Bertha Cool: The Last Lady Sleuth Standing

If I ever found myself the victim of a crime, and was able to hire any detective—living, dead, or imaginary—to help me out, I would call one of the female private eyes from 1930s and 1940s pulp novels. The women who fought fictional crime in that hyper-masculine era were witty, unsentimental, and as hardboiled as any male P.I., only without the weakness for scotch and femmes fatales.

They were successful, too. Although editors worried that male readers wouldn’t appreciate women in action roles, female detectives did helm popular pulp series. Bertha Cool, born 70 years ago out of the feverishly mass-producing mind of Perry Mason creator Erle Stanley Gardner (writing under the pseudonym A.A. Fair), was the longest-lived of these female detectives, starring in 29 novels published between 1939 and 1970.

Bertha wasn’t the most quick-witted of the female pulp detectives, and she certainly wasn’t pert or flirty like most of them. But her exceptionally long career is interesting in its own right because of how bizarrely her creator treated her. Originally a powerhouse, she is forced into semi-retirement during and after World War II, the very time when women were first elevated to a professional class and then, as men returned from service, sent packing back to the kitchen. In her long semi-retirement, Bertha became a symbol of what was missing not just from detective fiction but from American culture at large, at a moment dominated by male fears about the power of working women.

Bertha begins as a straight-talking, sardonic ball-buster. The widowed proprietor of the B. Cool agency, she is a woman of cosmic heft who sends weaker men fleeing before her—literally. The first time we meet her, in 1939’s The Bigger They Come [2], she is actually rejecting a series of potential errand boys who fail to impress. “She had the majesty of a snow-capped mountain,” Donald Lam, the series narrator and initially Bertha’s assistant, says of his new employer, “the assurance of a steam-roller.” Unlike the other fat women detectives of her time (the female counterparts to Rex Stout’s famously gargantuan Nero Wolfe and Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op), Bertha has a powerful—but strangely ambiguous—sensuality. She makes a point of not wearing a girdle, and Gardner lovingly describes her unconstrained, billowing flesh, a rare sight in the elastic-corseted days of the '30s: “[Bertha] wiggled and jiggled around in her loose apparel like a cylinder of currant jelly on a plate. But she wasn’t wheezy, and she didn’t waddle. She walked with a smooth, easy rhythm.” She calls men “lover,” and at one point kisses a police sergeant, although at the same time she’s often very motherly.

But as her assistant, Donald, rises to a controlling partnership in the agency, Bertha is gradually reduced both in importance and in physical size. Most heavy detectives hire an assistant to do legwork and act as Greek chorus: Nero Wolfe has Archie, D.B. McCandless’s granitic Sarah Watson has Ben Todd, and so forth. But in the Bertha Cool series, the sidekick stages a revolution. It’s like Watson deciding to outsmart Sherlock—and succeeding. Of course, Donald Lam isn’t a typical sidekick. Disbarred from practicing law, in Bertha’s employ he uses his legal brains to orchestrate bizarre and improbable schemes. One of his favorite strategies is setting himself up as the suspect, then wriggling free in a last-minute way that ends up solving the mystery and clearing his client from suspicion. The novels generally end, Perry Mason style, in dramatic courtroom showdowns, with Donald on one side whispering into his lawyer’s ear and a lunkheaded D.A. on the other.

Bertha, a shoe-leather crime-buster of the old school, is no match for Donald’s baroque and occasionally sublegal trickery. She keeps him in check at first by restricting his funds and locking him out of important meetings, but it’s soon clear that Gardner is simply more interested in the kind of detecting that Donald represents. He pits the two detectives against each other in a Darwinian duel. By the second book, Turn on the Heat [3], Donald regularly criticizes Bertha and shows her up in front of their clients. They bicker about money, with Donald pushing for a greater outlay. As the conflict progresses, Bertha is forced to give in, and her physical power begins to wane as well. Although she’s described in the beginning of Turn on the Heat [3] as “profane, massive, belligerent, and bulldog,” after Donald wins an argument, he watches her drive away and thinks that “for the moment she didn’t look big and hard and competent. She looked like a fat woman in the fifties who was tired out.” In the fifth book, Double or Quits [4], Donald negotiates for a full partnership in the agency. Bertha says no. But when Donald quits just as things start to heat up on a case, she’s forced to yield, telling him, “I must have been crazy to let you go. I’ve grown to depend on you so much, I can’t run the business without you.”

They become partners of sorts, yet Bertha doesn’t seem at ease with their partnership. Her final humiliation comes after Donald leaves for the war in Owls Don’t Blink [5]. In Bats Fly at Dusk [6], published in 1942, Bertha can’t solve a case concerning a potentially fraudulent will. She turns to Donald, who is stationed nearby: “All right, then,” she says. “I’m going to write the little shrimp. Brainy little bastard! He’ll know what to do.” And he does. At the end of the book, the crime still unresolved, Bertha takes off for a head-clearing fishing trip; Donald jaunts into town on a three-day leave and solves the case, leaving a long explanatory letter on her desk. By the time Donald comes home for good, in 1944’s Give ‘Em the Ax [7], Bertha is ready to admit how much she needs him: “[A]fter you left, I could take what seemed to be the biggest case and it would peter out into little business and little money.” Bertha is physically diminished too: After an illness and some time spent fishing, her weight is now described as 160 or 165 pounds, at least 50 pounds less than it was initially. It’s as if, uncomfortable with the ambiguities of Bertha’s character in the first novels, Gardner has literally cut out one side of her, the stronger side, in order to make space for Donald.

For 20 more volumes, Bertha continues on as a grouchy sidekick, occasionally showing up to bully a female witness, as in 1956’s Beware the Curves [8], and the series becomes repetitive and stale. But there’s always a half-hidden spark. Like the other female detectives of her period, Bertha occupies an awkward intermediate point: a harbinger of greater independence for women, but in her own life not quite jibing with the culture of 1960s feminism. Unlike her 1940s coevals, however, most of whom didn’t see the end of the decade, Bertha’s longevity made her into a curious anachronism, a dumpy, beaten-down former hell-raiser in unfashionable suits. Standing outside of history, she nonetheless marks a shift in historic attitudes: the last of her kind, and a bridge to the others who would follow.