Carregue numa fotografia para ir para os Livros Google.
A carregar... Fools Die on Friday (1947)por A. A. Fair
Nenhum(a) A carregar...
Adira ao LibraryThing para descobrir se irá gostar deste livro. Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro. When the book came it was one of those cheap mass market paperbacks published way back in 1947. Somehow it was intact, but just barely. The pages were extremely yellowed and the binding held together with book tape. But somehow it had survived, endured. I was very interested to see what a noir mystery was like. It brought to mind Humphrey Bogart smoking a cigarette on a dark corner in the rain and having to face bewildering and contrary evidence, but somehow finding the answer to the mystery, even if no one else wanted him to do so. In some ways this book by Erle Stanley Gardner is very much the same. Donald Lam is the detective in the partnership of Cool and Lam. His partner, Bertha Cool or B. Cool (well chosen), is a big woman with piggy eyes, greedy, a bit amoral and untrustworthy. Lam likes his well-made suits and has an eye for a good-looking pair of legs. A client brings a strange case - stopping a woman from poisoning her husband. Lam is immediately suspicious,well, how do you stop a poisoning from taking place - its so insidious. The cast of characters is well-drawn, if stereotypical at times. The husband to be poisoned - a self-centered womanizing con man, the wife - a smart, beautiful scheming woman, the client - a beautiful liar working for an unknown person, a weak gambling drunkard and sundry other characters. They all have a special kind of hardness to their characters - cynical and distrusting. Lam has to find out what is really happening, though he is unable to stop the poisoning from happening. When it does happen, it turns out that the poisoner is poisoned to death, while the husband survives. As Lam investigates further he finds there's an underlying conspiracy, which involves more than one person and more than one death. Its a box within a box kind of mystery, with overlapping and misleading evidence. It was a good introduction to the noir genre. The detective firm of Cool and Lam has been hired to thwart a potential case of poisoning. Lam concocts an elaborate scheme but it ends up backfiring. Will they be able to recover from the setback and keep everyone involved in the case alive? I found this book a bit jarring to get into, although really that can't be entirely the book's fault, since I started this series with book #11 (Fair/Gardner was a prolific writer). It was also somewhat stereotypical in that the protagonist was a wisecracking private eye who shows up the cops and falls for all the pretty women he meets as the result of his cases. I did like that the boss of the detective agency was a woman, but she really doesn't do much except scheme about getting more money from their clients and berating Lam for his harebrained ideas, even when they end up solving the case. (Further research into the series reveals that, even in the two books where she has to tackle cases on her own, Lam STILL gets parachuted in to help her solve them. Hmph.) As for the plot, some elements were predictable (the means of poisoning, for instance) and the ending was convoluted. The book did have its moments, but I've read more enjoyable private-eye yarns. sem críticas | adicionar uma crítica
"Private investigators Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, stars of five of Hard Case Crime's most popular novels, return to solve their toughest case yet. Hired to prevent a socialite from poisoning her husband, Donald Lam dreams up an ingenious scheme involving a carton of anchovy paste and a fictitious national ad campaign. But when the whole thing backfires spectacularly and bodies, witnesses, and suspects start piling up, it'll take every ounce of Donald's brainpower and Bertha's bruising ruthlessness to keep the police at bay - and a killer from getting away with murder."-- Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
Current DiscussionsNenhum(a)Capas populares
Google Books — A carregar... GénerosSistema Decimal de Melvil (DDC)813.52Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1900-1944Classificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos EUA (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia:
É você?Torne-se num Autor LibraryThing. |
Despite the quote attributed to Raymond Chandler on the front cover, this is definitely not the best of the series. I'd say it's almost the worst one in this series that I've read so far. A client hires Cool & Lam to prevent a poisoning, and it happens anyway! And then there's a lot of running around, and arsenic, and a dentist, and real estate. And then the killer is caught. I really had a hard time staying interested in this plot and found my mind wondering quite a bit as I read. Well, at least I learned one thing - there's a product in the world called anchovy paste. So...
“Fry me for an oyster!” ( )