Growing up there were a few of Erle Stanley Gardner’s PERRY MASON books around the house. I read them before ever seeing the TV show. I enjoyed them but even with having read them almost 40 years ago I still recall they seemed to be itching the whole time to get into the courtroom. Writing under the name A A Fair, GIVE ‘EM THE AX belongs to another series Gardner wrote known as COOL & LAM (one of the better names for a series I’ve heard). Not about a lawyer but instead about a couple of private detectives—Berth Cool & Donald Lam (B. Cool & D. Lam on their office door)—this book manages to keep a toe or two in the noir pool though we never quite dive in. Actually being written in the forties gives the book an extra noir gloss but even this book seems to want to get into the courtroom. The plot turns on a legal point that pops up late in the book deftly handled by Lam almost as if he studied law. Maybe he has, this is the 9th book in this series so who knows what I don’t know. Despite being late in the series, not a bad place to enter the series as Lam had just returned from serving in WW II and was re-entering civilian life. Wish that more thought had been given to what it means to return from war but being 1944 possibly a bit too soon to incorporate that into the story. A fast read, well-paced by someone who knows what they are doing with it’s share of snappy dialogue and smart characters. Have a soft spot for any book or movie that includes at least one scene where when a character says something important and more than one of the other characters in the room is smart enough to understand it and share a glance. While noir seems to beg for a seemingly doomed dame, the one here is shoe-horned in (as is the accompanying chaste romance), as if the author didn’t want her there. I did enjoy the characters enough to want to read another in the series—when late one night one is slipped under my door or tossed through an open transom.