Hot Cash Cold Clews

by Erle Stanley Gardner

Ninety-years ago, before Erle Stanley Gardner began writing the very successful Perry Mason series, he wrote for the pulp magazines. The hundreds of pulp magazines that published his works can be difficult to get these days. The pulps were called that because the magazines used cheap wood pulp for its paper, a process that created pages that were not meant to last a century. One of his most popular characters was Lester Leith, the urbane Robin Hood, who steals from the rich and gives to the poor, after taking his own commission. Written mostly during the Great Depression, these stories showed wit and humor that Gardner often displayed in his personal life, but infrequently in his works. Only a handful of the Lester Leith stories have appeared since their original publication dates. Hold Cash, Cold Clews will double the number of Leith stories anthologized. This is the fourth collection of Gardner s pulp characters in Crippen & Landru s Lost Classics series

233 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 2, 2021

About the author

Erle Stanley Gardner was an American lawyer and author of detective stories who also published under the pseudonyms A.A. Fair, Kyle Corning, Charles M. Green, Carleton Kendrake, Charles J. Kenny, Les Tillray, and Robert Parr.

Innovative and restless in his nature, he was bored by the routine of legal practice, the only part of which he enjoyed was trial work and the development of trial strategy. In his spare time, he began to write for pulp magazines, which also fostered the early careers of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. He created many different series characters for the pulps, including the ingenious Lester Leith, a "gentleman thief" in the tradition of Raffles, and Ken Corning, a crusading lawyer who was the archetype of his most successful creation, the fictional lawyer and crime-solver Perry Mason, about whom he wrote more than eighty novels. With the success of Perry Mason, he gradually reduced his contributions to the pulp magazines, eventually withdrawing from the medium entirely, except for non-fiction articles on travel, Western history, and forensic science.

See more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erle_Sta...

Reviews

[L J Field]

This book is a gas! Lester Leith is a wealthy cosmopolitan in New York. He is terribly interested in crime. Each week his valet, Scutter, reads to him from the papers the latest capers. Then Leith sets out to take from the criminals the stolen funds or jewels. He then gives eighty percent to charity and keeps twenty percent for himself. There is an air of comedy to the tales as Leith outfoxes the very suspicious police at every turn. Besides this, Scutter is actually a police detective who has found his way into the Leith household as an undercover man. With, it seems, everyone against him, Leith triumphs time and again. These pulp stories by Erle Stanley Gardner were published prior to Gardner coming up with Perry Mason and are written with the same elegance that Gardner wrote those stories.

[Glen]

A collection of short stories featuring Lester Leith, one of Gardner's Robin Hood type characters. HIs valet is an undercover policeman, and he's under surveillance all the time, but he is able to read about crime in the newspapers, figure out what happened, and cut himself in for some sugar, some of which he donates to the poor. There is, of course, at least one beautiful young woman involved in every case.

Despite the formula, immensely entertaining.

[Theunis Snyman]

I just love Lester Leith. He is a kind of a modern Robin Hood. He robs the rich and gives to the poor. But unlike Robin Hood, who has his gang of Merry Men, Lester Leith is a loner. Scuttle is a police spy in Leith’s household! He regularly brings clippings of crimes to Leith who selects one to rob. He then asks Scuttle to fetch, or buy, some weird things to help him to solve the case and rob the crook. These things seemingly have nothing to do with the case. Think, among others, of a layered chocolate cake, an apple pie, an anvil and the the most ferocious looking bulldog that Scuttle can find. Leith then goes with one or more of these things to the people involved in the crime. And Scuttle gives a sign to the police stationed outside Leith’s house to follow him and catch him with the loot. But Leith always outwits them with the weird things that Scuttle bought.

These stories are to be read more for the humor than the crime and the detection. And how the author conceives of these entertaining schemes is a miracle in itself. But he is Erle Stanley Gardner, the brilliant author of the Popular Perry Mason books. He wrote many other books, with many other detectives, but for me the stories of Lester Leith and Perry Mason are the top of the list.

It is nice to know that there are plenty more of the Lester Leith stories that can be published in future collections. I hope that Crippen and Landru, the publishers, will soon give us some more.

[Riju Ganguly]

This book revives some more lost tales that had entertained a lot of readers during the pulp era. Along-with an erudite 'Introduction' and complete history of Lester Leith stories at the end, we have following stories— several of which are of almost novella length:
1. Hot Cash;
2. A Tip from Scuttle;
3. The Girl With The Diamond Legs;
4. Lester Takes the Cake;
5. Thieves' Kitchen;
6. Put It in Writing!
7. Cold Clews.
The tales, i.e the way Lester Leith keeps pulling 'fast one'-s on the Police, are very clever. But it's the contrived & convoluted nature of the plots and consequent conceit on part of the characters which make these stories very dated as well. They are crammed with 1920-s expressions without being realistic to the slightest degree. And there are usual traits of pulp era that make these stories pretty suffocating.
Very clever stuff. Very charmingly produced by C & L people. But... not exactly my cup of tea, as I came to realise.
What about you?

[Kirk]

Five of the 65 short stories that Erle Stanley Gardner wrote about Lester Leith. Not as much fun as the Cool and Lam or Perry Mason books, but I enjoy the character and his capers. These stories are much better than his stories about Sidney Zoom and the Patent Leather Kid.

My main complaint (besides my opinion that it's about 60 stories too short) is that because the stories were published as pulp fiction and the longer ones serialized, new readers dropped in all the time, so every story and each chapter of the long stories provides the same description of Leith and his valet Scuttle and notifies readers that Leith knows that Scuttle is police spy. That gets old fast. Otherwise, they aren't great literature or mysteries, but they're fun as comic entertainment.

[Vallery Feldman]

Lots of fun. His pre Perry Mason stories.

[Nancy]

Erle Stanley Gardner's hook for this character is that Lester Leith solves crimes that the police either can not solve or have solved incorrectly. His solutions involve seemingly random items that all help him to identify the guilty party. He always manages to snag whatever valuables are at stake and keep some for himself and shares the rest with some character that had been abused during the crime or the police solution.

[Steve Gross]

Fun to read.