The French Quarter of New Orleans — where everything has happened, where anything can happen... the exciting and colorful French Quarter — where the past is the present and there is no future.
It was a long trail from New York to Los Angeles...
It all started with Milton Carling Calhoun, a wealthy young tycoon, who hired Bertha Cool and Donald Lam to find a writer named Colburn Hale.
The reason? Calhoun just wanted to talk to Hale.
The search begins in the novelist’s pad and...
First there was the blind man. He “saw” a great deal for a sightless man.
Bertha Cool had no sooner digested his strange story when her life really became complicated with other things...
A girl who was hit by an automobile but who...
Money in the bank had always been a persuasive factor in Bertha Cool’s life — and Lamont Hawley represented a lot of it. He also represented an insurance company that smelled a rat about a traffic-accident claim. The trouble was the claimant...
It started as a routine tail — shadowing an oily hustler who’d been courting a well-healed matron. But the assignment soon led Donald Lam to a sleazy hotel room with a sexy barfly. And now she’s left him high and dry with a pair of corpses...
Bertha Cool was in a flap. The distinguished Mr Homer Breckinridge had been waiting twenty minutes for Donald Lam to make an appearance, and around Mr Breckinridge was the heady aroma of C-A-S-H. Then Donald appeared and in no time found himself...
Have you ever met one of those one-armed bandits standing innocently against a wall — waiting for you to play his game? There are thousands of them throughout the country — slot machines.
The notorious slot-machine rocket furnishes the...
First there was Everett Belder. He seemed to have a round-trip ticket from the frying pan to the fire.
Bertha Cool had no sooner agreed to help him than she found herself traveling the same route.
And everywhere she looked there were...
This was one case when Bertha Cool didn’t see much of her partner, Donald Lam. This time he was living with the clients instead of running up expensive hotel bills. Still, it made it even harder for Bertha to keep tabs on him.
But she had to...
The day she told her husband he could go his own way, were it blonde or brunette, she became a happy woman. Freed from the duty of preserving a contour that would keep Mr. Cool home nights, she gave up dieting, and serenely watched her figure expand...