Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970) was an attorney who wanted to earn enough money writing pulp fiction so that he could quit the practice of law. The general public knows him best as the creator of Perry Mason courtroom dramas but under the name of A. A. Fair he also wrote a series about Donald Lam, a private investigator who worked for Bertha Cool. Later in the series Lam became a partner in the agency, but in the beginning (The Bigger They Come, 1939) she owned the agency and he was her employee, an oddity for the time.

According to the afterword by Russell Atwood, The Knife Slipped (Hard Case Crime, 2016) was written in 1939 and was supposed to be the second book in the series, but Gardner’s publisher objected to Bertha Cool’s tendency to “talk tough, swear, smoke cigarettes, and try to gyp people.” It was found some 75 years later in Gardner’s papers.

A mousy woman and her abrasive mother hire Bertha’s agency to follow the younger woman’s husband, whom they believe is playing around. What Donald discovers instead is that the husband has a second apartment, where he is selling the answers from civil service exams to local police and firefighters. The discovery leads Bertha and Donald to look for the source of the information in the city bureaucracy. True to form, Donald falls madly in love with the switchboard operator at the apartment and that blurs his judgment beyond understanding when the husband is found shot to death.

Unusually for this series, Bertha steps in and does a fair amount of investigation herself, both to earn the agency’s fee and, as she says, to cut herself a piece of the pie, that is, pull some money out of the exam corruption scheme.

I can understand the publisher’s reaction to Bertha. She is much brassier here than in subsequent books and Donald is wimpier, although strong resemblances to their later versions are apparent. Bertha has her eye on the financial bottom line and Donald falls for every female who looks in his direction. Bertha also has an annoying habit of referring to herself in the third person that I don’t remember in later titles.

I am sorry to report that Bertha indulges in the earliest instance of fat-shaming I can remember seeing in print. When the mother and daughter duo first appear in the agency’s office, Bertha reminds the daughter that if she unloads the current husband, she will have to find a second one and asks her how much weight she’s gained during the marriage. She points out the daughter had better lose weight before rocking her current marital boat if she expects to find a second husband. It was probably all true for the time and the place but distasteful in the here and now. It reminded me of the Perry Mason novel The Case of the Blonde Bonanza (1962) in which Perry watched a young woman wolf down huge meals every day. Perry made it his business to follow her and document what she was eating. He inquired and learned she was being paid to gain weight to model a new line of large size clothing for women. When he looked at the contract, he of course discovered gaping holes and advised her to start losing weight. Gardner clearly had an attitude about overweight women.

The Knife Slipped is like one of those prehistoric insects caught in amber. A lot of the pulp fiction of the 1930s and 1940s is gone as is antediluvian animalia, but this gives contemporary readers a solid idea of what we’ve lost.