The Stray Lamb

Mild-mannered investment banker, cuckold, and dipsomaniac T. Lawrence Lamb gains perspective on the human condition during a series of mysterious transformations into various animal forms. Lamb, his daughter Hebe, her boyfriend Melville Long, and Hebe’s friend Sandra Rush (a twentyish lingerie model who becomes Lamb’s love interest) pursue many adventures, most of which fall well outside the perimeter of law and order. Lamb has, like many Thorne Smith heroes, a shrewish (and in this case adulterous) wife who at one point tries to murder him (at the time he is a goldfish). As in many Thorne Smith novels, a courtroom scene involving the protagonists and an exasperated judge provides a climax to the characteristically tipsy action.