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When a representative from an insurance firm appears at the offices of Cool and Lam, it sounds like just the kind of case they need, or specifically, the kind of case that is music to the ears of Bertha Cool. An insurance company is offering a large fee for investigating a traffic accident. It looks like a nice, quiet and respectable job, unlike the other sordid cases that her detective Donald Lam usually manages to unearth. An easy case is fine with Donald Lam as well, although he suspects there might be more to this investigation that looking into a potentially fraudulent whiplash claim that could easily be dealt with by the firm's own detectives. So why do they need Cool and Lam? Well, there is clearly an element of unspecified danger, but it also seems that they want Lam for more than just his investigative talents. There is an attractive woman involved and they need someone with the charm to get in close to her, and Donald Lam is just the man for the job. I'm guessing that...

Famous for his Perry Mason series, Erle Stanley Gardner also wrote the entertaining Cool and Lam Private Investigation team series under the name A.A. Fair. I say PI team, but essentially most of the work is done by 'pint size' Private Detective Donald Lam, while the business side of the arrangement is taken care of in the rather larger shape of Bertha Cool. Bertha has a tendency to explosive outbursts at the unconventional way Lam operates and is always trying to improve the reputation and class of clientele of the agency, but although it's an arrangement that generally works surprisingly well, this familiar/repetitive operation is certainly put to the test in The Count of 9 . Bertha has landed a nice little engagement with a wealthy socialite and is making the most of the promotion and status such a commission will bring. Dean Crockett the Second has hired Cool and Lam to look over the guests invited to the party at his penthouse apartment to make sure nothing gets stole...

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 convenie...