Well, I thought I would get in a nice quick read in between other books. But personal projects took over my brain for the last week, so I took some time to read Turn on the Heat by Erle Stanley Gardner (writing under the name A. A. Fair).
Turn on the Heat is a decent read, though a bit hard to follow a lot of the time. It has all the elements of a whodunnit, but unlike a lot of crime fiction I read, also has the main character actively manipulating events about which he doesn’t always have complete information. Gardner made this main character, Donald Lam, into an anti-caricature. Lam is mouthy, but he’s a scrawny runt, and so he gets his ass handed to him a few times in the book. I’m also not particularly fond of the way female characters come off in the book.
This is the second book in the Cool and Lam series. Bertha Cool is the owner of a P.I. agency. Donald Lam is a former lawyer who works for her as an investigator. Their client wants them to find a woman who disappeared around 20 years early, around the same time the woman’s husband disappeared as well. The client has something to hide; he’s running for mayor of a town, and would possibly be implicated by the disappeared woman. Another investigator then gets murdered. Lam not only must find the missing woman, but steer the police investigation away from their client.
That plot synopsis is only the tip of the iceberg. It gets way more complicated. The other investigator wasn’t hired by their client. And a goon strong-arms Lam out of town just before he’s about to find a woman claiming to be the lost woman. The whole time, Lam is actively playing everyone, including his own boss Bertha Cool. Lies left and right to get the police looking in one direction, to a girl he meets while investigating to get her to do his dirty work, and more. It’s all very complicated and hard to follow along. Even the normal post-story recounting of what really happened still left me feeling like I didn’t know what was going on.
I liked Donald Lam as a character. His goals aren’t exactly to find out the truth. He’ll happily spin tales to all sorts of people. And he doesn’t even feel the need to tell the truth at the end. He’s not cowardly either. He’ll provoke people into taking swings at him left and right, even without a way to fight back. He gets beat up and it’s not even part of his plan.
I didn’t like the women though. One starts off as smart and wanting to move up in the world. But she’s also been written with the normal for the time female frailty. Normally written that is. She swoons for her man Donald. And she happily lets him make her decisions, even though Gardner shows she’s a little bit smarter than that when she reveals she knows Lam is lying to her. Bertha Cool isn’t a delicate flower. She’s assertive and just as willing to play people as Lam is. But she also comes off as somewhat incompetent. Most of the secondary women in the story are gullible and easily led, where the men are less so. I suppose there needed to be intermediate steps like this one, where women aren’t mothers and wives only, but not yet portrayed as equal to men. But I felt like I needed to grit my teeth through some parts. Still, even with women being not so reflective of reality in the book, Turn on the Heat actually passes the Bechdel test, which is more than a lot of contemporary literature can say.
Definitely mixed.
Title: Turn on the Heat
Author: Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A. A. Fair
Series: Cool and Lam; 2
Imprint / publisher: Triangle Books
Format: Hardcover
Length: 306 p.
Publication date: November 1942
You’ve made me curious-what’s the Bechdel test?
It’s a rule that Alison Bechdel put in her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, and which she says isn’t really the Bechdel test since she didn’t make it up, but the name has stuck: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zizyphus/34585797/
Basically, it’s kind of a test of minimal female characterization in a movie or book. Not everything has to pass, of course, but a large majority really should. For a work to pass the Bechdel test it must:
a) have at least two women in it,
b) who have a conversation with each other,
c) that’s not about a man.