Erle Stanley Gardner, author of the Perry Mason series, also wrote a series of around thirty private eye Cool and Lam detective books under the pseudonym as AA Fair, of which Top of the Heap is the thirteenth in the series.
Donald Lam is a Los Angeles detective who is used to getting results, only it all seems to come a little too easily when John Carver Billings the Second calls in looking for a couple of girls. The wealthy client, son of a banker, wants to find Sylvia and Millie as he picked them up and spent the night at a motel with them. It's important to find the women as it appears to be connected to a police looking for a missing woman, the moll of a notorious gangster who Billings had foolishly tried to pick up earlier that evening.
Lam is more than a little suspicious with the ease of his own investigation and the clues that seem to have been left for him to find. The not terribly elusive Sylvia even provides the necessary corroborating information makes it sound conveniently like a useful alibi for Billings. Lam's boss Bertha Cool is happy to pick up a big check and not pursue a matter that is of no concern to them, but Lam reckons it could bring him a lot of trouble in the long run.
Not waiting for it to come, Lam goes looking for it in San Francisco and he certainly finds it. If the efforts that went into the alibi were convoluted, it's nothing to the web that connects Billings with a murder, with gangster Gabby Garvanza, with the owner of fraudulent mining companies and a visit to some gambling dens. And of course he runs into a few smart dames along the way who know how to make their fortune and the best use of their fine figures, and not solely as a burlesque stripper.
Top of the Heap is fast paced, with plenty of incidents and colourful characters, all tied together in an unfathomable scheme that Lam unravels with incredible ease and speed - although not without personal risk - that Erle Stanley Gardner delivers with considerable pulp thriller style.
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