OVERLOOKED TELEVISION: COOL AND LAM (JANUARY 16, 1958)

Bertha Cool and Donald Lam were popular detecives in a long-running series of novels by Erle Stanly Gardner, writing under the name "A. A. Fair."   Donald Lam was a shwewd, savvy, and nervy ex-lawyer; his senior partner in the detective agency, Bertha Cool, was a large and fearless, penny-pinching bull-dozer of a woman who plowed through their cases.  The series was cramfull of fast action, clever plots, and near-impossible situations from which only Lam could extricate the couple.  Many readers felt the cook-Lam books preferable to Gardner's more popular Perry Mason.

Although Mason made it to films and television numerous time, Cool and Lam only made it to television twice:  once as a 1955 episode of the program Climax!, based on The Bigger They Come (the first book in the series0with Art Carney and Jane Darwell in the title roles; and in this pilot episode featuring Billy Pearson as Lam and Benay Venuta as Cool.  (Gardner himself praised the casting highly and hoped that the pilot would spark additional episodes -- it didn't.)  Also in the cast were Maurice Manson, Margaret Field, Judith Bess Jones, Allison Hayes, Sheila Bromnley, Dom Megowan, Movita (the stage name of Movita Castania, Marlon Brando's second wife), John Mitchum, Tristram Coffim, and Alex Sharp; Gardner also appeared as himself.  The show was directed by Jacques Tourner, from a script by Edmund L. Hartmann, based on the second published novel in the series, Turn On the Heat.  (Turn on the Heat was also the basis of the only Cool-Lam episode to make it to radio, on ABC Radio's United States Steel Hour for June 23, 1946, with the role of Donald Lam being played by Frank Sinatra!)

(Garner's other popular detecive, D. A. Doug Selby, was filmed only once, with Jim Hutton for a 1971 television movie, They Call It Murder, based on the novel The D.A. Draws a Circle.)

Watch while a simple case of infidelity leads to murder.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMLKgaM5Cq0