Nows and Forevers

Three hours left and I finished my final book of 2025, “Beware the Curves,” a long-forgotten 70-year-old detective novel by Erle Stanley Gardner in his pseudonym A.A. Fair. Ever since I finished three years of Welsh classes in 2023, I have delved back into reading books even more intentionally than before. I need to do my part to preserve the printed word.

Gardner’s best known for Perry Mason, which bores me. But he wrote 30 snappy novels from 1939 to 1970 about two L.A. detectives named Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, a 60-something widow and a 30-something disbarred lawyer. A few weeks ago I read a mention about the Cool and Lam novels and found one reissued at the Carnegie Public Library.

I was hooked. I spent my teens and 20s reading pulp fiction, but it had been decades until the Kindle and I read the Continental Op and reread the rest of Hammett and Chandler and Cain and Thompson. A colleague has been reading and watching classic detective stories, and that inspired me to find some I hadn’t read. Cool and Lam were ahead of their time. Gardner was likely the most productive writer ever but he seemed to have a lot of fun writing them. They are fun to read.

Most are long out of print but I was able to find five through interlibrary loans. I found a few more on Archive.org. They have not disappointed. Nor has Ethan, who has also been reading Cool and Lam.

I expect the ‘26 reading list will include more, though it feels like it will get harder to find the other 24 or so I haven’t read