Owls Don’t Blink by Erle Stanley Gardner

Owls Don’t Blink by Erle Stanley Gardner

(writing as AA Fair)

published 1942

 

Of the books by ESG that I have read, (he wrote around 150, my sample is small in comparison) I most enjoy the Bertha Cool/Donald Lam books.

Bertha runs an investigation agency. This is how I have described her in the past: ‘Bertha is a splendid character – hard as nails, enormous, and prone to referring to herself in the 3^rd person’. Donald is her puny, ex-lawyer operative, a very wily character indeed. They make a great pair. I have also pointed out that Bertha ‘uses the endearment ‘lover’ to Donald all the time (he is clearly not in this role with her) sounding like nothing so much as Northern cake shop ladies of my youth.’ Bertha would like my food comparison – she is very keen on eating and talking about it, and in this book everyone is obsessed with the subject, and many fine New Orleans meals are described in detail.

I picked up this one after reading a review over at Invisible Event (as with so many books – I might as well have that sentence as a template ready to go), and I did enjoy it, but I feel Jim probably made more sense of the plot than I did. The main action takes place in New Orleans. There are two young women who may or may not be impersonating each other: one has a divorce on her hands, the other business dealings. They share a flat, but maybe not simultaneously. Someone works in a very shady nightclub, everyone visits bars and eats those meals mentioned above. Someone is shot in the apartment. After a while I gave up trying to distinguish between Roberta and Edna - if you want more about the plot I suggest you read Jim’s post.

I just enjoyed the clothes and the nightclubs and other details, which are excellent.

For example, there is some emphasis on ‘pure coffee’ – but as opposed to what? I wondered about chicory, well-known for eking out expensive coffee (this was wartime) but claimed as a flavour improver. And as it turns out, chicory coffee was also known as New Orleans coffee, so this is what Bertha wants to avoid.

There is an interesting semi-scam involving silk stockings – Donald uses it to get someone’s address, but also plays a trick on Bertha. This is from the letter he creates:

At the time of Pearl Harbor a Japanese ship put into a Mexican port and we were able to obtain its cargo of silk stockings…Simply place your name and address, the size, style, and color of sheer silk stocking you prefer to wear on the enclosed blank, put it in the enclosed, stamped, addressed envelope, drop it in the mail. You are not obligated in any way.

 

Gardner is prolific, but he still paid a lot of attention to plot in every book, he didn’t skimp. However he maybe could have edited a bit more: in this book he uses ‘knuckles sounded/banged’ to mean ‘someone knocked on the door’ – but he uses it seven times, which I feel is excessive.

I had to have several runs at this sentence to make sense of it:

Once when I went out with a fellow one of the girls in the office didn’t like she came to me and told me that a man had given his life in order to protect my honor, that I shouldn’t hold it cheaply.”

[An American humour writer called Dave Berry would come up with the opposite: sentences that should be impossible to parse, but are very clear. My favourite example from him is this: ‘She parks in whoever’s not there that day’s space.’]

There is the Jack O’Lantern nightclub, but there is also Jack O’Leary’s bar (I think they are separate establishments, but I’m not sure).

But the description of the club shows his good points: it is atmospheric and visual:

The Jack-O’-Lantern  Nightclub was typical of dozens of other little nightclubs that clustered through the French Quarter. There was a floor show of sorts, half a dozen hostesses, and tables crowded into three rambling rooms which had been merged together by a process of knocking out doors and making full-length openings where windows had been. Out in front a dozen publicity pictures of the various performers in the floor show were exhibited in a large, glass-covered frame. It was early, and the place hadn’t as yet begun to fill up. There were a few stragglers here and there. A sprinkling of soldiers, some sailors, four or five older couples, evidently tourists, determined to “see the sights” and starting early.

 

The hostesses in the club wear dramatic clothes: ‘I could see the long curves of her body beneath the red gown which clung to her like wet silk.’ Marilyn is “the girl in the cream-colored satin.” “Marvelous figure,”

The floorshow includes this:

A girl with an Egyptian profile, a pair of shorts covered with hieroglyphics, and a bra decorated in the same way came out, sat cross-legged on the floor, and made angles with her hands and elbows.

(The picture shows something much more respectable: a ballet, called Egypta, by the Denishawn company.)

The top photo of woman in evening dress is in fact Gypsy Rose Lee, featured on the blog before. And, she also featured in a post on another book Appointment in New Orleans by Tod Claymore, with a similar setting.

Drawing of couple in evening dress also from NYPL.

There’s another Cool/Lam book here, and a different ESG setup here. The author, weirdly, has featured more in the occasional esoteric Clothes in Books series, Furniture Watch, because of the davenports – see either of those two posts for more, and the Evelyn Waugh connection.

A year ago I posted on another classic New Orleans book – Dinner at Antoine’s by Francis Parkinson Keyes – and there are a few others on the blog (including one of my favourite blogpost titles: “Why is that stripper crying? – lost in New Orleans”).