Why Donald Lam is my favourite detective

I've been re-reading a few of the A.A. Fair novels of late.  Once I started Turn on the Heat
Read While Walking: Turn on the Heat by A.A. Fair I just started to run through all of them.


I like the humour.  I love the titles (Some Slips Don't Show is probably one of my all time favourite titles).  I like the attempt to write in a hard boiled style, without making it all about the style.  I like the cleverness of the tricks used to uncover clues.  But most of all, I like Donald Lam.  He's smart, he's loyal, he puts women on a pedestal, he's tricky, but from the standpoint of a reader who likes to identify with a protagonist, I love how much Donald likes to read.


In Double or Quits a client needs to step out for a couple of minutes, tells Donald to make himself comfortable and enjoy a paperback, but that he'll be back in twenty minutes.  Two and a half hours later, Donald looks up from his book and realizes the client hasn't come back.  (Unfortunately for our detective, his client is dead).


In Kept Women Can't Quit, Donald picks up a magazine in an apartment to flip through, and then naturally hangs onto it.  When left with nothing else to do, he reads and re-reads and re-reads it almost obsessively, and in the end finds a clue.


In Some Women Won't Wait, Donald is on a cruise to Hawaii, and is supposed to make contact with a woman seated at his table for dinner.  Donald has been told she'll make the approach.  Donald doesn't talk to her much at dinner, and following dinner he heads back into his stateroom to settle down with a book.  Bertha asks Donald why he isn't with her, and Donald says he was waiting for her to make the contact.  Bertha points out she isn't likely to come down to his stateroom, tear the door off its hinges and pull his nose out of his book.


But my favourite instance of Donald compulsively reading is in Bedrooms Have Windows.  Donald skulks around the back of a house searching for a woman who had tried to frame him earlier.  He sees the woman in her bedroom in the process of getting dressed.  She invites him in, then she suggests he wait in her sister's bedroom while she finishes getting dressed.  Donald sees a book and settles down to read.  An hour later, the sister comes in to see him sitting there reading, thinks he's an intruder and starts to scream.  Of course, the woman has been murdered in her own bedroom, and Donald didn't hear a thing because he was absorbed in the book.


It's not overdone in the series, but since hardboiled private detectives rarely have hobbies or much of a social life, I really like that Donald's off-duty entertainment seems to center around reading mystery novels.  Lots of mystery fans can probably relate to that.