How long does it take to read Top of the Heap?
Top of the Heap by Erle Stanley Gardner takes about 4 hours 4 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 4 hours 4 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1952. 222 pages, about 61,050 words.
9 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 6 hours 47 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 4 hours 4 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 33 minutes |
The page count is the median across 13 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Cool & Lam Mystery #13 (1952) John Carver Billings II has a story with more holes in it than the surgeons had to sew up in the torso of recuperating LA Mob boss Gabby Garvanza. On the other hand, Billings has also promised Bertha Cool a $500 bonus on top of the usual agency fees. Donald Lam's concerns fall on ears deafened by the sound of Bertha's office cash drawer slamming shut on Billings' initial payment of $300 in cold, hard cash. Not that their client is in any way implicated in the botched Garvanza hit. Billings' style runs more to hitting on attractive women in cocktail lounges. Twice in short order, according to him. "Morrie" was the first pick-up. Billings swears he didn't know she was in fact Maurine Auburn, Gabby Garvanza's girlfriend and a witness to his unfortunate encounter with a lead double-tap. Didn't learn anything about that side of things until days later, when the newspapers reported her mysterious disappearance--after a cocktail lounge pick-up separated her from her companions. But she isn't the missing person Billings wants the agency to find. He claims she ditched him almost immediately, and he then moved on to a twosome, "Sylvia" and "Millie." That's where his tale really starts leaking like a sieve. He says flat-out that he's paying Cool & Lam to deliver Sylvia and Millie as an alibi. It's the gaps between his words that have Donald Lam hearing alarm bells.
Subjects: Fiction, mystery & detective, general, Missing persons, fiction, Crime, fiction, Donald Lam (Fictitious character), Fiction, Private investigators
