Customer Reviews

Widows Wear Weeds

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Widows Wear Weeds is one of the Cool and Lam mysteries written by Erle Stanley Gardner under the pseudonym A.A. Fair. Private Eye Donald Lam provides the narration.
This is a convoluted tale of blackmail and murder which unfolds in Los Angeles. This is the same Los Angeles readers will recognize from Raymond Chandler's novels starring Philip Marlowe. Seductive dames, less than honest cops, houses of great wealth, seedy residential hotels, cheating husbands and grifters on the make.
Unfortunately, Lam is no Marlowe and this book is little more than a collection of hardboiled crime cliches cobbled together to make a rather unsatisfying, though mercifully short, detective novel.
Of historical interest because of the identity of the author. Aside from that there is little reason to recommend Widows Wear Weeds.

Widows Wear Weeds, A.A. Fair

Donald Lam and Elsie Brand are on a coffee break when Nicholas Baffin joins them and asks for help because of blackmail. Does paying off a blackmailer work? Lam meets Starman Calvert, gets the photo negatives and a receipt for the money (a confession), and leaves. But when he tries to deliver the goods a new mystery develops! Nicholas Baffin thanks Lam & Cool by giving them a free meal, and they invite Sergeant Frank Sellers. Gratitude, or for another reason? We soon find an unexpected development at the dinner party, with a chance for scandal. Will an eyewitness use his imagination for details his eyes never saw? Donald Lam is in a predicament.

Lam begins his detective work in Chapter 9, and finds the credit card slip for Mrs. Starman Calvert and car license. It tells how a small-town girl like Connie Alford could be lured to Hollywood through a contest created by a promoter for merchandising. In Chapter 10 Lam is told that the dinner was planned to allow for hidden photography, and this witness is scared. Lam then meets with newspaperman Colin Ellis, who is very well informed, but can't print it all without proof (Chapter 12). Chapter 14 tells how witness statements can be arranged to create the desired story. Lam continues his investigation, and takes some pictures to recreate the events around the time of the murder, showing the waitress who found the victim. This leads him and Sergeant Sellers to re-question Baffin and get the information that basically solves the murder, and exposes the wider scandal of campaign contributions to legislators. This fast-moving story is like the best of the Cases of Perry Mason, and an implicit critique of society. It uses the building of an apartment house as a clock to date a photograph. Was Los Angeles undergoing rapid expansion at that time?