role.
When the beautiful girlfriend of a notorious gangster vanishes, the last man to be seen with her needs an alibi – and fast. Enter Donald Lam of the Cool & Lam detective agency. Donald tracks down the two women with whom his client claims to have spent the night and the client declares the case closed.
But it’s not. Something about his client’s story doesn’t add up, and Donald can’t resist the temptation to keep digging. Before he knows it, he’s dug up connections to a mining scam, an illegal casino, and a double homicide – plus an opportunity for an enterprising private eye to make a small fortune, if he can just stay alive long enough to cash in on it!
It was just a routine case. All Bertha Cool had to do was help a fellow in a jam - a $20,000 jam.
But it didn't stay a routine case for long. All of a sudden Bertha's client had a fistful of anonymous letters, a missing wife, and a body in his basement. Bertha Cool had her hands full. The only problem was, her hands were tied - and the murderer's were very, very busy.
It started as a routine tail - shadowing an oily hustler who'd been courting a well-healed matron. But the assignment soon led Donald Lam to a sleazy hotel room with a sexy barfly.
And now she's left him high and dry with a pair of corpses dumped in his lap. Suddenly he's the cops' prime suspect. And it'll take some fancy footwork to sidestep the law - and the real killer, who intends to leave Bertha Cool partnerless.
John Dittmar Ansel walked into the Cool-Lam office and asked them to trace a man named Karl, who, six years before, gave him an idea for a story. Donald Lam - always the suspicious one - immediately smelled a rat. And his nose had not betrayed him: investigation proved that Mr Ansel wasn't a writer at all; and Karl had died by a bullet.
Bertha Cool and Donald Lam decided that this was a case worth pursuing, and before long they found they were not the only ones with a vested interest in the six-year-old mystery.
A beautiful heiress is missing, and a husband, but not her husband, is looking for her. Texan Lawton Corning is determined to find Yvonne Wells, and hires Bertha Cool and Donald Lam to track her down.
She has had a spat with her husband, and the neighbours tell Donald Lam what they heard the night Mrs Wells went missing. But then she turns up again, and the mystery deepens ...
Strange bedfellows can be political poison, and the candidate had picked himself a dilly. She was ruthless and corrupt and had enough on him to smear his shining armour with front page mud.
Donald Lam and Bertha Cool told him not to worry. Women were Donald's speciality, the more dangerous the better. But when the lovely lady turned up dead, the case took an ugly twist. Suddenly Lam and Cool were in the middle of a red-hot race where bullets, not ballots, counted.
One morning Barclay Fisher awakes in the apartment of a beautiful woman. He is threatened with blackmail - and he is pretty sure his wife will never understand. Hence his pitiful appeal to Bertha Cool and Donald Lam.
Bertha smells money, and Donald heads for San Francisco. There he has quite a time with the glamorous 'other woman', a disconcerting and hilarious encounter with modern art, and a very nasty turn when he finds the body.
Roberta Fenn was every man's dream - a clinging climber with photogenic features and a phenomenal body. She had what it took to get what she wanted, and she wanted a lot.
But one thing she wasn't looking for was an early grave, and that was where she was heading - unless the redoubtable Bertha Cool and the inimitable Donald Lam jumped in, guessed right, and moved fast to save this bedevilled dream girl from a nightmare of blackmail, double cross and murder.
A cool girl hunt is what the blind man wanted. He was searching for a pretty young woman, soft spoken and slender, whom he'd never seen but knew had vanished, and he was willing to pay Bertha Cool anything to find her.
The whole thing seemed impossible and sounded suspicious, but the man's money was right - even if his motives weren't - and given the choice Bertha always followed the dollar sign.
Only this time, the dollar sign pointed to murder and fingered Bertha Cool as a red hot suspect.
Daphne Beckley comes to Donald Lam to find out what really happened to her husband. He has disappeared and his life insurance contains a double indemnity clause in the event of an accident, meaning Daphne is in line for a windfall. However, if he is still alive, she wants a divorce and alimony.
It is up to Donald Lam to discover if she is the jilted wife of a philandering husband, or a beautiful, very wealthy widow.
Pauline began to give me double-talk and let her housecoat slip open. Finally she dimpled at me and said, 'Donald, I'm sorry I put on the act I did. But, well, you're a man and I like men'.
That's when Bertha got out of her chair and went up to Pauline. 'You're a tart and you like money. In about fifteen minutes you're going to be talking to the cops. So start telling the truth.' And with that Bertha threw her half across the room.
'Come on, dearie,' Bertha said, 'get rough. I just love to have the party get rough.'
Mira Woodford was a beautiful girl who believed that the best things in life were expensive. She bartered her youthful charms for the rewards of being an old man's bride, and her investment paid off in millions when she suddenly became his widow.
When Bertha Cool sent Donald Lam to find out if Mira's kisses had turned to poison for the rich little poor girl's late husband, one look at Mira made Donald eager to see for himself how deadly her embrace really was. But though Mira was lovely and willing, her past was ugly and threatening - and when passion and blackmail went hand in hand, murder could not be far behind.
Donald Lam arrives at work one day to find an outraged police sergeant Frank Sellers stewing in the office of his senior partner, Bertha Cool. Sellers is close to cracking an armoured car robbery case, but in the course of his investigation, a telephone number for the Cool-Lam detective agency was found on one of his primary suspects - one Hazel Downer.
The same Hazel Downer employs Donald Lam to find her husband who has run off with another broad, taking her fifty thousand dollars with him. Wasn't it fifty thousand dollars that haven't been recovered from the armoured car job ... ?
All that glitters isn't gold.
A rich man sends Donald Lam looking for a man - when he really wants to find a woman. A minor missing persons case turns out to be a major one. And a pleasure boat on pontoons serves as a smuggler's ship on wheels.
This is a job for detectives who know their fact from fiction, and Bertha Cool and Donald Lam are pitted against people who know too well that all grass isn't green.
Death gave its warning in the form of a luscious brunette. She walked into the office of Donald Lam and Bertha Cool, calmly announced that her employer was about to be killed, and paid them a healthy fee to keep the boss alive.
For Cool this case meant cold cash. For Lam it meant warm curves. But before long it meant murder ...
Bertha Cool was purring like a kitten. A client had just hired the agency to investigate a suspected insurance swindle and, in Bertha's glittering eyes, that was just the sort of respectable case they needed. Donald Lam had his doubts but he began looking around for suitable bait to set the trap.
What he didn't know was that the trap was already baIted - and more than ready to spring.
Bertha Cool was in a flap. The distinguished Mr Homer Breckinridge had been waiting twenty minutes for Donald Lam to make an appearance, and around Mr Breckinridge was the heady aroma of C-A-S-H.
Then Donald appeared and in no time found himself hired to investigate an insurance claim. 'Such nice, safe, respectable work', purred Bertha, 'and it's up for grabs.'
But it didn't take Donald long to find out he was anything but safe and that he was the one up for grabs ...
Money in the bank had always been a persuasive factor in Bertha Cool's life - and Lamont Hawley represented a lot of it. He also represented an insurance company that smelled a rat about a traffic-accident claim. The trouble was the claimant had drifted away - a beautiful blonde who had been co-operative and level-headed. In fact, too level-headed ... she sounded almost professional.
Donald Lam didn't like it. Why should a large insurance company need an outside investigator? But Bertha's eyes see $$$ so Donald gets cracking, and within no time he is the prime suspect. For what on earth is a body doing in the trunk of Donald's car?
The story of how a man can commit a brutal murder, confess, and get away with it!
The killer was guilty without a shred of doubt. The police had him behind bars. The district attorney had plenty of evidence. But - no court in the state could convict him!
The Bigger They Come features that fast-moving, skull-cracking team: Bertha Cool, a two-hundred pound "lady" who uses the language of a longshoreman. And Donald Lam, a pint-sized process server who would have been in the morgue long ago except that he can think faster than the next man ... or woman.