Shills Can’t Cash Chips

Bertha Cool, a business partner in the 1950s Los Angeles detective agency of Cool and Lam Investigators, is trying to move the firm away from Lam’s usual type of case—seat-of-the-pants investigations, harum-scarum dealings with cops and crooks alike, and last-minute escapes—to something more respectable and better paying. An excellent opportunity presents itself when the head of the Claims Department of Consolidated Interinsurance asks the firm to look into an apparently straightforward adjustment claim. Perfect, as far as Bertha is concerned, but nothing the pint-sized, sharp-witted, snappy-talking Donald Lam touches is ever straightforward, and he soon suspects there is more involved than a routine car accident. Lam slowly puts the pieces together, or so he thinks, but not before being bashed on the head, cuffed by the police, and, on the brighter side, encountering more than his fair share of shapely-legged women. The well-paced plot provides plenty of twists, the last of which turns Lam’s theory about the crime on its head. Shills Can’t Cash Chips is a fast, pulsing read, as you would expect from Erle Stanley Gardner (writing under the name of A. A. Fair), the famed author of the Perry Mason books.